My Spoonmaking Attempts
Jim Crammond in Monroe, Mi
>After the spoonmaking exercise was discussed on the Hand Tool forum, I started thinking about the approach I would take to make a spoon. Because of my experience making ladder back chairs, I thought that working the wood green would be easiest. I outlined the procedure in my mind after doing a little research via the internet.
For wood selection I choose a piece of apple otherwise destined to be firewood that had been cut around New Year, so it was still fairly wet. The piece was about 3 inches in diameter and I cut it to a 13� length. After starting a split right in the center of the limb with a hatchet, it was rived with a froe and mallet. The piece split cleanly with no runout. I then sketched the shape of a spoon on the surface of the wood. My plan was to saw around the wood at the base of the bowl and rive off the excess of the handle. I had problems with holding the limb to rive it, so I went right to the shaving horse and drawknife. In retrospect, it probably would have been quicker to waste away some more wood with the hatchet at this point.
I then roughed out the spoon with the drawknife and cleaned it up with a wooden body spokeshave. So far I had spent about 50 minutes on the spoon.
To hollow out the bowl, I planned on wasting out as much as I could with a brace and bit, but I realized this would leave holes from the leadscrew and since I don�t have any spoon bits, I proceeded to a gouge. This stage actually went pretty quickly, in about 20 minutes I had a spoon, albeit a rough one.
The wood was too wet to proceed with any further refining of the spoon, so I put the other half of the log, the spoon and all of the shavings in a paper bag with the hope that it would dry slowly and not crack or otherwise deform.
All in all, I was satisfied with my first attempt. It took about 1 hour and ten minutes, it resembled a spoon and I learned a few things to try on the next attempt at making a spoon from green would.
In my second attempt with green wood, I did more shaping with a hatchet, roughing out the handle and bowl with it. The spoon shown in the picture is the result of an hour of work. At this point the spoon needs to be dried out in order to smooth the surface.
