pattern for a bowl

Dan Parrell wrote: .(clip) I was going to stack and glue them together. Should all the grains run the same direction or does it matter . ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ There is a way to make a nice bowl our of a single piece. You cut the board into a number of concentric rings, with a circular piece in the middle. The cuts are made on a scross saw, at an angle, so that when the rings are restacked in reverse order, the smallest ring rests on top of the circular piece, and each successive ring rests on the smaller ring below. The angle is laid out in advance so that the rings overlap each other by enough to give you some wall thickness. Everything gets glued together, and the sides are cleaned up on the lathe.

I recommend placing the grain all in the same direction. If you use the method described above, this will lead to fairly good grain matching, so the seams do not show too much. Also, if the grain is crossed, any movement in the wood due to moisture changes will stress the glue joints, and could lead to problems down the road.

"Dan Parrell" wrote: is there a diagram for this ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ There probably is, somewhere, but I made my own. Draw some parallel lines,

1/2" apart, representing a stack of boards. In your case, lets suppose you are going to have 4 layers, so you will draw five lines, for a thickness of 2". Your bowl is going to be 2" tall and just under 6" in diameter. Sketch in sloping straight sides at about 45 degrees, say. This will make the bottom diameter 2". Play around with the wall thickness until the OD at the top of any ring lines up with the OD at the bottom of the ring above it.

This should become more clear after you start to lay it out. If you go for thinner walls, you can get more rings and a taller bowl, but the accuracy has to be better. If you are willing to settle for fewer rings (and a shallower bowl), you have more wall thickness to absorb any errors in sawing, gluing, etc. I would suggest, for a first try, don't try for a thin-walled, tall bowl.

Some of my first bowls were done this way because I didn't want to buy large pieces of nice wood, and risk ruining them. I still have a couple of these, and I consider them very nice. The main problem is that you don't have much leeway on the shape. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "Leo Lichtman wrote: (clip) cuts are made on a scross saw, (clip) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This should have said "scroll saw."

You could try the woodturner pro web site the software design pro has patterns in it. Therer is a demo version and you could see if this is the info you are looking for.