Scrap Wood Project-Yarn Bowl/Discussion and Plans

Hi Everyone,

Well, it's gotten much cooler here and rainy too. What kind of weather is this? Yes, wood turning weather!!

Ok, our next project is a scrap wood project and here is the discussion behind this:

Discussion

I had some 12"x1" pine boards left over from a recent project along with a piece of 12"x2"western red cedar that I had been eyeing for a couple of days and wondering what I could do with all of it. I suddenly got the idea to laminate them all together and make a yarn bowl. Linda, my buddy who tests a lot of my kitchen ware, is also an amazing knitter and I got the idea she might like to try out a yarn bowl for me. I emailed her and she said yes but to make it deep with a wide bottom so it can't easily tip over. So this is what we're going begin making today.

Plans

I am going to make the bowl out of yellow pine with a red cedar bottom. If you google the words yarn bowl you'll see what they look like-typically a large, flat bottomed bowl with either several large holes drilled into the side or a hole-slot combination. The hole-slot thing allows the knitter to pass the yarn through the hole without having to break the yarn and it keeps the yarn in the bowl while it's being knitted.

I used 8 - 12"x1" pine boards and cut them into 11" circles and I did the same thing with the red cedar. I'm going to coat them liberally with wood glue, clamp them, and let the whole thing dry overnight.

Let's take a look at some photos:

Here is the stack ready for gluing. The whole thing is about 7"high and 11" wide and even though it looks huge in the photo, it's not very heavy, which is important for my lathe as I don't want to exceed the operational limits by turning too heavy a block. You can also see a line on the side-I've drawn that line on the edges of the boards to keep the end grain patterns lined up:

I'm going to use carpenter's glue and an old pain brush to spread the glue around. I've also laid down a plastic trash bag to help keep some of the glue off of my work bench:

I cleaned all the wood dust off of the surfaces and applied a very thick bead of glue:

Next I spread the glue evenly across the surface, making sure that the edges have a thick, even layer:

And I did that repeatedly. Here is what the whole thing looks like at the moment:

Now, for difficult part: clamping the whole thing together. Laminated turning blocks need to be really solid and this means having enough clamps to produce even, hair-line joints in the block and ultimate in the bowl itself.  I used as many clamps as I can fit around the edge of the block, which in this case was 8 clamps:

Screwing down the clamps always makes the wood shift around a little so it's helpful to have a mallet, in the photo you can see I use a plastic mallet, to gently tap it in place:

And then I clamped the hell out of it. Screw it down as tightly as possible. You should see glue oozing out of the sides of the block:

And I'm going to let it sit for 24 hours. We'll come back to this tomorrow.

VW