Pierced Bud Vase: by Roy Wood

Fourteen years ago I was inspired by the charismatic Tobias Kaye, from Devon, to try involuted, (inside-out) turning.  As ever, I typically entered for the Indy 500 before I even knew where the brake pedal was, and opted for a flask shape incorporating a flower design in the bowl, so no surprise there! The joint owner of Wokingham tools, our local supplier, subsequently purchased the first vase. I had thought that the material used was olivewood, as it started out a light greenish yellow, but over time has changed to a dark reddish brown, so now I have my doubts.  This format fitted our recent Berkshire club competition, so I broke a longstanding preference, to never make two of anything and produced

Elaine's bud vase

The basic system is well known; Take four accurately squared lengths of high quality timber, clamp together and turn grooves to planned shape, revolve each piece through 180 degrees and glue up, turn exterior to pattern required. Easy-peasy, except that you have to turn the inside whilst it is on the outside which calls for some mental gymnastics. 

I made sketches to clarify the situation and realised that with the finished diameter known, and a rounded section achieved over the designated area, it was vital not to exceed the depth of the radius plus the wall thickness from the rounded surface. There is a ‘Get out of jail card’ here, in that leaving exterior flats will effectively increase the wall thickness if you slip up.

 

Initial stages: four pieces of wood marked and clamped

Having established a plan the first tricky part was achieving an accurate clean ninety-degree cut where the lower inside of the bowl began, as this remains visible and difficult to correct later. Not having acquired much in the way of tool skills, I cheated and used a fine-tooth saw for this operation. Cardboard templates of the flower were made and the top & bottom petal halves turned. By far the most challenging aspect of the whole project was to form the two, (to become sixteen), side petals. Two parallel cuts were made with a thin parting tool to leave the delicate, end grain, central partition. A special chisel was made for the left side petal from a bent masonry nail glued into a section of broom handle, while the similar right-hander was from an old screwdriver.

Great care, with constant measuring was needed to achieve the blind shape of the petals to approximately match the existing halves.

The saving grace of this operation is that the detail of the resulting grooves cannot easily be observed, and most certainly not criticised! This allows considerable re-shaping of the flower petals to be carried out once reassembled, glued and the outer shape completed.         

  

To enable the item to be truly functional, I purchased miniature test tubes from the local pharmacy, and drilled the requisite 15mm hole whilst holding the vase in a dovetail in the waste at the base.  The device of the extended diamond in the stem of Mark 1 was straightforward enough to cut but left me with a perilously thin wall which led to me opting out of this extravagance in the second version.  To finish, I sanded down to 1500 grit then used many coats of a conventional vehicle repair Acrylic Lacquer to obtain a high gloss.

Both final results are very pleasing to the eye and may have made me reconsider my previous, “ Making a second is boring”,  policy.