Bowl carving question

[Howard Pollack]

Hi-
I'd like to try my hand at bowl carving. I assume that the easiest way is to rough it out is with a bowl adze. Is that correct? I don't own one and would appreciate a recommendation. Also, I've seen them sharpened on either the inside or the outside of the bevel, does it make any real difference in this sort of work? Thanks.
-Howard

[Brent Cutshall]

Hi Howard,
The first thing I do is mark out the dimensions of the bowl on a cylinder shaped blank. You can choose whatever shape floats your boat. Then I choose the depth of the bowl and work down the outside to 3/4 to 1/2 an inch away from your chosen depth. Leave the outside still a little rough. You can use a chisel, a hatchet, an adze, or even a drawknife to work the outside. If you want to, leave a couple protrusions on the side to bolt onto to keep it steady. Then you'll need to hollow out the inside, I use a good straight gouge of about 8 sweep. After you finish the inside smooth down the outside to your desired shape and thickness. Sand, resand, finish, refinish. The worst part is just trying to hold it still.

[Karl Andersson]

Hi Howard,
A proper bowl adze may be helpful, but a lot of us get by just fine without one. I bought the sculptor's adze from lee valley (it's actually a Stubai I think) thinking it would help -it has a curved adze blade on one side of the head and a hatchet blade on the other- and it really isn't very useful without a lot of modification. There is another bowl carving message chain in here somewhere where I showed the mods, but even with them, that adze is just too light to be very useful for chopping bowls in hardwood. If you get one, try to get one that's fairly stout. The best method that works for me is to use a double-bevel hatchet to remove most of the inside, then shape it with a few gouges (two fairly deep straight gouges and a #5 30mm bent gouge for "smoothing' followed by scrapers if needed. No sanding if done with green wood and scrapers. Unlike Brent, I carve the inside first, then carve the outside. This allows me to square off the outside before carving the inside, thus providing better surfaces to grip/ wedge so it doesn't move around. More than one way to do it, certainly
good luck
Karl

[Howard Pollack]

Thanks folks. I'd welcome more thoughts and I look forward to getting the time to work on this.
-Howard