One of the walnut turning blanks almost got thrown in the burn pile. The grain and color are nice but it had a knot surrounded on a couple sides with a gap and a bark inclusion. However, with all its faults it looked like it could be made into an interesting piece. I started by cleaning out all the loose bark and debris between the knot and the body of the blank. Second, using thin super glue the joint is soaked to lock the knot in place. That’s been done in the left photo. From there the gaps are filled with the turquoise/resin mix. Turning is done the same as the other pieces with the final result shown in the right photo.
The other blanks are turned to various different shapes following the same basic process as previously described. When done I had accumulated eleven different refrigerator magnet bodies shown below ready to be sprayed with lacquer.
The lathe turned Christmas ornament is next. It starts out with four pieces the same width and thickness. Length is determined by taking estimated overall length of ornament and adding about 4”. Below are the four pieces of cherry I will use as a prototype or “proof of concept” trial.
Gluing the pieces together with all edges flush or at least having the center point where all four pieces meet perfectly aligned is critical. I’ll go into detail as to why that’s important later. The turning process for making the ornament requires this glued blank to be turned then split into the original four pieces. To make the splitting apart process easier only a ¼” wide band at each end will get glued to hold them together for the initial turning. After applying the ¼” wide glue band at the ends the four pieces are end clamped with the grey clamp to keep them flush. The blue clamp provides downward pressure to keep the top and bottom joints flush. All of this has been done in the top photo. The bottom left photo shows the blue clamp removed and replaced with two clamps to provide even top to bottom clamping pressure. Last in the bottom right photo the end clamp is removed and two orange clamps are added to provide side to side clamping pressure.
Turning what will be the inside of the ornament is next. The top photo shows the blank mounted in the lathe and ready to go. The bottom photo shows the completed turning sanded and ready for the next step.
To split the blank into its four quarters a chisel and wood mallet are used. 
Here the top photo shows one of the split quarters. In it you can see where the piece was just glued at each end. The red circles are areas when the joint was split some wood from the adjacent piece stuck to this piece. Because the four pieces will be glued back together the faces have to be flat so these projections need to be removed. That’s accomplished by using a wood chisel to remove most of the material then clamping a piece of sandpaper to a flat surface and sanding the faces flat.
The pieces get glued back together with each of the pieces turned 180 degrees from where they were originally. This means the turned surface that was facing out now faces in. The chalk marked faces in the top photo show where the glue gets applied. The two below show what they will look like when glued up. The bottom photo shows the four quarters glued up into two halves.
Once the halves glue is cured the two of them can be glued together to make the turning blank. When the glue cures the point where all four pieces come together is marked. Using that point for mounting is critical because if it’s off the four outside faces will not be the same. From there the blank is put on the lathe as shown in the top photo. The actual turning went well for a while with the center part starting to emerge but then at the top I had a catch that broke the turning into the two pieces shown. Not exactly what I had envisioned when starting the turning but I did get some valuable information on the design and what to change next time to improve my chances of success.
Armed with what I learned in testing it was time to do a little 3D modeling to work out in detail how altering both the pieces dimensions and initial outside turning proportions impacted things. What started out to as a simple 3D design very soon snowballed into a real head scratcher that ate up about 10 hours of work spread over three days. It turns out that working with multiple curved intersecting surface taxes both the computer program as well as my brain. The top drawing shows some of the failed layouts and dead ends with the bottom drawing showing me enough detail I could proceed with a second attempt.
The second attempt starts with a larger turning blank made from maple. Where each of the four, square segments in the first attempt were about ¾” square and 6” long the new blank’s pieces are 1 ¼” square and 8 ¾” long. The cutting and assembly of the four-piece blank follows the same process as the test piece except that instead of gluing all four pieces together at once to form the turning blank I did it in two steps. First is to glue up two sets of quarter pieces to form two halves then glue those together to make the blank. Here in the top photo is the blank with the center turned. The big difference here is the depth of the cut. The thinnest part of the of the turning is a just under ¾” thick which is proportionally quite a bit deeper than the failed prototype. Everything went well until the turning uncovered a nasty little surprise deep in the blank shown in the bottom photo. There is a bark inclusion that I think runs most of the length through the blank even though it did not show up at all when making the blank and is something I will have to deal with.
Next Up – Turning the Christmas Ornaments
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