Our demonstrator for the evening, Clif Poodry, likes to warm up with a "simple" piece. Tonight he's starting with a small goblet. It's always a great feeling when the chips start flying...
After defining the outside shape of the "cup", Clif hollows the goblet with a small scraper...
...then he starts to form the stem and base.
Working on the fine details on the evolving stem.
Parting off with a thin (1/16") parting tool...
...nice catch!
The final goblet form, about 4" tall.
Save your small, lidded glass jars. As a gift item, Clif makes decorative wooden jar tops that fit snugly over the original metal screw tops.
Here he puts the wood in the chuck and hollows it out to accept the jar's metal top. The top of the top can be completed on a jam chuck.
Clif sizes the interior of the lid to get a tight fit on the metal jar top. A little epoxy makes it permanent.
Here is a textured (by Sorby tool), decorative lid on a baby food jar (filled with holiday M&M's).
Off-center detail on another baby food jar lid. Cool. How'd he do that?
Here's how... The key is a jam chuck with an attached rectangular block glued on that can be grabbed between the chuck jaws in an arbitrarily offset position. This may be the best tip of the evening.
Clif gave some general instruction on box making, and discussed forming a tenon adjacent to the line separating the lid and bottom of a box.
He also explained how he uses a scraper to hollow out small boxes.
Here's an example of the general shape Clif is shooting for tonight. Note that the "step" is actually a tenon will be parted off and fit inside the hollowed base with the surface slopes matching.
Clif does not make his small boxes in the traditional way. First he turns the finial. Then he parts it off, completes the underside, and then hollows the base and completes its bottom. Here, the beginning of a ring holder is rough turning the starting blank...
...refining the basic shape...
...comparing the turning with the model...
...and adding detail to the finial (with a detail gouge). Every one is unique.
He turns here on the finial with a skew chisel in his left hand, using his right thumb as a pivot point, while supportig the finial with the fingers of his right hand as he turns it.
Working down the base of the finial to make the base of he top match the adjacent slope of the top of the box body, and to form the tenon in between that will drop into in the hole in the hollowed body of the box so the top is flush, and the box looks like one solid piece of wood when the lid is in place
Forming the tenon and parting off the top with a thin parting tool...
...and as seen from another angle. The base is then hollowed, much as the goblet was, before it is parted off and reversed to complete the its bottom.
Another valuable trick we learned from Clif is to mount the parted-off finial top in a collet chuck, backwards!
Clif finishes the inside center of his finial lids with a little "surprise" gem. A completed finial is seen here in the collet chuck. Very interestingly, the top lies inside the lathe spindle for finish turing of its inside bottom -- including the depression for the central cabochon that is already shown in place.
A bag of as-yet unusued cabochons.
For demonstration purposes, here's how a finished ring holder finial/box top looks in the collet chuck -- held tightly by the 4-jaw scroll chuck.
Here is another example of one of Clif's ring holder designs. This is a box -- the ring can fit either on the finial or inside the box, depending on the desires of the user. Note how the tenon fits flush, down into the hollow ball, and the slope of the top matches the slope of the adjacent body at the joint.
Examples of some of his previously-made, off-center collet chucks for making off-center finials.
An example of a ring-holder box with an off-center finial. Thanks for a great show, Clif. Nice work. The number of useful tips in your demonstration was very high -- lots of food for thought and experimentation.
