Young craftsman takes Old World path

By DAVID GUNTER

Feature correspondent

SANDPOINT — Time was when a young person seeking to develop a skill had to first find a master in the field and then hope to be taken on as an apprentice.

With Old World craftsmen in short supply, 14-year-old woodworker Luke Owens took a different direction when he wanted to learn how to turn wooden bowls.

“YouTube,” he said. “That’s how I taught myself.”

For the past 18 months, Owens has spent countless hours in his family’s garage — a space he has pretty much converted into a woodshop. And while his parents gave him an early leg up in purchasing some basic tools, the teenager now has spent about $2,500 of his own money to buy additional tools and equipment.

He has mostly squared up that investment with the help of various summer jobs and, more recently, the sales of his handcrafted bowls.

“I had a booth at the medieval craft fair at the fairgrounds,” said Owens, referring to an event that accompanied the Montana Shakespeare in the Parks performance of “Richard III” this summer. “It went well. I sold seven bowls, which was good for my first time.”

This maiden voyage into retailing, however, also gave the young craftsman his first glimpse of what it takes to actually sell in public the things he creates in the privacy of his woodshop.

“It was pretty dreary until somebody bought something, which was nice,” he said.

Pulling up to the woodcrafter’s home off of West Pine Street, one might be greeted by the sound of a chainsaw and a rooster tail of flying sawdust as he turns logs into rounds which, once he lays his hands to them, will become attractively smooth, highly figured bowls. To hear Owens talk, you might even get the impression he has the gift of X-ray vision, letting him see past the bark and the grain to find the finished piece inside.

“For most people, when you see a log, you don’t say, ‘Oh, that could be a salad bowl in my kitchen,’” he allowed. “It’s fun, once the shavings start flying, because you can see it take shape.”

Along with the value of having the right equipment in place — Owens first saved up to buy a larger lathe and currently is saving for a bigger band saw — his main epiphany was the importance of having hand tools that could work the grain without fighting against it. The defining moment was when — once again thanks to online tutelage — he learned how to create and keep a keen edge.

“Definitely sharpening,” he said when asked about the most helpful thing he has learned so far. “Having sharp tools changes everything.”

The wood, too, has taught him a lot over the course of his year-and-a-half, self-guided apprenticeship. His favorite is walnut, because it doesn’t tend to warp, is easy to cut and generally has rich color. On the other hand, Owens’ least favorite wood made a less positive impression.

“One time I worked with fir,” he said. “That was terrible. I got sap on my face and the sap hardened on the bed of my lathe.”

There are times when the teenager goes to the Internet to find hardwood rounds for his work, but he prefers to source local wood. Often, he locates it in the yards of people who have had an old tree felled and are just ready to get it off their property. To them, it might be a stack of logs that need to go away. To him, it looks like a stack of bowls ready to be released from the logs that bind them.

“All around town, people are cutting down hardwood trees to get them out of the way,” he said. “They use them for firewood or have them chipped up. They don’t realize what they have.”

Interestingly, Owens didn’t come to the trade based on a lifelong yearning to turn bowls. It took a chance YouTube encounter to prod him that way.

“I’ve always been interested in craft stuff and the idea of woodworking was always in there,” he said. “But I never locked into it until I saw that video.”

This summer, Owens spent more than 60 hours in the shop, which may not seem like a lot of time until you remember that he is, after all, 14, and the golden days of summer vacation slide quickly by. For that reason, his passion for the craft is all the more admirable.

And what do his friends think of this obsession with wood turning?

“They think it’s cool,” he said, stacking a few finished bowls in a corner of the shop after showing them off. “But some of them think I spend too much time in here.”

An early start to soccer season and the beginning of school have changed all that. With shop time at a premium, Owens now finds himself looking forward to next summer, when he will have more skills, more inventory and additional equipment behind him.

“I will probably have an online store by then — and a new band saw,” he said.

People who own and appreciate wooden bowls might very likely have a few of them that are considerably older than this young man who now makes them. There’s something about that relationship that Owens finds very appealing.

“It’s kind of like the legacy — the lifeline — of your craft,” he said. “These bowls, if you take care of them, will outlast you by a long shot.”

To see photos and videos of work in progress and finished bowls made by Luke Owens, visit the Instagram address: @thedustywoodworker