From July 6 to August 3, 2012, a limited number of very unique wooden bowl art will be available for viewing and sale at the Caswell Gallery, located at 253 & 255 E. Columbia River
Hwy, Troutdale, Oregon. All funds raised from the sale of these pieces created by Master
Wood Turner Mel Borg will be donated to the Orphan Relief & Rescue efforts to aid young boys and girls in war torn Liberia, specifically to build a Transition Center. Many orphanages are being closed down due to the abuse of the children by the operators. These traumatized orphans can’t be moved directly into a legitimate and caring orphanage without some special attention. The Transition Center will accomplish this. You can learn more about
Orphan Relief and Rescue by going to the website at www.OrphanReliefandRescue.org
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Mel Borg is a 60-year old Christian first, then a ship Captain, a carpenter, a dutiful son to his aging parents and a selftaught Master Wood-turner.
He first tried his hand at turning some wood down into a lamp base when he was in grade school. His tools were an electric hand-drill and a broken hacksaw blade. He next turned out a few bowls during his high school years and he didn’t turn another bowl until he was 50 years old.
His principal “roughing-out” lathe is a twenty-ton tool he found in Wrangell, Alaska while he was helping his brother, who acted as a preacher to various villages, maneuver a 65-foot ship throughout
SE Alaska. The man that owned the lathe told Mel “take it, if you can use it. I’d rather give it away than see it rust into junk”. So, Mel shipped it to Seattle on a barge for $180 then spent another $300 to get it to his home in Canby, OR.
All the raw material Mel uses is either salvage from a landscape company or has been hijacked as it was on its way to the dump. He has used Douglas fir, maple, oak, balsamic poplar, incense cedar, black walnut and Baltic birch plywood, which is the only material he has actually bought off-the-shelf. His technique is to rough-out the bowl blanks on the twenty-ton behemoth, then put them in the basement for a year before they are placed on a shelf up

near the roof of his metal-skinned shop, where they finish the drying process. He says he has not yet lost a single blank, but then he relishes the opportunity to enhance the natural attributes of each piece and use “defects” to the advantage of the piece. Virtually all his pieces are of one species, especially the larger ones. His largest piece started as a chunk of maple that weighed over a thousand pounds as a green piece of stump and ended up as that which he describes as a “free-form bowl”. He is a modest man, indeed, for that piece is a masterful reflection of the wood-turner’s art.
Mel’s tools are virtually all hand-made. His large lathe and the smaller finishing turret lathe are both units designed for use with metal. His large lathe is driven by an electric motor connected to an automotive transmission to slow the speed down to an acceptable level. The base of the lathe was raised eight inches above the bed to give him more radii for larger bowls. His smaller lathe has an indexing feature that allows him to use a router to make the cuts on the perimeter of some of his work, which is an unusual arrangement and combination of tools. He is an innovator in both the tools he uses and certainly in the work he turns-out.
He has used inlay materials around the perimeter of some of his work, but most of it is just the wood itself. The color Mel achieves in his work comes from the natural color of the wood, with some enhancement from powder paints or pigments mixed with a smidgen of the final finish material. Some pieces are finished in water-based varnish, some in lacquer and some in polyurethane material – he uses that which best enhances the wood color.
Over the ten years Mel has been turning-out bowls, he has only sold one piece of his work. Therein lies the beauty of Mel Borg; the money he raised by selling his piece of lathe-work (it was not a bowl) enabled him to go on a missionary trip. His guiding statement is Proverbs 19:17 “He who gives to the poor lends to the Lord and he will repay”. He has, over the years, been on over a dozen trips to
Guatemala and Mexico, building orphanages. He is especially desirous of helping Orphan Relief and Rescue in Liberia and is being assisted in that endeavor by the
Clackamas County Peace Officers Benevolent Foundation, whose members arranged this showing of his work.
For more information, contact the Caswell Gallery at (503) 492-2743 or view their website at www.CaswellSculptures.com
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