Some problems with my first vase

but I love turning vases with holes in them! For example, I turned a black wallnut crotch a couple months ago. The top of the vase was at the crotch. This resulted in some interesting bark inclusions that when I hollowed broke out leaving bark lined holes in the vase. The outside of the base has sapwood, bark, and dark heart wood.

hmm... May I need to patent it.. rofl

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

You're just gonna have to break down and buy one of those flex LED setups for your gouges..

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

I have a laser rig. I love it. I can hollow faster. I know my thickness and only cut through the wood when I want to.

I spend more time with the shape of my vase and less time worrying about hollowing.

PS a good compressor works great for removing shavings and dust from the inside.

I understand sears has come out with some kind of computer controlled router rig. It is a bit expensive but imagine the decorations you could do on a vase

I've hollowed a couple dozen vases (for some reason, I tend to like them better than bowls, YMMV), and what I've found works pretty well is a lathe tool spin-off of the forsner bit idea. I've got a smaller round-nose scraper (about 1/2" x 3/16") that I set directly in the center, and use like an auger bit to get to my depth. That effectively "drills" a hole with a slightly concave bottom that I can work down to with other tools, and there is no nub to remove at the end. The other suggestion you've already gotten about levering the tool up into the nub works well also, but that is what I do with bowls, not vases, as there is more room to work.

I had a rough time with this as well for quite a while, and tried all sorts of things to get sandpaper in there. What I found was that a combination of two scrapers gives me the best results. For the sides, I ground a scraper out of used M2 punch tooling (basically just a 1/2" round piece of HSS) with a profile similar to the end of a butterknife, and slid it into the end of a 4' piece of black pipe. The cutting edge is a little different than you might imagine, and I confess I stumbled on it by accident- rather than being relieved on the bottom, it is actually a slightly convex angle (about 93-95 degress when looking from the edge.) I use it freehand (without a tool rest) and let the bevel ride slightly below the center line. If you move smoothly at the waist, you can get a really, really smooth inside face with this method.

The bottom is done with a regular fingernail-profile scraper. the only thing that will help you blend the intersection between where the two tools is practice, but once you get it, it will be plenty smooth for the inside of a vase.

The way I handle it is to turn from wet to finished in one session- I can see the arguments for the turn-dry-turn method when it comes to bowls, even though I don't do that myself, but with something like a vase, every little distortion is magnified signifigantly in proportion to it's length. You do risk distortion in the finished vase by finishing from green wood, but that's not always a bad thing. The big trick is to avoid getting the lip around the top too thin, which will allow cracks to start and travel down the length of the piece (in the case of end-grain vases, at least)

If you really feel that you need to dry before doing the final finishing, and I'm certainly not going to tell you that there is anything wrong with that, I would remount the dried vase between centers before trying to stick it in the chuck. Hopefully, you have a spur center mark in the foot from your original roughing before you put it in the chuck to use a a reference, and on the open end, you'd need to turn a cone that you can stick into the mouth of the vase to have something to press the tailstock against.

Once you have it between centers, it should be pretty easy and straightforward to true up the foot and the the rest of the vase with good support in place before remounting it in the chuck. Doing it that way would not only be safer, but will preserve more of the wood, if that is what you're trying to accomplish.

Nah.. not the laser... I know that's a great way to know the depth and wall thickness...

I can't find the damn link, but this is an LED light with flex neck and battery pack, designed to attach to your chisel and light the bottom of the piece as you work on it, as in finishing the bottom, etc... Sort of a miners lamp for your lathe tools.. lol

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing