Mating pieces?

wrote: (clip) any examples of

The mating pair illustrated in the link are very attractive. The idea and the method are quite clever. With great effort it would be possible to a snuggling pair of bowls by carving.

If you turned the outside of a pair of matching pieces. Then take one and offset the axis by the distance the centers of the two pieces will be when they are mated, it would then be revolving around where the mating piece is going to be. You could then hollow out, even though you're working on the outside of the piece. I don't know if hollowing like that would be workable or not. You could make a third matching piece and mount it at the opposite end of a piece of plywood to balance the turning.

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Maybe even with another piece of ply at the tailstock end to stabilize the ends if needed, with a hole cut at the center to allow for the hollowing.

Possible?

-Kevin

wrote: If you turned the outside of a pair of matching pieces. Then take one

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Dear Legends: It's too late at night for me to wrap my mind around this. Maybe tomorrow when I'm wide awake (hopefully.)

One of my mentors turns "footed bowls" in 2 pieces..

He turns the foot/base and turns a recess for a tenon on it, then rough turns the actual bowl with the tenon.. He then assembles them on the lathe and finish turns them..

I'll post a picture on ABPW (called footed bowl)

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

Following up on the idea, I think the geometry of it is sound, I don't know about the practicality of trying to "hollow" on the outside like that, also they are only going to mate properly at exactly the right depth. I think you could use the counterweight turning to help with that though, by setting it slightly closer to the center. You would be test fitting the mating piece against that one first, and you'd basically get two shots at it. Whichever one didn't fit (or more likely both!) could be an interesting piece on its own right. Sort of a death star vase, if you will. Somebody somewhere has to have experimented with something like this.

That's one way of getting mating pieces. I would think with all the convoluted shapes possible with intersecting arcs and inside out turning, you could end up with surfaces that mate in other ways, as much by accident than by intention. Maybe they don't even "mate" but interrelate in other ways by occupying some of the negative spaces of the other.

-Kevin

Very nice, but not quite what I'm getting at. You still end up with something that looks like a single piece, or could have been made as a single piece. I'm lacking the right terminology to describe it, not so much 'mating' as interrelating. I guess at the point where you have two or more separate pieces you've crossed over into sculpture.

-Kevin

Some years back, Dale Nish wrote a book called Artistic Woodturning. In it are step by step photos of making some projects that sound like what you're getting at. Essentially, you make a normal bowl, but then cut it in half on the bandsaw right down the middle. You then glue up what was the top edge. Makes for some interestingly shaped bowls. The AAW site has some pretty interesting pieces too, for instance this:

S'later...

...Kevin

Malcolm Tibbitts uses the same sort of process. He comes up with some amazing stuff. Here are a few examples.

A while back I saw a website of a turner that made rustic looking rectangular vases and weed pots in groups of three. The tops were turned beautifully like the top of a bottle. Each of the three pieces could stands alone as a work of art. But what he did next made them a set.

Somehow he clamped all three pieces together and turned concentric circles. Each of the three pieces had only a portion of the circles. To see the complete circles the pieces had to be set side by side. The real neat things was that he did this process on all four sides so that you had four different ways to view them and still get unique circles.

I lost his web page.

Ted

this:

That is very cool. I'll put the book on my reading list.

-Kevin

Now we're talkin! Something I actually have a shot at doing this decade :)

-Kevin

Tried it on a small scale. I lack any hollowing tools, so it was pretty limited what I could do, but it's a proof of concept. It was going fine at the start, but was starting to chatter as I went on. All I could use was my scraper which just barely fit in there.

It was very freaky, as you can completely see the tool and the stock is just a blur around it, and then when you hit it chip just magically appears on the tool.

-Kevin