The Coffee Scoop-What Happened...

Good Morning All,
Well, I went outside and checked on the state of the collet chuck and the glue was dried and the whole thing seemed strong enough to withstand turning on a lathe, so I placed the oak blank in the chuck and put the whole thing onto the lathe:

I checked to make sure the handle cleared the bed of the lathe:

And then I turned the lathe on just to see what happened. It worked without incident:

Well, so far so good. Time to set up the tool rest and cut away the face of the blank:

And what do you know--it worked! I continued to shave away at the face of the blank, very gently, until it was flattened. Then I took a drill bit and cored out the center of the blank, both to establish a center in an eccentric turning and to eliminate having to cut out more wood and possibly making the blank unstable and thus make it pop out of the chuck:

Here we are several minutes into the turning and after I've cored out the center:

As you can see the center and the blank are not lined up well. Oh well, it's a prototype. Here we are several more minutes into the turning:

I turned it down and emptied it out and that went uneventfully. I just did it gently and slowly, bit by bit and here it is:

And it really does hold coffee!!

Analysis:

Well, the process works but the final product has a lot of flaws in it. The blank wasn't completely round and I used some scrap red oak which is a coarse wood and not the best for this type of small turning. On the good side, the chuck does work and so does this process so I'm going to keep the chuck and try it again with harder, finer grained wood and see what happens. I am also going to carve one by hand and compare the results with the one in the photo. That will be a future project and I'll keep you posted on that.

Now here is a picture of the black ash bowl from last week. This did turn out well:

I'm going to deliver this to it's happy owner tomorrow.

Our next last project for the time being will be a platter made from Phillipine mahogany. It's a soft pink in color and softer and more light weight than some of the woods we've used this summer.

Well, I'm going to take my coffee scoop and go and make some coffee and sit down a bit.  Have a great day and as always, thanks for stopping by.

See you soon,
VW