E-Mail me at
mmickhutch@yahoo.com

Working

Click on pictures to enlarge.

Turning a bowl is fun when one uses a sharp tool.  The turnings fly off in ribbons.  At this point, the same question always arises.  Did I allow enough wood to make the bowl round and not go through?

My shop is crowded into a one car garage, but it is comfortable and tools are close at hand.  Here, I am turning a bowl on the larger lathe. This bowl is about ten inches in diameter.  The lathe can turn up to fourteen inch pieces.

The inside of the bowl after roughing out.

The outside before any tooling.  The chuck which attaches the piece to the lathe can be seen.

It is fun to watch the eight and sixteen sided stack of rings become round, and begin to take the shape which I pictured while cutting and gluing all those pieces together. Sometimes, I don't see this tansformation until weeks after cutting the first pieces. A lot of time is spent watching the glue dry.

This is my new table saw with the cutting jig in place. The cutting jig or sled allows me to cut many pieces having uniform length and angle.  The stop can be seen on the left clamped to the jig.  This sled can cut angles 22.5 degrees or 11.25 degrees.  This lets me make either 8 or 16 sided rings.  One segment can be seen sitting on the fence. It takes 8 or 16 of these to make a ring.

Pieces are then glued into pairs and then into half rings as seen here.

This is an entire bowl glued together into half rings.  It may take several days to get to this point.  I spend a lot of time watching glue dry.  It takes about a pint of glue to join an average size bowl.

It gets more complicated when making patterns.  For instance, each of these segments  is made of 14 pieces of wood which must be glued together before the ring is cut.  The real challange in segmented turning is in executing the pattern rings.  Each one is different.  It took 4 steps to glue this segment.  A lot of dried glue can be seen, but this will all be cut off during turning.

Here, is a bowl which has been turned.  It is still glued to the waste block and screwed to the face plate. It is very important that everything is solidly mounted to the lathe.  If not, the piece can fly off and be destroyed.  Personal injury can also result.    

Here, the glued stack of rings is mounted to the lathe and ready for turning.   Some times it takes me as many as two weeks to get to this point.  This is the proof of the pudding.  Is the bowl or vase going to turn out as it was invisioned?  Most times they do.  Some times I am pleasantly supprised or dissapointed.

The completed rings are then sanded flat and glued together as shown.  They are allowed to dry overnight.  The piece on the right is ready to turn and the one on the left is clamped and drying. Staggering the segments like laying brick adds strength to the finished product.