Send the Light

A couple more days in the shop and my mesquite turned lamp is ready to send to Texas. This was one of those projects that while not hard, nothing about it came easy either. Regular trips to the sharpener were required for both my gouges and scrapers. When they were sharp, the mesquite turned like a dream. Once they lost their edge, they might as well have been a butter knife. (Okay, it was not quite that dramatic, but I did need to pay attention to the ribbons coming off of the blank … once they stopped flowing, it was back to the grinder.)

Have garden torch, will carbonize.

I am pleased with the shape of the lamp; it is very much as I had envisioned it. As it is going to be a gift along with the mesquite turned bowl I’d made earlier, I decided to carbonize the widest section. My trusty garden torch did the trick. Once I had completed the carbonized section, I got started with final sanding.

The blue section of the flame produces best results. Make every effort to burn the wood evenly around the project.

Linseed oil was my first coat of finish. It is traditionally used by Japanese craftsmen when they burn a finish on cedar. It soaks in and stabilizes the burnt wood fibers. I followed that with a coat of shellac and finished up with a coat of paste wax. I buffed out the wax finish on the lathe with a soft cotton cloth.

A coat of linseed oil to stabilize the burnt wood fibers and pop the grain figure on the rest of the piece.

Cleverly, I checked to see if I had a drill bit long enough to bore top to bottom through the lamp body. But I was not as clever as I thought because when I got back with the lamp hardware, the diameter of the drill bit was too large for the threaded nipple. So, I bored down from the top with a traditional brad point bit. Then, I drilled up from the bottom with a 1-1/8” diameter Forstner bit to meet the other hole. Surprisingly, it actually worked!

Next up is to package them carefully and send them to the Lone Star State. Yee Haw!