Pet urn, continued

Hello Again,

I took a break (actually took a nap-it's hot and I'm tired) and then went back down to the wood shop to work. I've got the block back on the lathe and I've got it roughed into shape. But there still is a problem-see the photos below:

Photos
Here's the turning block. I trimmed off the irregular wood on the ends and now they are parallel and it's ready to be placed on the Nova chuck and the exterior shaped:

Here it is between centers and ready to go:

 Here is the block in motion. The wood is hard maple and maple tends to have a pink undertone to the wood and you can see that clearly in the photo. It's fine grained and wonderful to turn:

 Here's the shape. The top of the urn is the wider end on the left and the bottom is the right end:

And unfortunately here is the problem-cracking. The crack on the bottom will be turned off shortly but the crack on the top is deep and in order to remove it I'll have to substandially re-shape the urn. I'm going to think about how to approach this over night and tomorrow I'll work on it more:

See you tomorrow,
VW