The Pet Urn continued-Making the lid-trials and tribulations

Good Morning Everyone,

The epoxy dried and hardened overnight and other than sanding and applying the finish, the body of the urn is complete. The lid however is proving to be a real challenge. Here's today's photos and discussion.

Here is the top of the urn with the bushing epoxied in place. The next step here is to flatten the top and smooth out the plastic bushing and remove some of the epoxy that spilled over onto the wood and the plastic. So I placed it back into the chuck and turned it a little bit more:

 And this is how it came out:

Other than sanding, it's finished:

The Lid

Now on to the lid. Here is a section of a piece of hickory that I'm going to use for the lid. I'm going to cut out a create a turning blank from this:

I also drilled a 1 1/4" diameter hole into the underside of the blank to hold it on the lathe for turning. Also in the photo is the plastic plug I was going to modify and use for the lid:

 So I put the wooden blank on the lathe and trued up the sides and face and turned a tenon on the face as the attachment point for the chuck. By doing this I can attach the blank front and back for shaping the lid:

The plastic plug fits the hole perfectly so the only step left was to shorten the threaded section of the plug so that the entire lid would fit flush on the top:

 So I placed the plug in the chuck and turned it down. As it turned out it had to be reduced in size considerably in order for the lid to fit:

 I wound up turning off almost all of the threads. Unfortunately it wouldn't thread into the body of the urn. It just wouldn't work. There are also too few threads remaining for a good, secure closure of the lid so I discarded this and started again with a different pvc component:

 This is the component that I'm going to modify next. It screws into the body of the urn perfectly. Instead of turning off the begining of the threaded section I'm going to remove the un-threaded body of the component, fit the threaded section into the lid and take it from there:

I also decided to make this particular blank a test piece in preparation for making the final lid. So I drilled a second, small diameter hole into the underside of the lid and then placed it back on the lathe for turning and shaping:

So I put the camera down and just proceeded to turn out the lid. It's a little under 3 inches in diameter and about 3/4" thick in the middle and it tapers to about 1/4" at the edge:

And here are photos of the test blank just sitting on the top of the urn:

I like the way it looks. I'm going to make a different lid out of a different, lighter color of hickory and make the lid later this week. I'll post photos so you can see how it comes out.

Stay tuned.
VW