Small Elm Bowl

This is a small bowl made from English Elm, nothing very exciting about that, but it was made using my newly acquired drilling post. This drill post was purpose made for me by a very good engineering friend of mine to fit the banjo on my Record Power Lathe. The tool rests on my lathe did not line through the centre of the lathe being above the centre at the tail stock end and below the centre at the headstock, he corrected all of that and trued up the tool rest before making this drill post. The drill post takes hardened steel drill bushes (I already had) in three sizes 6mm, 8mm & 10mm. the possibility for embellishment of my turned items is endless. The indexing head I have is inbuilt into one of my chucks and it is 24 steps, the index tool is home made and also works perfectly. What a friend to have, I gave him as a thank you, a ½” router with 24 new unused cutters which I have no further use for but, I will definitely find some use for this piece of fantastic equipment.
The plug inserts were made using tapered plug cutters in my drill press; I have a set of these to match the drill size of each bush. The plugs were cut from Sapele Mahogany for the 6mm plugs and Spalted Beech for the 8mm plugs; they were all glued in using PVA adhesive.
The manufacture procedure was; the bowl was mounted on a face plate and the outside of the bowl was turned, turning a 6mm spigot on the base for remounting, this was removed later. The bowl was remounted using the indexed chuck and trued up, then using the index and the drill post the bowl was drill from the outside face, the plugs were produced and inserted with the glue. The glue was allowed to cure and then the bowel was turned to a finish, spigot was removed and the bowl finished with 1 coat sander sealer and 2 coats melamine lacquer outside the lathe. Nice and easy but quite an appealing item.

-- Bill, Nottingham. Remember its not waiting for the storm to end, but learning to dance in the rain that counts. If you dont make mistakes, you make nothing at all.