John Weaver and John Ragland joined me for a first try at coring multiple bowls from a large blank.
A coring tool allows multiple bowls to be pulled from a single blank. Larger blanks are needed to coring, minimum size would be about 12″ where two bowls would be produced. A 22″ blank could be cored into five bowls. This 17 inch blank yielded three bowls. Green wood is easier to core because the tool cuts easier and faster. Dry wood can core up to double the number of bowls from the same size blank because they can be thinner than twice turned green bowls.
This is not a tutorial so all details of use are not going to be examined. Below there are several video clips that tell most of the story. Some parts are sped up to keep the viewing time down.
The video below shows taking the first and smallest core from the bowl. The core was about 9 inches and took about 5 minutes to core.
Next the core was jam mounted into the hollow in the blank and a tenon turned for mounting later.
Next the second bowl is cored. There was a catch on this one, another learning experience.
Next another tenon for the second core, then some clean-up on the outside of the 3rd and largest bowl.
There are a few reasons to core bowls:
- For expensive or rare wood this maximizes the use of the wood
- It is much easier and usually faster to core out large bowls than to hollow out using a gouge
- Multiple bowls out of the blank instead of a couple 55 gallon trash bags full of chips
Disadvantages of coring:
- Coring systems are expensive
- Need a large lathe with a minimum 1.5 HP motor
- Shapes are more limited
First try coring worked out well and this tool is going to get a lot of use. Like any new tool, there is a learning curve. Overall I found the Easycore pretty simple to use.