For wood, living in the northwest USA, we have plenty of Pacific broad leaf maple that I use and am quite happy with. It is very common here, a close relative of east coast sugar maple. In fact, one can get maple syrup from these trees. And when I cut the wood on a band saw, some times I can smell something like maple syrup. This wood has a better consistency than cherry, another wood we have here, in that is is less prone to cracking, is less fiberous, and is a little softer than it's east coast cousin. I do things differently to make kitchen utensils and spoons. I split the rounds along formed cracks and use the wedges like they were quarter sawn. I cut rectangular cross section blanks to let them dry with one end smaller in cross section than the other for the shank and the bowl. Then, I draw the profile from side view of a spoon or something else and saw out the profile on the band saw. Then I do the same from the top view. Then I use a custom made rubber backed grinding pad with cloth coarse grit sand paper used for metal grinders, 80 grit, that is larger than the rubber disc, which gives me flexibility in how much solid pressure I use on the blank. I can vary the lathe speed that holds the disc to be slower than the usual overly aggressive speeds on most power equipment. Then I use rasps and files to begin smoothing the surfaces and get the final fine shape. Then I hand sand the shape and then carve out the bowl, sand and scrape the bowl, and then treat the wood with pure tung nut oil mixed half and half with orange peel oil you can get from Florida. I keep oiling the wood every half hour or so until it is saturated, about 4 times, and then put it in a toaster oven at 150 degrees to polimerize the tung oil inside the wood. Heating and UV light polymerizes tung oil, walnut oil, and other natural oils faster than just letting them sit. I then steel wool off the irregular coating on the wood, and coat it again, and perhaps one more time with a light steel wool working between coatings. The result is a hard surface resistant to water and oils, kind of shiny, and looks real nice. The longest time spent with the most labor is sanding and finishing, then carving out the hard dried wood bowl. Before carving the bowl, I use regular drills the right size to drill out the deepest part of the bowl as large as I can safely do this leaving about 1/8 inch material at the bottom. I then use the gouge to cut out a cone shape going with the gouge towards the center of the hole I drilled out. This sets the thickness of the bowl walls but I am sure to leave some material to clean out at the tip point where the drill drilled out the wood or it will leave a compressed mark in the wood at that spot. Wet woods do not work with grinding, rasps, and files because they clog up real fast with sap, etc. With hard wood that is dried, I can even use traditionally used files like Swiss needle files for detail and the wood will not clog up these files either. My goal is to try to make a living doing this, reclaiming wood that would other wise end up in the fire place, and make these items fast enough but still end up with good quality so the labor pays enough for us to get along. That is my system, but there are some tricks I do also that saves time, which is how to hold the spoons and utensils of all sizes and shapes and yet have use of both hands while carving and some times shaping the spoons, etc. Best wishes to you all. I am not a purist, I cannot afford it, so go ahead and be critical if you wish, at least I am not wasting perfectly great wood and I am sequestering some carbon to boot. I might add that I even discovered by accident that regular cooking oil used for frying, if put in a glass jar over the summer, will begin to turn opaque and polymerize in the jar from the UV light and heat! My next trick is to see if I can coat wood outside using partly solidified cooking oil that is on the way to polymerization to water proof the wood! Now, wouldn't that be fine? Water proof wood from used non-hydrogenated cooking oil to start with! We will see.
