As mentioned on the main page, I had acquired a modest number of mostly one-foot-long finished plank cut-offs from a neighbour who was trying to clean out his shed. It was a light-colored wood similar to but probably not in fact maple. The donated planks became something of a "what can you do with this wood" challenge and a while ago I had made a trivet for the kitchen. The trivet was pretty basic (although through the magic of over-design I was able to transform making a flat piece of wood into a waaay more complex project with lateral and vertical lamination).

I had in mind for some time to make a turned laminated piece, so that seemed like another reasonable application for the planks. The design of this one was inspired by some pieces by Virginia Dotson, who has done some sophisticated laminated turnings. I wanted the laminations to be obvious so that meant alternating the light wood with a darker layer. For the contrasting wood I used walnut veneer which I conveniently had left over from a previous project.

Here is a pile of the planks, although I needed only four of them for the bowl. The rightmost one has had the finish removed and so is rather cleaner looking, but even through the dirt you can see that there is a fair amount of board-board grain variation evident between the pieces.

The first step was to run the planks through the jointer to flatten one face and one edge, and then through the planer to remove the finish on the other side. After that, each piece was cut into four on the bandsaw like the sample shown here.

I selected planks that were at least twice as long as I needed so I could get eight laminations out of each piece. Here the four planks have been quartered and are being cut the long way.

The next step was to cut up some veneer. I had a couple pieces of walnut left over veneer from a previous project and one of them was exactly enough for what I needed. The veneer was only 20 mil thick (0.5 mm) so I just cut it using a utility knife. Off to the right is the pile of maple-or-whatever laminations waiting to buddy up with some walnut.

And here's the little pile of veneer pieces. They were cut a bit oversized compared to the laminations to avoid the need for precise alignment when gluing up.

This is the "you can never have too many clamps" shot. This isn't all the ones I own of course, just the shorter models.

I've learned over the years not to take too many shortcuts when gluing, especially with multiple pieces. So rather than one grand massive 64-surface glue-up (and how would you even coat that many surfaces without the glue drying?), I made a number of short assemblies that were then more calmly glued together with the appropriate offset.

And voilà - a perfectly glued blank if you don't care about making them even or having your nice alignment lines line up correctly. Strange things happen when I'm in a rush to clamp...

At any rate it worked out OK and this shot shows some sacrificial end pieces added to provide extra length for turning.

I needed to add a block to mount the piece to the lathe so to ensure a good glue joint and a square mount, I wanted a flat surface. In this setup the drill press is being used as a milling machine to flatten the bottom of the laminated stack.

The depth stop on the drill press was used at the "start" end rather than the normal "stop" end. The setting is used to hold the bit down a specific depth below the surface of the wood, and then the wood is moved manually under the bit to give a consistent surface.

The blank has had the sides trimmed in this shot and is ready for the other pieces to be added for turning.

For consistent turning I wanted a full circle of wood so that the cutting tool was supported all the way around the piece. I could have accomplished that by making a much larger laminated blank, but that would have just been wasted work. Instead I just added some solid wood pieces on the sides as this photo shows.

On the flattened face of the blank is glued a base used to mount the piece to the lathe. Here clamps are holding it while the glue sets.

The metal rod between the clamps was used to properly position the base so the turning center is in the middle of a lamination.

Finally the whole assembly is together, including the blue aluminum face plate. The piece has also been trimmed in a rough circle to make an easier start to the turning.

And here it is mounted on the lathe.

And at this stage, it has been rounded off and the face coarsely evened.

To help achieve the proper shape, here I have drilled a couple of depth-guide holes and the wood will be turned down until the holes disappear. Also evident in this shot is a crude sketch of the outline and a center hole drilled down to where I wanted the bottom of the bowl to be.

Here I'm using a home-made scraper (reground from a cheap chisel set) to shape inside of the bowl.

I'm pretty sure my hands are not that bright red color most of the time, so I'm going to blame the camera.

With the inside mostly done, here I've switched over to doing the outside. I've already started to remove wood as can be seen by the bevel on the laminated sections.

The more conventional process in bowl-turning is to shape the outside first and then cut the inside contour to match. Here I did it in the opposite order since it was the inside of the bowl that was the focal point, and I wanted to make sure the inside contour looked good.

I mostly used scrapers on the back since they had less tendency to catch on the wood. And for whatever reason, this particular turning geometry resulted in big fountains of shavings like those seen here.

Here is a photo of the shavings that came off the bottom side. There were cubic feet of these nice fluffy piles before I was done.

Using the inside of the bowl as a reference, the bottom was turned to get down to the desired wood thickness of about 0.2". I did a bit of cutting and then stopped and measured the thickness, working in from the edge of the bowl.

This shows the outside of the bowl with the shaping complete.

...and the inside is done too. There is some sanding to be done on the lathe to smooth the surface and remove the remaining tool marks.

As is usually the case, sanding on the lathe doesn't give as good a surface finish as I like, largely due to cross-grain scratches. So I spent a couple evenings doing hand sanding with the grain of the wood as shown here.

To ensure the base was cut exactly square to the bowl, I first trimmed away a bit of it on the lathe to make a square edge as a guide.

Then with a jig holding the face of the bowl vertical, I cut off the bulk of the base, leaving a bit of wood past the square edge that I had cut above. That wasn't the final base, so if the saw was out of square a bit, it didn't matter.

Finally, I used the belt sander to sand away the extra base material down to the square edge I had cut, resulting in the flat base shown here.

In retrospect it might have looked a bit more finished if I had turned a small lip into the base, but I failed to think of it at the time. My compensating strategy will be to avoid displaying it upside-down.

With the bottom cut I moved on to the top, marking it to the desired outline using the plan traced through carbon paper.

Then the shape was rather rudely cut out on the bandsaw (due to a thick blade that wasn't happy about cutting curved lines).

But after a bit of quality time with the indispensable belt sander, the outline started to look more respectable.

Further hand-sanding rounded the edge of the bowl.

My mom thought that I should be marking the woodworking projects that I had done, so I've usually been adding my intitials and the year as can almost be made out in this shot. I usually mill a shallow circular area and sign in ink before adding the finish.

And it's done except for the finishing.

The first coat of varnish has been added and is still wet in this photo. The varnish was mostly applied with a sponge brush, but some final touch-up was done using a cloth to apply an even thinner coat.

Done.