In this photo the turning has started and the right end
of the blank has been brought down close to its finished size. There is just a little more to be removed so
the shadow line matches up with the pattern.
All of the turning here has been done with a fingernail ground spindle
gouge shown in the bottom photo.
Here the bulk of the turning is done with just the ends
holding the egg in the lathe to do. At
this point the tail stock gets pulled back out of the way so that the end can be
turned to its final size and sanded smooth.
The top photo shows after the tailstock had been pulled
back so the little nub/cone could be removed and after that nearly all the
finish sanding done. The bottom photo
has the tailstock brought back up against the egg but with a folded-up paper
towel added to provide a pad so the sanded end does not get scratched or
damaged. The tailstock is there to
provide a little support while the left end of the egg gets turned.
Once the shadow from the wood egg lines up with the
pattern on the shadow board the turning is complete except for a little bit on
the end. Rather than try to turn the egg
off and risking a chance of it hitting the lathe or floor it gets cut free
using a fine-toothed Japanese pull saw.
What little is left on the end is hand sanded to blend in.
The actual turning of the egg went pretty quick, probably around 45 minutes or so. I am sure if I made a bunch of them it would get a lot less. Since everything was set up I decided to make
two more eggs. In addition to the
already completed cherry egg one of them will be from a highly figured piece of
black walnut and the other will be from oak.
Here are the three completed eggs ready for finishing. The cherry in the center is the first
one. The walnut egg on the left ended up
just a tiny bit smaller as the blank wasn’t quite big enough in diameter to
match it to the center cherry one. The
one on the right is out of oak. Since
that blank was larger it could be bigger – how about calling it a goose
egg. To revise the original pattern I
just added a line about 1/8” larger than the original layout line and turned to
it.
Normally my finish of choice is lacquer but here that’s a problem because there is no good way to support the piece while the finish dries. The balls that I have made have a friction wax finish applied but that only works because the balls have a consistent diameter. That allows me to rotate them in the lathe about each of the X, Y and Z axis in a fixture to seamlessly blend the finish together. This is not the case with an egg so I went with a three coat Danish Oil Finish.
After the first coat the walnut and cherry eggs looked
great but the oak egg’s proportions looked wrong. At first, I couldn’t figure out why. I doubled checked it against the pattern
profile and it matched up just right.
For a day or so I couldn’t find a reason on why but then it dawned on
me. Because an egg is longer than it is
wide or pretty much an elliptical shape adding a fixed amount to the perimeter
distorts the length to diameter ratio making it look not quite right. The fix is to change the current length to
diameter ratio so it matches the original egg’s ratio. I could do that by putting it back in the
lathe and eyeball turning until it looks right or doing some math and laying
out a new pattern based on the original egg’s ratio. Since I already know from experience what
happens when I try to turn the shape by eye the mathematical method seemed to
be the way to go. That change was not a
lot, only about 1/16” needed to be taken off the radius or 1/8” off the total
diameter at the widest point. From there it's tapered toward the ends to blend in. To
see if my math was correct, I laid out the new pattern on the shadow board then
put the egg back in the lathe and turned it down to that line. After some hand sanding to blend things
together it ended up looking like the other two eggs. Here are all three eggs with the completed
Danish Oil Finish.
I have to say there is not really any functional use in
these turnings but it was a fun little project the does not take much material
and I had plenty of available scraps to use. Who knows if I get bored in the future I might try and turn more? Maybe even an ostrich egg.
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