Craving half a sphere

I copied bob's grayscale above, and definitely will find a way to use it myself. I've never actually done a two pass carving myself, so I think this could be a perfectly simple thing to try. I added a little "blur" to the drawing to smooth out the curve a little and it looks good in ipicture. Think I'll try a shallow cut of .5" to see if I like it, 1.5" is a little steep for me.......I think a 1.5 depth and diameter would give you a cone more than a bowl.

Decided to carve this to get a feel for a 2 pass at 1/2" depth. This is a piece of 2 x 4 pine, some scrap wood I had laying around. Settings were:

Normal speed
x = 3.0
y = 3.0
z = 0.5
Scan step = 0.0059
Feed depth = 0.25
1/32 bit

Picture on the left is when the second pass is really kicking in, and the right picture is the finished 1/2" deep cut. Took just under an hour to finish both passes. I did add 3.0 gausian blur to Bob's original drawing just to smooth it out a little.

The change in scan step is something I do on every carve, early on with the 1013 I had a lot of "lines" in my finished piece no matter what depth. It had something to do with the distance of Y travel on every pass. So I reduced it, and the lines basically went away. On this finished piece, with the right lighting, I can spot some small lines on the curved section but it's tough to know if that is from the soft wood and grain, or from the machine. There are no lines on the flat center section, either during the first or second passes. So I tend to believe its the cheap wood. This would sand out VERY quickly into a final finish.

Evaluating the viability of a two pass operation from this simple sphere is a little tough, it came out great for me but there is no real detail to the carving. I can see where a figure carving might not come out as well, but it certainly gives me an idea for some uses elsewhere - I just need to be careful on what I choose to carve so it comes out right.

The one question I have is in designing it into a bowl as originally designed. With Bob's drawing of the original request, the small diameter overall requested and the large depth (both 1.5"), you are more likely to get a cone shape rather than a bowl. The object should be to have the deepest center section fairly large yet give a curved side up to the top to take the sideload off the spindle motor during the carve. A plunge carving of 1/4" would work, but having replaced a spindle motor (not cheap) already - which I blame on my making many 0.33" plunge cuts when I started out - You really want that curve downward to ease the strain on the bit.

Thanks! I'll give that a try