Skewed rice bowl and chopsticks

Every month, as regular readers may remember, the local woodturner’s guild sets a challenge for its members. This time the request was for a small rice bowl and wooden chopsticks, with the emphasis on the chopsticks, and that they had to be made with a skew only.

A skew is a turning chisel with an angled cutting edge, specifically good to turn, say, chair spindles. Needless to say, I don’t normally use such a tool for microminiature turning, but what the president demands, the president gets.

The chopsticks above are about 4 mm long (about 5/32″), and as thin as I could make them with my smallest skew. To give an idea of the scale, the cutting edge of the tool is about as big as the table that the set-up sits on. That’s 1/48, or Quarter-Scale, for those who demand exact numbers. The bowl and chopsticks I made from ebony, the platter is yellowheart, and the maple table is ready for lunch.