Just playing around

This is a large cherry end grain vessel that I turned by hand on Friday night and Saturday morning. It started out with the idea that it would be a lampshade, but it’s much too tall and disproportionate for that, so I put a foot on it and made it an open vessel. The natural edge and foot are “new” for me, since I don’t typically like them. Overall, I am not in love with this form…

If you look at the bottom, you can see the ring of loght where the end grain is. To get this one “right”, it needs to be 1/8” or less all the way down. I have a couple of spots that are probably 1/4”, and they show as dark spots when the light is on them. The only way to measure the wall thickness reliably in a vessel this large is with light. The idea is to turn until you have uniform light passage through the walls.

I now have the vessel sitting in some paper bags to dry. 14” tall by 15” at the rim, and less than 2 pounds. When the log was put up on the lathe between centers, it was probably 70 pounds and barely cleared the ways. If you look at the bottom below the ring of light, there lies the biggest risk in the whole vessel. Not only does the pith run through the bottom, but it was left some thick in comparison to the rest of the vessel in hopes of giving it some stability. If this one dries without any major cracks, I’ll be surprised, but happy.

It sits on top of my new “holloiwng system”. I decided that it’s absolutely crazy that people are spending $400 on somthing as simplle as a box to support the back end of a boring bar. I started out this project with one goal: spend $0 on it. Shop scraps only. 90 minutes later, mission accomplished. The box supports a white oak handle that keeps the cutter level. No reason to “capture” the back support. I guess that if you are going to engineer a $400 tool, you have to make it look complex?

I used it before the glue even dried. It works well. If I was going to spend money on it, I could make it prettier, but it wouldn’t work any better. If I can find that laser pen I got at a tradeshow, that’s my next stop…

-- Steven