Since I had a nice little pile of circular plywood scraps, the relative ease of making a turned vessel seemed attractive. The simplicity was relative to the irregular vessel that produced the scraps. That one took a significant amount of shaping and sanding so that even with power tools I needed to break the work up into 15-minute sessions since that was about as long as my wrist lasted holding the power sander. So this vessel gave me something easier to work on in parallel.

I started with these scraps. They were the centers of larger pieces and were all roundish in shape. They mostly had a hole on the edge used to insert the saw blade that cut them out. They varied in diameter and the vessel shape I chose would work with them stacked from smallest to largest.

Since it is very difficult to try to glue and clamp things on an angle, I left off the top and bottom caps and just stacked them in a staggered manner. When that staggered stack was tilted 15 degrees, it would look like the arrangement in the plan.

Here are the smallest three pieces being glued together. I did the gluing is sets of three to prevent having to correctly position a larger number while the clamps and glue made things slip around.

Plywood always has an odd number of layers with alternating grain direction, making the grain the same direction on top and bottom. In order to keep with the alternating grain, I gave each even-numbered piece a 90 degree rotation.

After enough sets of three were together, those were combined to form the full stack. In this shot they have been glued and are enjoying the attention of my deepest clamp.

Walnut caps were to go on the top and bottom so I started by cutting up a short 2"-thick plank to make a couple appropriately-sized pieces.

The end caps have been glued on in this shot. It is almost ready to turn except it needs a mounting piece on the bottom to give the faceplate somewhere to screw in to. The center line of the vessel has been drawn on and the ends will be cut at the appropriate angle so they are perpendicular to the axis for easier turning.

So here the ends have been trimmed and the mounting block glued on.

I marked the center of the vessel as accurately as possible (which was "not very" given the funky angle and the irregular surfaces) and mounted it on the lathe between the drive spur and live center.

I did some very rough shaping using the roughing gouge just to make the unruly assembly better balanced, and then cut the bottom end flat - this is important to have the faceplate mount at the correct angle (as opposed to the approximate angle I cut the end at).

After the bottom flattening, I pulled it off the lathe, screwed on the small blue faceplate and put it back on.

Then roughing gouge was used to cut off most of the excess. Here it is mostly round but still oversized everywhere.

I usually print a full-sized plan since that makes it easy to transfer measurements. Here I've drawn lines every couple of inches along the plan and measured the diameter at each line. Those diameters will be transferred to the wood to guide the shape.

This montage shows the shaping progress starting with the oversized piece with the lines transferred to it.








Then a parting tool was used to cut to the measured diameter at each line.









And this is the start of the excess wood being cut away, starting at the top.









Here it's mostly down to the desired diameters but still rather lumpy.







And finally after some finer work with scrapers the final shape is achieved.

So while the Baltic Birch plywood is better quality than the normal softwood version we might use to sheet our garage, it still has a few voids. Here is one of the larger ones out of a half-dozen or so.

Here the voids have been filled with bits of one of the plys from a matching piece of plywood. I cleaned out the voids to give them cleaner edges and to remove any loose material and then glued in an appropriately-sized piece with the right grain direction.

After the glue was dry, I cut the excess wood off the plugs and re-turned the outside to even it up.

On the closeup of the void above, it is apparent that the end grain of the plywood isn't very evenly cut. To fix that, I took off a small layer of wood using a very sharp scraper (sharpened every 5 seconds or so of cutting), which cut more cleanly. In this shot, the vessel has also been sanded, and the surface looks much smoother.

So with the outside done, it was on to the inside. The Steady Rest has been added to stabilize the wood since the tailstock no longer supports the end. Here I've also added a taped-on piece of hard plastic (melamine shelf edging to be specific) to avoid compression of the wood by the wheels.

In this shot I've already drilled a larger-but-shallower hole and am preparing to use the smaller-but-longer drill to go almost all the way to the bottom.

For hollowing, I used my captured hollowing jig that has a small cutter on the end. Here the first 1 or 2 inches have been hollowed.

And here the cutter is close to the bottom as shown by the position of laser spot that is rather dim-looking in this shot.

Once the hollowing was done, I sanded the inside using a tool modified to be a deep sonding jig. Here some double-sided tape is added to the rounded end in preparation for sticking on a small piece of sandpaper.

After the inside was done, I removed the steady rest and re-sanded the outside, mostly using a flat sanding block.

Then here is a shot of the mostly-complete vessel. The last step is to cut off the excess on the bottom and form a foot.

The faceplate has been removed and the vessel flipped around to better access the bottom. I'm using some rubber "buttons" at the drive end on a large set of jaws to hold the top of the vessel.

In this shot, the mounting block has been partially removed. That will be completed and the bottom hollowed a bit to form a foot flush with the outside of the vessel.

And that's all the woodwork complete - it just needs the finish added.

And voila! The finish is added.

Well, the first coat anyway. I used my favorite finish, which is a satin wipe-on polyurethane varnish, applied with a cloth-covered sponge brush (to get the convenience of the handled brush with the application surface of the cloth).

I usually apply three coats of the finish but polyurethane needs to be sanded between coats for proper adhesion. So after a coat is dry, I use extra-fine steel wool to scuff up the surface and then remove the varnish/steel wool dust in preparation for the next coat.

Here I'm using a little vacuum-extension brush to remove the bulk of the dust. That let me reach all the way inside to the bottom of the vessel.

As a final step the surface was wiped with a tack cloth to pick up any remaining bits of dust, and then the next coat of varnish is applied.

And it's done.