Carving a Wooden Trench Bowl

I started by clamping a short log in the small carving bench I made and taking the draw knife to it to remove some bark and flatten the top a bit.

I used an adze (this one is by Kestrel in the PNW native American style) to remove the bulk of the wood from the bowl.

This is another way to use the bench to steady a piece for adze work.

I cleaned up the rough chips with a gouge.

Cut the corners off with a saw, removed more bark, flattened the bottom, and continued using the gouge to deepen the bowl.

I roughed out the outer shape with an axe. This is Gransfors Bruks’ Swedish carving axe.

This is about as far as I can take it with an axe.

I finished the finer work with a Mora wood carving knife. I got kind of lazy here. I could have made it a bit thinner and with less obvious tooling marks but I felt happy enough with it.

Sanded. Since this is green wood, I rubbed it liberally with flax oil and I’ll put it in a plastic bag for a month or two to dry. I’ll apply oil every so often to keep replacing the lost fluids. This will help prevent it from cracking.