A segmented vase for charity

My parents attend this community Crisis dinner/auction every year. They always donate items to be auctioned off and all of the money raised from this event is used to help abused women and children who have escaped from their homes. This year, I decided to build a segmented vase to be auctioned off. This was two and a half weeks prior to the event, and I knew nothing about segmented turning. So I started doing a lot of research and designed the vase. I also needed to design and make four jigs and tools for this build: a set of cole jaws, a steady rest, a gluing jig to ensure rings glued flat, and a sled for my table saw to cut the angles. I really jumped into this quickly and designed the vase to be 32” tall and 11” wide at the widest diameter. I like full scale drawings, so I made a 1:1 scale blueprint on graph paper, and used those dimensions to create a calculation sheet with the circumferences and the diameters of the rings, amount of rings, the width and length of the segments, species of wood and the layer number.

The cutting and gluing was pretty easy going after I got into the routine. I would cut three rings and then label them with the layer number according to my calculation sheet. I found that it makes everything easier to tape all the segments in a ring together before glueing. I used Tite-Bond 2 to glue everything together. After applying glue all the joining edges of the segments, I used surgical tubing to tighten all the pieces together. Hose clamps would have been more ideal for this process but I did not have any on hand. Once all the segments were glued into rings, I hand-sanded the faces of the rings so that they were flat. I then glued the 43 layers together into two parts to create the vase blank.

When I was turning the mouth of the vase on my home-made cole jaws, it flew off at 700rpm (my lathe’s slowest speed) and hit me right in the head. It left quite the bump for a couple hours, but luckily, the vase mouth was completely undamaged and I was able to finish it off.
The turning made me very nervous because the entire thing could be destroyed so easily. I was very relieved when the turing was done, and once it was sanded and fished with four coats of wipe-on Poly it really shined. It looked much better then I imagined when planning it. Here are a some pictures of the process of building this vessel.

The mouth and neck were then glued to the body, I just used some lead weights as clamping pressure. I attached the entire vase to the faceplate that came with my lathe (it was also my first time using the faceplate). I turned a large taper to attach to my tail-stock to assist in supporting the top of the vase. The immense size and imbalance of this case caused my 310 pound lathe to vibrate so much that it was moving around the floor. My solution to this; add more weight. I ended up adding around 250 pounds (with concrete bricks and heavy shop objects) to the lathe, which extremely reduced the vibration.

These first two photos were taken in the workshop at my school where I started building the vase.

The vase was originally going to be in the silent auction, but was transferred to the live auction thanks to the people who run the event. It sold for $2800, which made me extremely happy considering it all goes to a great cause.

Thanks for taking a look,

Ryan

-- Ryan