Hi Boys and Girls,
This is my first post, so please be gentle.
I have just completed the Texas Tornado prototype. It is a bowl created from thin strips of wood laminated with plywood into a block, sliced into thin sheets, cut into rings, laminated onto a solid base, and topped with a segmented rim. I just barely completed some critical DMS steps one day before the shutdown (routed jigs on the CNC and cut the block into sheets).
Here are some progress pics:
The lamination block consists of 35 pieces of 1/4-3/16" thin 2" X 12-5/8" whitewood & western red cedar sandwiched with 3/4 plywood. The finished block is 2" X 12-5/8" X 12-5/8"
I cut the block into (6) 1/8’ thick slices and drilled holes to prep for cutting them into rings. I cut the rings using a circle cutting jig mounted on my scroll saw. The inside diameter of one ring becomes the outside diameter of the next ring::
I cut all the rings and stacked them. By twisting each ring, they form a tornado pattern.
I mounted a sacrificial piece of maple onto my lathe chuck and glued the base onto it with four sheets brown paper/titebond 3. The chuck weighs about 5 lbs., so I added a couple of 4 lbs weights instead of trying to clamp them. Here I’ve also glued the first four rings and rough turned the outside:
Here I’ve glued and rough turned up to ring 7. You can see the plywood is perilously chippy:
As the rings got bigger, I thought I needed more evenly distributed weight, so I added this monster of a 3 HP router and put the weights on the outside of the router table insert:
As the rings got larger, I used the disc sander mounted on the tail stock of my shopsmith to keep it flat, then after I glued all 40 rings I added a 12-segment rim made of western red cedar. If your unfamiliar with WRC, it is the cheap lumber commonly used for fence planks. I have an abundance of it left over from Intarsia projects:
I managed to get the outside rim roughed, but it didn’t take much of a catch on the inside rim to part the bowl between the base and ring 1. Fortunately, lathe projects turning at 1000 rpm or less, tend to fall downward instead of spinning airborne, so this bad boy took a couple of bounces across the garage floor after escaping the tool rest. Well, it is just a prototype, so WTF, over? It was a clean break, the cracks in the bowl were pretty limited, and the top rim split right at a couple of joints.
Some glue, a band clamp and lots of sanding and I managed to get it back on track. Here it is sanded and shaped, then I built a cardboard spray booth and applied multiple coats of Deft gloss lacquer.
After the Deft finish cured for five days, I rubbed it with micro-mesh pads and buffed it with polish. So here it is: 12" diameter, 6-3/4" tall, 3/8" wall thickness, weighing in at 1lb-4oz:
I move that this category hereby be renamed “show and tell all”
