Well, I had a long day to day and by the time I got home around 4 pm I was in serious need of some wood turning time. I have several projects going at the moment and here are some project updates:
Purple Heart Tea Box for Jim
I've constructed a lid for the box and here are some photos:
I looked through my hickory wood stack and found exactly what I wanted for the lid: a 1 inch thick piece of butter yellow hickory and so I marked off the lid and the wood for the knob on top for cutting on the bandsaw:
Here is the blank after cutting. I've established the center of both pieces and I am about to drill a hole in both pieces in order to peg them together. The square portion also acts as the attachment point for the lid to the lathe-more about that tomorrow. I decided to use CA glue to glue them together and it ran all over the place.
Between the above and below photos I managed to glue the small block to one of my fingers. I always keep a can of acetone around just in case I do something stupid like that. You should have seen me walking around with a piece of wood stuck to my hand....
Here is a photo of the two pieces glued together with no fingers attached:
I like to get a very fine joint between laminated pieces of wood so you can't see the glue line and I've managed to accomplish that with this in spite of myself. I'm going to leave this and come back to it tomorrow.
Next-laminated hickory and walnut bowl
You may remember from about a month ago I laminated several turning blocks out of hickory and walnut. The first blank became the nut bowl and this blank is going to become a medium-sized hickory bowl with a walnut rim. I was worried about this blank because the walnut began to crack down the middle while I was clamping it and I was beginning to worry that I might have to cut off the rim. So I decided to at least get it roughly shaped today and take a close look at the walnut rim as I was turning it.
This first photo shows the blank very roughly cut out from the laminated block. As it's heavy and rather unbalanced at this time, I'm going to use the 6 inch faceplate and 1 1/2 inch wood screws to mount it:
Here is a photo of the blank on the lathe. I'm going to turn it between centers for safety's sake. You know this is a very heavy block of wood turning hundreds of time per minute a few inches away from my head--crazy way to make a living when you think about it. But the wood bug bit me early in life and I've never regretted working in wood. I've never seriously injured myself either.
Here you can see the blank being shaped from the bottom to the top. Cutting at a diagonal insures that the wood fibers are cut cleanly with a minimum of tear out:
Here is a photo after about 2 hours of turning. There was a lot of wood to remove and the block is probably much lighter in weight now and certainly is is well balanced at this point in time. I'm going to deepen the shaping of the layers of wood tomorrow. And I've added a foot to this bowl as well:
This is good quality wood and because of that, this bowl is going to work out nicely.
It's getting late and I'm covered with wood chips from head to toe so it's time to stop. I'll be working tomorrow so grab some coffee and I'll do the same and we'll see how the lid to the tea box works out.
Thanks for dropping by,
VW
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