News RSS

This will be another piece that is about at the capacity my lathe can handle.  I roughed it out with the chainsaw and managed to get it mounted in the lathe. It is a very cool chunk of old “Rich Lighter” Ponderosa Pine from the same tree as my last piece.  I think the starting blank in the lathe weighed about 150lbs.  This hollow form vessel will have both crushed mineral inlay as well as solid mineral lapidary inlay when finished.  It will be in the neighborhood of 17” diameter x 22” tall I think.

After a very long 9 days of work on this piece it is finished!  I’m very happy with how it turned out as it was a challenging piece to turn and inlay.  It measures 18” diameter x 15.5” high with a 4.875” opening.  It has a CA finished buffed to 50,00 grit.  There are more photos in the hollow form vessel gallery on this site.

I’ve been hollowing the last couple of days.  There is a lot of volume to remove.  I’ve had to stop a couple times and do some inlay work to help stabilize the shell of the vessel as this old piece of wood has some defects that require inlay work to strengthen it so that I can get it successfully hollowed out.  The photo shows some of the specialty hollowing equipment I use.

I’ve settled on the basic shape and it shouldn’t change much.  Looks like it will be about 18.5” diameter and I’ll be starting the hollowing process next.  I still need to decide how much inlay and how many holes I will ultimately leave in the wall of the vessel.

It took some doing but I have the blank mounted in the lathe and have started rounding it out.  It was a little bit of a struggle to get it in place by myself as it weighs about 100 1lbs.  It’s always a little spooky when you first get that much mass spinning! 😅