Aff Wood

Ever Put a Wooden Bowl in a Microwave Oven

Hi Everyone,

One of the enduring difficulties in turning unseasoned wood is the drying that occurs when a bowl or platter is turned. The turning exposes the grain of the wood and any water that is inside of the wood evaporates away. Sometimes, if the grain dries evenly, the bowl will retain its shape and not crack. But if the grain dries unevenly cracking and distortion of the sides of the bowl or the bottom of a plate can occur.

One way to get around this is to turn an unseasoned blank several times, each time removing a little more wood and then wrapping the bowl blank in heavy paper so it will dry slowly and hopefully evenly. And youve seen me do this many times. It can take 4-6 months for a large bowl to dry out this way and a long time for a project to come to completion.

Another way to dry out a bowl is to place it in a microwave oven and heat the wood up. This drives out the water in the wood and can speed up drying from months to 30 minutes. Thats the good news. The bad news is that it can cause the wood to rapidly dry out and distort, ruining the piece.

Ive never tried it before and since I have a small block of linden wood in the shop I decided to go down and turn the linden block into a natural edge bowl and to then take it into my kitchen and microwave it.

So heres what I did:

Here is a photo of the linden block. Its half of a large branch that Ive had for about 1 1/2 years or so and so Im going to turn it into a natural edge bowl. This is a bowl that still has some of its bark left on the edge:


This is about 90 minutes later. This type of turning produces a saddle-shaped bowl and you can see the shape beginning to form:


Here you can clearly see the saddle shape and the bark on the edge:


Here is the bowl after its had a session in the microwave. Its hot to the touch and very damp at this point but I dont see any cracking or obvious distortion. Ive placed it on my bread rack to dry and Im going to put it in front of an open window. Ill check back on it later today.


VW