Segmented Bowl

This was my entry for the Turning Swap at the other place. I’ve never done a segmented bowl, but I kind of had an idea what I wanted to do with it. As the idea evolved, I had the idea to add some epoxy and create sort of flowers or Lolly pops (or something) up the sides of the bowl. In retrospect, lining up all the vertical pieces was harder and more exacting than I probably should have undertaken for a first attempt, but it didn’t come out terrible. I also inlayed an epoxy disc on the bottom, as well as two inlays along the rim of the bowl.

I didn‘t use a wedgie sled to cut my segments, rather my Incra HD miter gauge. It’s very accurate and produced great angles. I also didn’t use hose clamps to hold the rings together. Rather, I laid out a piece of blue tape along the bench and placed the wedges and accents tightly edge to edge, then rolled them up into a ring, securing in place the tape at the end. This resulted in very tight rings. What I did notice, however, was that I used tape narrower than the height of the wedges, and i didn’t concern myself too much with whether the tape was centered in the middle of the wedge’s height. Anyone who uses the blue tape trick for edge banding or glueing knows how tight you can get it. Well, making the rings tight with tape, and having the tape end up slightly off center resulted in a very slight skewing of the blocks, which resulted in a couple very small gaps that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. The learning point for me on this one is that the blue tape clamping works great, but the tape should be at least as wide as the wedges are tall so that you get even compression all the way across the ring. That aside, I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

Sanded the rings flat on my FlatMaster, and assembled them using the tail stock of the lathe and a Jumbo/Lomgworth style chuck.

For the epoxy portions, I drilled the bottom hole, routed flutes in one of the rings, and ended up turning recesses in the rim…and backfilling them with epoxy, then turning them down…but all at different times during the build. This made for some pretty complicated planning (especially for a first attempt) but the result looks like it was all done at once with the same color.

I really liked the natural look of the wood, so I just sanded to 3200g and then used Dr. Kirk’s. Finished simply with Renaissance Wax. Makers mark and swap info laser’d on the bottom for posterity!

There are certainly things I’d like to clean up if I did this project again, and I learned a ton, but overall I’m pretty happy with it!