{"id":221,"date":"2010-03-11T20:35:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-12T00:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.woodturningpens.com\/?p=221"},"modified":"2010-03-11T20:35:16","modified_gmt":"2010-03-12T00:35:16","slug":"segmented-blank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woodturningpens.com\/segmented-blank\/","title":{"rendered":"Making a Dish From a Segmented Bowl Blank"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Long ago I was trolling through a wood turning catalog and spotted some segmented bowl and vase blanks which really caught my eye. To be honest, I hadn’t done a great deal of turning at that point in my life so I was probably an easy mark. But, since a “professional” turner recently wrote an article about using these very same blanks to make pepper grinders, perhaps my attraction wasn’t due to inexperience after all. At any rate, suffice it to say that I ordered them.<\/p>\n
Imagine my surprise when I read the instructions that told me that I should expect to have voids that would require filling! The catalog didn’t say anything about that and given my relative inexperience at the time I was intimidated. Granted, my Dad, my teacher of all things turning, had told me in principle about filling voids with sanding dust or shavings, but my attempts at doing this had not been overly successful to date. The blanks languished on my wood rack for close to a year.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n I had been given the opportunity by my sister to make a large assortment of pens as gifts prior to Christmas and this gave me a chance to better determine her likes in wood turning. She turns out to be fond of the multi-colored items, and was most taken with an aniline dyed pen made from tiger striped maple, primarily I think because she didn’t expect wood to be blue. Of course, maple isn’t blue naturally but the dye had the positive effects of highlighting instead of obscuring the figure and of creating an unexpected color spectacle. Based on her positive reaction to the blue pen and to her fondness for two part pens made from different woods, I decided that a small dish made from the multi-color block blank would be a winner.<\/p>\n The blank was noted as being made in the Philippines so I strongly suspected that there would be a high content of cheap tropical woods along with what appeared to be at least some leopardwood and padauk. The small off cuts were held together both horizontally and vertically by generous amounts of what appeared to be a brownish colored epoxy. The whole blank was sandwiched between two veneer thin pieces of what appeared to Philippine mahogany or another cheap wood.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Even when cutting the square blank to round on the bandsaw the most immediate drawback of using multiple woods in one blank became obvious, namely, different woods have different densities and hardness, making the process of working them uneven. This tendency would become all the more obvious once the piece was mounted on the lathe.<\/p>\n The softer woods would naturally cut faster and occasionally there would be an obstinate harder piece sandwiched between softer pieces. The natural tendency would be for the gouge, scraper, and even sandpaper to act more aggressively when encountering these softer woods, so to avoid craters, it was necessary to be cognizant of this tendency and to struggle to maintain all tools steadily on the plane surface to be worked.<\/p>\n In the end, I was pleased with the overall shape achieved, which amazingly was pretty much what I had intended. This isn’t always the case with free-form items like dishes and spindles where sometimes the wood itself seems to want to do something different than what I have pre-conceived. Usually I assume the wood knows better than I do what it wants to become and I let it guide me. Perhaps because this was a conglomeration of small pieces there was no longer a guiding principle and my desire was adequate.<\/p>\nWhy I Decided To Use the Blank<\/h2>\n
About the Blank<\/h2>\n
Working With the Blank<\/h2>\n