Now, that's more like it. I wasn't saying that glass sculptors aren't amazing, I was more pointing out that the ones I've seen doing their thing were making little doo-dads over a torch in a mall kiosk. Never really cared for the stuff those guys were turning out, and I'm generally not impressed by the other semi-big glass industry where they make a lot of drug pariphenalia- I'm not that concerned about what they're doing with it, and I'm sure it isn't easy, I just haven't been impressed with the design skill, for the most part.
"Prometheus" wrote: (clip) I've been trying to come up with ways to make some exterior light fixtures for my house- I can already do everything
*except* make glass domes for them, (clip) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Consider making open ironwork cages, and blowing the glass domes inside them. I have always thought those were really cool.
How about surrounding the vase with a plastic bag (except for the mouth) and drawing a vacuum through the porous vase walls to evenly distribute your inner vessel?
Gambiting right along. George's comment re lab glassware reminded me that I once tried unsuccessfully to make a glass Klein bottle: a vessel that doesn't know its insides from its outsides. :) Google or visit Wikipedia for pics if interested.
Years later after watching Mike Hosaluk make curved wood pieces by slicing a cylinder radially into segments with various angles and rotating the angled surfaces of the segments, I thought about making a turned and sliced wood cylinder into a crude klein bottle. However I figured the curves would need to be so sharp that a hole of any size thru the original cylinder would be offset past an edge, so I never gave it a try.
But now in a gambit to help Jesse with the insides of his vessels, I wondered about doing away with both sides. Eureka! A Klein Vase. :) Have any of you guys ever considered or made any turnings that somehow incorporated the klein bottle concept or maybe a Mobious strip or two? OK, ok, I'll go away quietly. :)
You can actually buy these, though they're a little pricey and they aren't *really* a Klein bottle (since they don't pass through themselves without touching). Pretty cool, though:
Mobius strip ??, heck I didn't know they had a name for that Arch, I remember making those a few times, I was told to make them right, first ones where made in kindergarden, had to cut them apart and do them over again, I thought my last bandsaw band looked like that, Ha :-*))
A Klein vase, in Dutch, is very doable, but the one I think you are referring to has escaped me yet, haven't found a way to get the shavings out of it. ;->
probably the fastest way to seal: make a wooden plug for the opening pour in molten wax and turn with vigour drain and air repeat once or twice again seems like you will receive water-tightness in half an hour. RTV also holds interesting options, if you could get it fluid enough. but always, always, have coke. Max
Well, I just tried the Coke bottle trick, and it doesn't work- at least, not with the equipment I have.
Application of heat to the bottle from the inside *or* the outside causes it to shrink. Simply blowing into the opening with the air compressor when heating did nothing, so I put a rubber stopper in the end with the compressor blower stuck through it, and heated the outside with a hand torch while blasting 90 psi into the semi-airtight bottle.
Figured I'd at least get a good bubble for my efforts, but it still shrunk, until it eventually burned through the side. Could be I had too much heat or air pressure, or not enough of one of those, but that was the best control test I could think of, and if that didn't work, I can't see being able to pull it off inside a vase!
Maybe another plastic source would work, but the soda bottle is out. I'm actually still really liking the wrench dip idea. IIRC, it's cheap and easy to work with- though it's been a while since I last used the stuff.
Hi Jesse, Back in the box and coming down to reality from blown glass and Klein bottles, we are really talking about wooden vases to hold flowers, not holy water, not even wassail or hot coffee. :)
You might want to reconsider a glass insert; a beer bottle instead of a coke bottle or maybe an olive bottle etc. True, they are straight sided and don't conform to the interior walls and hold less water, but with an attractive removable turned collar to hide the fact and hold them in place who cares? Certainly not the general public and probably not the flowers either. How much fluid do their stems really need? :)
To add another turning task to your repertoire you might want to spin a handsome collar from aluminum sheet. :)
OK to get even more real, I have to agree that this suggestion has little to do with the intention of your original post. :)
There is no law to stop you from making the vase in two pieces, and gluing it up with a glass bottle inside. You are obviously more interested in getting results than in conforming to an arbitrary, preexisting restraint.
I'm sure you are aware that there are simple ways to conceal the seam. If you want to be completely open about it, join the two halves like a lidded box, so the glass liner can be removed/replaced.
Let's carry this a step further. Let the bottle neck show, so it becomes part of the design. How about this? Make a gift, consisting of a bottle of wine, contained in a two-piece turned wooden shell. After the wine is gone, the recipient keeps the container, and uses it as a vase. Or buys another bottle of wine to put on the dinner table inside the same "box."
Well, I suppose on the vase- but I would think that with the styles I've done, most glass bottles would be too narrow for the stems to fit properly- especially considering that the flowers that grow in my yard (Lilacs, roses, and irises) all have pretty woody or flesh stems that take up a good deal of real estate. We didn't plant the flowers, and they come back every year with no special consideration, but it still seems like a shame not to bring them inside when they're in bloom.
Oh no- not aluminum! Used to be that stainless steel was the stuff I hated with a passion, until I had to do some work with aluminum. Spinning the stuff leads to huge amounts of galling, and very ugly "tears" on the surface of the spinning metal.
I've had better luck with copper and brass, and have incorporated those into some turnings, but I still have a lot of trouble with ridges popping up on the edges. Even though it's more physical work, I've been just hand-hammering things like that lately, since the slower pace of that allows me to hammer those ridges down before they're a problem.
That's not a terrible thing to integrate with turning, either. I don't have a swage block, so I turn the shape I want to hammer out of whatever I have laying around, and use that for a temporary form. The hammer is just an old tack hammer I rounded the head on, and the material is worked cold. If you get thin metal (and who can afford thick copper these days anyway!) it's not that hard to work, and it looks really nice if you just keep hammering until the surface is evenly faceted by the hammer head. Be advised, the hammer has to be held lightly and "snapped" to do this- it's all in the wrist. It can be tiring, but not nearly as much as it seems like it would.
I tend to favor bowls with slightly closed rims, so I've been tossing around the idea of lining those with thin brass or copper the next time I get one with an interior that could use a little extra embellishment (let's face it- you never know what you're going to get, and sometimes it's boring, or even just plain ugly!) That would have an extra *wow* factor to it, considering that the metal insert would be perminently formed inside the turned bowl (and, with a little polish, those hammer facets really sparkle nicely)
That's a possibility- and while I had initially thought to myself that the neck makes that a unusable suggestion, I just recalled seeing a guy cutting bottle glass to make outdoor lamps. The process was pretty simple- you heat up a bar of metal to an orange heat (and I would assume that an oxy acetaline torch would work fine in lieu of a forge,) bend it over, and then press the bottle against the point of the bend while rotating it. It melts the glass a little bit, and gets it hot in a thin line all the way around- and then to break it, you just plunge it into water, and the shock shears the glass cleanly.
Yes- but that's still not quite what I'm looking for. I've done a few segmented turnings, and *that* would be cool, but I don't like cutting things made from single blanks- even when I've been able to hide the seam, it interrupts the grain.
The thing to remember here is that I am results-oriented for the interior only- the outside that will be visible below the spread of flowers or whatever is the part that I am taking extra pains to make attractive. Since my style tends towards simple, sweeping curves in two-tone and burl wood, hiding seams usually is a martyr's task.
Man, I really live in the wrong place. Many of you guys turn bottle stoppers and the like- but I'm the only person I know who drinks wine around here, and I don't drink any alcohol often enough to make any accesories for it. Now, if I were to make beer or whiskey bottle holders, that might go over a lot better.
Another thing occurred to me after I hit send. There's no reason why a turned wine box would have to be two pieces- Why not turn a small hole for the neck, and leave the bottom open? With a little care, it's not too tough to get a fit that will allow the "cover" to fit tightly enough to stay on well with no further encouragement.
The big concern here, of course, is that it might split badly instead of just warping a little if it's held tight against a glass vessel when the air gets really dry.
You can do this with heated nichrome wire (foam cutter) or even tie string around the bottle and set it on fire. I recall doing the string thing back in the 60s and it worked quite well.
Suggestion from SWMBO on the same basis that the vase itself provides support: trap a plastic bag of some kind between the neck of the vase and a turned ring (like an end-grain fitted-box lid with a hole in the middle). You might need to reinforce the locking ring with a dowel or some such device to prevent splitting along the grain.
only one p in my real address / un seul p dans ma véritable adresse
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