On Tue, 17 May 2005 13:20:16 -0500, "Dr. Deb"
wrote:

And then there is the LDD approach. 50/50 mixture of liquid dish detergent
and water, soak the nearly finished bowl for 24 hours wipe most of the
solution off, cover the bed of your lathe with plastic sheeting, chuck the
piece up and finish it on out, I usually use shellac and wax for a finish.
Depending on the type of wood, warping will be either non existant or give
you a nice oval effect (oak is bad about going oval). However, I have had
no problems with any of my pieces splitting.

How exactly is this supposed to work? Does the detergent lower the
moisture content of the wood somehow? I'm not saying it doesn't work,
of course, just wondering why it would. One of the other responses
mentioned that the wood may appear milky under the finish without
drying it, does the LDD method cause that to occur, or does the soaked
wood behave in effectively the same manner as dried wood? I'll
definately give it a try, as I've heard of this before. Thanks for
filling in the details of the method.

To fill in a couple of details from my original post, the bowl in
question is about 5" dia x 3" deep with a wall thickness of about
3/8", and slightly thicker (perhaps 1/2") on the bottom. I did the
final cuts at a spindle speed of 1750 rpm, and sanded for a heck of a
long time to clean up some tearout on the end grain, and got the piece
fairly hot. Sanded though the grits to 400 (60, 100, 120, 220, 320,
400), and then burnished the piece with the shavings. No way of
telling what the moisture content ended up being.