Elephant Walk

I am planning on posting some of my projects you might have seen elsewhere. I’m doing this is with a view towards upping the activity a bit on this site.

This bowl is made from Walnut/Beech. It is about 6" high and 8-1/2" wide and contains 169 pieces.

I had been wanting to do a turning with a feature ring that had natural forms instead of a geometrical design. The elephants were all scroll sawed at 90 degrees. I first scrolled the elephants and then traced the cutouts onto the ring segments.

Here are a few pics of construction underway. Being my first feature ring I made it extra thick at 1-1/2". This necessitated using two rings glued together. Before face gluing them I had to cut 24 elephant inlays. 12 for the inner ring and 12 for the outer ring as it would have been too thick otherwise for my scroll saw to get accurate cuts. I found later that I probably could have done it with one ring about 1" thick saving me a lot of time and work, but I haven’t tried that yet.

These 3 photos show a test inlay I did before deciding if I could do this.

The finished feature ring.

Glued up and ready to turn

Progress

This turning was a lot of fun. I enjoy scroll sawing and I got plenty of that with this project. The bowl was fairly deep as bowls goes and I didn’t have a tool rest that went deep enough for my standard turning tools. I had to use my Stewart turning tools which have a handle piece and a socket to accommodate an extension that holds a small cutting tip in order to reach the far enough in and still have enough leverage to keep the cutting tip where I wanted it.

I am hoping to do a feature ring with scroll sawn inlays again, but with a more complicated design which includes more that just one wood species. Meanwhile I hope you like this one. Thanks for looking!