What should spoons be like, anyway?

This, I have been thinking about, on and off for the last 10 years. My spoon making was suddenly interrupted two years ago. Therefore, recent resumption of my spoon making, in a way, gave me an insight into this issue.

You just take a step back from something and look at it from perhaps slightly different angles that you are used to. Usually, you are bound to do that if you are taking a new look at something. In the worst case you could have forgotten how you used to make them. So, in that case, you might be effectively looking at the whole thing from scratch.

Either way, my considered and instinctive view is that there can only be two types of spoons in this world, almost flat spoons and very deep spoons. There should not be intermediate spoons in terms of depth. They will be next to useless and not worth my time.

I can be justified, if you think about the use of spoons. They are nothing but carriers, of solids or liquids. As long as solids do not fall off the spoon its concave depth can be as shallow as you wish.

Somebody mentioned to me something akin to this in relation to infant spoons. Infants often fail to reach the bottom of the concave with their tongues. If they are flattish then the spoon's extent, apparently, does not matter much. I would rejoice in that as it will make my life a lot easier.

Take a look at the following photo.



These are all infant spoons I have been making lately. Beautiful, are they not? They are almost flat and not very strongly "S" shaped. Infants cannot take in a lot of solids in one go at any one time, anyway. So, that goes to that. Now, think about curry spoons. Do you need bucket like deep spoons for your curry intake? No, of course, you do not.

The only additional consideration would be spoons' spatial extent. My gut feeling is that curry spoons should be round and almost flat in their external appearance. Actually, the same can be said of soup spoons, except that they should be deep enough.

It must be true that for large single intakes the spoon shape, top-on shape anyway, should be almost round.

I have been making these infant spoons and some other photos are here.



With these, convex surfaces are not yet there. Intake areas are also still flat. These "bottom" surfaces will be sanded into convexes, very shortly. I will also be talking about details, separately, as this stage is very important.



With above, convex surfaces are there, and yet intake areas are still flat. Stems are also rectangular in cross-section and need to be rounded. However, I feel that I am still perfectly capable of making these rather flat spoons, even after a lapse of two years. I pride myself on that...

What follows is the bits I sometimes (not always) use for cleaning the inner surface of the concaves. I am not exactly happy with these.



Anyway, I will soon be taking up the task of adult spoons making, I think.

Spoons at long last - 3

Outer surface of a spoon is as follows.



This is the convex surface of an infant spoon, already fine sanded up to the grain number of 120. This process is not too awkward. Any flat sanding surface can do the job.

I actually use my belt sander, then followed by a rotary sanding device, with a tiny plastic drum covered with a cylindrical sanding paper. The latter is meant to obliterate ridges on the outer surface.

These ridges originate from being placed on a flat abrasive area for any length of time. There are usually half a dozen of them.

Making this convex surface as smooth as possible and evenly balanced when viewed from any direction is important. It is because the concave inner surface can only be hollowed out by feeling the remaining thickness by fingers as the inner mass is being removed.

If this convex surface, as a reference surface, is not properly perfected it is going to be anybody's guess what might result in terms of the inner concave surface. Naturally, remaining thickness differs from point to point across the entire spoon surface, but then it has to maintain symmetrical distribution when viewed top on and straight on at the spoon tip.

Having said all that, it is not that difficult. You only need an experience of 3, 4 years, I think.

Next photo is more problematic.



This is the roughened inner surface, roughened by a certain grinding piece. It is concave enough, but needs more treatment. You can use your fingers and a sanding paper, as the most primitive option.

You can also use all kinds of sanding/grinding instruments and associated bits. I normally use a few of them, depending on the extent of the concave surface to be created.

I must say I am still experimenting with them, after all these years... At the end of the day, though, it is the good old sand papers.

My gut feeling is that the best assistance will have to come from large spherical bits coated with either diamond or ruby grains. I want a minimum of 10 mm in diameter. Right now, it is a tall order, due to the limited availability of sufficiently thin axis of rotation.

Right now, my ruby bit has been clogged up and corrupted.

OK, I can go for thicker axes and yes, I am going that way, slowly, slowly...

I think this more or less completes my contribution to flat spoon making. I will talk about fully fledged spoons, later. For the moment take a look at what follows.



Above is sufficiently self-explanatory, I think.



These are simpler snack beds, upside down. Of these, 6 on the left have very short mahogany legs. When placed properly on a table there is little gap between the bed and the table.

Legs are effectively hidden away from view, with the net result that they look like floating. I think that is neat, actually epic! If nobody likes them I will still be liking them immensely...

Spoons at long last - 2

I now have 25 spoon candidates as shown below.



Associated with these are the cutout left-overs and there are 50 of them.



I do not want to throw them away. One way of turning them into something useful is shown below, but I will be dealing with this topic separately.



I will also be talking about a new discovery, which is the photo below. This may actually turn into something potentially very big, but again I will talk about implications of this discovery separately.



Above will be replacing what is shown below.



The problem with this 45 degrees flat bed is that the angle is not accurate enough. The angle adjustment mechanism with the PROXXON table saw above is much more accurate. I will talk about this amply later.

Now, let me go back to spoon candidates. These are still all flat pieces. Next step in the process is to pencil mark lateral profile on the side of the curved pieces. To that end you need a profile jig. For infants the profile at the bottom of the next photo is used.



Since this jig is placed on the side, striding across the valley it is made of a thick piece of wood, so that copied profiles are identical. You do not want it to bend easily as you pencil around.

In order to loose anything outside the marked lines the band saw is not used. Instead, a disc sander is used, as shown below.



This allows me to loose mass very quickly from the unwanted region of the spoon candidates. These roughly sanded pieces will be more finely sanded on the belt sander. The result is shown below.



I think you can actually see that convex surfaces are already there. These are still rough surfaces and a hand-held rotary device is then used to smooth them out.

What you need to do then is to hollow out concave surfaces. It is now my beer time, so I will talk about it in my next article.

(TC)

Spoons at long last!

I want to make spoons. In fact, historically speaking this blog of mine started around spoon making.

I made my last spoons two years ago. Can I still make them? My last spoons were fully fledged spoons. It was a little tricky and dangerous because I was determined to get the lateral profile right.

By "proper lateral profile" I mean an "S". I remember using my band saw to cut the S shape. I do not want to repeat that because it is dangerous. I have a better idea.

However, for my renewed spoon making session I want to take it easy. Take a look at the following photo.



This is an initiation set for infants. As such neither of these have proper lateral profile and it is a lot easier to make them. This particular spoon was quickly made yesterday in an attempt to get both lateral and top profiles right.

I am happy with this. I want to make lots of these rather flat "infant" spoons, for a start, in order to make myself ready for fully fledged spoons.

Anyway, these below are the starting materials.



Blocks of beech with constant thickness. I then pencil-mark top profiles using a profile jig, like below.



Cut by the band saw the block looks like below.



(TC)