I’m having a lot of fun practicing my wood turning. First up I wanted to see if I could turn a plate from some 3/4” stock. I had some triangular off-cuts from making the folding side tables and I was able to cut some circular blanks from them thus cleaning up more scrap that I just couldn’t part with.
An important learning here was that I only needed a 3/16” recess to hold this blank on the chuck and so it was feasible to have one on each side and still have a 3/8” base to the plate.
I did have to fill the small hole in the center where the forstner bit’s guide spur when deeper but now it’s a little feature that looks like a black sesame seed in the center of the plate.
I finished it in the usual way and it looks very nice, I did have to re-sand and refinish a couple of spots where the walnut sanding dust got into the pores of the maple but I managed in the end.
Looking at the other circular blanks I got from the same triangular off-cuts I realized that I could make a low profile bowl with a cherry segmented band in the middle using a segmented ring that I made but didn’t use for the big segmented bowl I recently made.
I was able to flatten the ring and the off-cut disks quickly on my planer which worked great even with the ring having grain in all directions and hole in the middle because the helical carbide cutter just doesn’t care. I was able to glue them up almost perfectly centered all at once using the framing points trick I’ve been using.
I wanted to see if I could do a hollow form bowl that looked like a torus so I drilled a 2 1/4” hole through the top and a 3/16” x 2 1/4” recess in the bottom. I was able to turn it and widen and shape the opening and then reach in with various tools and shape the interior. If it was any taller I would have had to invest in some curved hollowing tools but in this case I got away with it.
The big hunk of walnut that I had acquired and made one blank into the two walnut bowls had broken down into four 8 1/4” x 8 1/4” x 3 1/4” big blanks and two 4 1/2” x 8 1/4” x 3 1/4” blanks from the ends that had some defects. I realized that I could cut up the odd sized blanks into eight small bowl blanks about 4 1/8” x 4 1/8” x 1 7/8” each.
I decided to turn one of those into a nice little snack bowl. While finish was drying on the hollow form bowl I worked on the snack bowl and vice versa and so they progressed at the same time. The walnut’s open grain is a little tricky to get smooth without pulling up fibers from the grain, so I still have some work to do getting that improved. Not perfect but it serves its purpose admirably.
Finally I went back to one of the first things that I tried when I started this journey which was a sapele lidded bowl that had a number of flaws including a bad chunk out of the rim and a scar down the side where I did a stupid thing trying to cut the lid off on the band saw.
I decided to put it back on the lathe and fix it based on my learning so far. I chucked it with the Cole jaws and was able to clean up the bottom and very carefully put in a recess so that I could mount it on the regular chuck and turn away the damaged area of the rim, turn the outside down to erase the scar and for good measure I did a much better job hollowing it out making it deeper, the bottom flatter and thinning the walls considerably.
I put my ususal finish on it and it looks much, much, nicer. I don’t have a way to hold the lid to turn it again because of the knob on the top so I may or may not return to fix that as well… we’ll see.
All in all it was a good sequence of little projects to learn new skills and practice.