The Wedding Bowl and Quaichs, continued

Hi Everyone,

Well, it's good turning weather so I'm back down in the shop today to take a look at where we are with the wedding stuff. First the bowl and then the cups. Here we go:

The Bischofia Bowl

I took the bowl out to look at it and to see how much distortion there is from drying and if there are any cracks. Here's a photo:

The bowl is still heavy so it's still has a lot of drying out to do and even thought it looks perfectly round in the photograph is 1/2" wider side to side than it is top to bottom. That's ok as there is a lot of wood left for turning so the bowl, when it's done drying, can still be turned to a round bowl. This guy goes back in the drying bag-box for a couple of weeks so stay tuned.

The Bischofia Quaich or the Little Red Cup that could and did

This guy is coming out quite well. It's dry and there was only about 1/8" of distortion in the cup. In a larger bowl that would be almost imperceptible but in a small vessel it's very noticeable. Here are some photos:

Here is a photo of the bowl next to a tape measure for comparison. If you look carefully you can see that the thickness of the walls isn't the same all the way around the cup. We need to fix that:

And here it is from the side. It's also a little too tall. We'll fix that too:

I placed the quaich back on the lathe and the first thing I did was to remove about 1/4" off the top. That made the diameter and the height look a lot better together. It also shows that there is enough wood to continue turning. Lesson here: never turn a green piece of wood to it's final dimensions. Leaving the walls and bottom with enough wood for future tuning makes the difference between a finished project and a cup to dish up dried cat food with:

So to turn the cup into a true circle again, I began by turning the outside of the cup. The upper two thirds of the cup is the most distored so that's where I began cutting. Once I finished turning that portion of the cup, I turned the bottom one third of the cup and it you look closely you can see two different arcs in the surface:

Here you can see I've blended them together. The outside now is completely round:

After I finished the outside, I trued up the inside as well and I must say that went very well. I took a good look at the quaich at this point and decided to sand it which I did to 400 grit followed by a final smoothing with 4-0 steel wool. And here it is:

 I'm very happy with this.


The Maple Quaich

Well, this one didn't turn out so well. Fortunately the wood was dry from the beginning so there wasn't any distortion or cracking. But the handles look awful. As they really serve no useful purpose and as the rim was missing a small chunk, I decided to remove the handles and turn the rim down past the missing chunk:

Here is a side view of the quaich. The first thing I did was to reduce the diameter of the base as it's too wide so I took a bedan tool and turned away about 1/4" of wood. Then I straightened out the profile of the cup and then removed the rim:

This is the new shape:

Then I removed the cracked broken part of the rim and you can see that the rim is smooth and intact:

And then I sanded it down too. I like the cup but I think it's too small so I may wind up turning another one. I'm going to cogitate on that for the next day or so and make a decision about this on Friday.

So here are final photos of both for comparison:

So this is where we are at present. I need to go and clean up the shop so I'll be back probably tomorrow with an interim project: a bike rack for my bicycles.

Stay tuned,
VW