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I spent 3 days hollowing and a day sanding and finishing the inside.  I needed to get that finished so that I could remove the steady rest once completely done with the interior, and then reinstall the tail stock on the lathe in order to support the piece on both ends for the exterior inlay and finishing.

I have the piece mounted back in the lathe with the steady rest and my deep hollowing tools in place.  It sure is nice to have the proper tooling for hollowing large deep vessels.  It makes it much safer with less wear and tear on the body.  Right now I’m running the lathe at about 250 RPM.  I’ll adjust that as needed as I get closer to the OD of the vessel and the velocity across the cutter increases.  Hollowing generally is at much lower speeds than working on the outside of the vessel.

This photo gives a good idea of the basic form the piece will take.  I have to do some preliminary inlay work in spots to get a smooth surface all the way round the circumference in the area the wheels on the steady rest will ride.  After I get that done and the steady rest mounted I can begin hollowing.  The hollowing on this large piece will take quite a while I think.

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.