SaddleBrooke woodturners repair warped bowl after finish failure

The SaddleBrooke Woodworkers Club turned a regular meeting into a case study in repair culture, service work and turning know-how. In the MountainView Sonoran Room, where the extra table space and television make room for projects and PowerPoint alike, members also ran through a long list of jobs finished since the previous gathering: repairing SaddleBrooke TWO library shelving, building a credenza for the SaddleBrooke One Clubhouse, refinishing an antique toy chest, restoring antique side tables, helping sell shop tools and starting on 12 tabletops for the Preserve Clubhouse.

Then show-and-tell brought the evening back to the lathe. Michelle Kouri displayed a bowl that had been rough-turned in Michigan, then warped after being moved to Arizona. After she had spent 12 hours carving and painting it, the piece blew out at the bottom during finishing, leaving what turners jokingly call a funnel. The fix came from inside the club itself: another member supplied a matching wood plug, and the bowl was repaired successfully instead of being written off as scrap.

That outcome fits the way the American Association of Woodturners describes green wood. Bowls warped because wood shrinks more across the grain than along it as it dries, and a common answer is to rough-turn the piece, let it dry and then remount it for finish turning. The AAW also notes that turning a bowl to an even thinness can reduce stress while the wood dries, a useful reminder of how quickly a delicate form can move from promising to problematic when finishing begins.

Kouri’s bowl was not the only piece with a story. Dan Williams brought eight carved and decorated carousel horses that were originally meant for a carousel for his grandchildren, and Bill Brown showed chair restoration work complicated by deteriorated wood around the hardware and evidence of an earlier repair done with a pneumatic nail and stapler gun. In a club that also takes requests for furniture repairs and, in some cases, does the work at no charge, the boundary between turning, carving and plain old shop problem-solving stayed deliberately thin.

The club itself is still young, created in October 2022 after Mark Erickson identified strong resident interest in woodworking. By February 2026, the group said it had grown to more than 90 dues-paying members despite having no dedicated workspace of its own. Its meeting locations have shifted over time, from notices placing it on the first Tuesday at 2 p.m. in the MountainView Saguaro Room to the June gathering in the Sonoran Room, but the emphasis has stayed the same: make something, fix something, and keep the good wood in circulation.