The "use up the scraps" impetus for this vessel put some constraints on it including of course the material, the diameter and since it made sense to use most or all of the scraps, the height. I had found the look of the body of the original vessel a bit bland so for this one I added some walnut layers to spice it up a bit, and of course the big wedge. I ended up chosing an odd shape for this vessel, thinking that might make the profile of the insert look a bit more interesting. I'm not sure that quite panned out, but at least it's a bit different looking than most of my other efforts.

And yes, once again I've made a vessel using maple and walnut. But given that the main feature is the big intruding wedge, that became the nomenclature for this vessel.

In making the original maple wastebasket vessel, the centers were cut out of each of the layers which produced the pile of irregular discs seen here.

This was done by drilling a 1/4" hole, inserting a jigsaw blade and cutting in a circle. As a result these are mostly roundish with a little bite on one edge. There were 19 of these, all 0.4" thick.

I figured out the usable diameter of each piece by finding the largest circle that would fit inside the hole on the edge, and marked the center of that circle.

I made a list of the diameters to make sure I had enough of sufficient size. Ultimately, the thin neck of the shape I chose meant that I had no shortage of adequately-sized pieces.

For the darker layers, my plan was to use a walnut veneer which was about 0.02" thick.

I failed to think of any clever way to cut variable-sized circles out of veneer sheets, so instead they were just manually cut into octagons using a razor knife, ruler and grim persistence.

A couple of the discs had imperfect surfaces which may have resulted in an inconsistent-thickness glue joint, so instead of using those I cut out small circles from the good parts of the wood for the top two layers.

This is the pile of walnut layers alongside the maple layers (including a thicker one for the bottom).

The little montage below shows most of the stacking-and-gluing stages. In each case, a metal rod is inserted through the center holes to keep the discs aligned while gluing. The pieces at the top of each pile are just used to distribute the clamping pressure.

Since perfect symmetry and flatness is hardly to be expected after clamping and gluing 40 or so layers, the blank was mounted on the lathe so the bottom could be flattened.

This created a flat and perpendicular mating surface for the wood screwed to the faceplate and would ensure the vessel was correctly aligned to the turning axis.

Then after the blank was glued to the disc of maple on the blue faceplate, it was ready to start turning.

Before starting the outside turning, I redrilled the end to a 1" diameter to have a centered hole to be used when cutting the vessel later on.

Shaping went pretty quickly using the bowl gouge seen here. In this shot it is already mostly done and the bottom profile is just being adjusted a bit more.

It was shaped a bit oversize to have room to make adjustments when re-turned later. I left the bottom half-inch or so to be done after the vessel was swapped end-for-end because there would be more room to work on it.

These are typical of the shavings coming off when using the bowl gouge. These had shot a couple feet over to land on the drill press table.

This is where I stopped with the shaping.

My plan was to cut a wedge shape out of the vessel using the bandsaw but to ensure that the saw cut close to the desired line, I would need to handhold the vessel to direct it. The cut wouldn't be very clean or accurate, but the belt sander would be used to smooth and straighten the faces.

That meant that I needed to mark the cut lines on the vessel. Given the irregular shape, a laser line seemed like the ideal guide. Here a laser has been mounted pointing down on a tripod above the vessel and I'm tracing the laser line with a pencil to mark one of the cut lines.

This photo shows the vessel with the wedge to be cut out marked on it. I used some jig pieces from a previous slice & fill project to hold the vessel. The left holder includes plywood extending under the largest part of the vessel to provide a bit more support after the first cut has been made.

In this photo the bandsaw blade is partway through the first cut. Handholding the piece gives a wigglier cut, but it lets me compensate for any blade wander. I was aiming to cut about 1mm inside the pencil line.

With the top piece cut off you can see the interesting character of the saw cut with the left side of the cut burned and the right side looking fine. This blade obviously has problems, although I'll sheepishly admit I made both my critical cuts before replacing it.

In my defense I'll note that I left enough extra wood to sand off all the problem areas before getting to the planned size.

And then the second cut was made which removed the wedge-shaped section, sitting on the right side in this shot (with the metal rod stuck in it's center hole as a handle of convenience).

I started cleaning up the two cut faces using the belt sander. Since both pieces were wider than the belt, I kept them moving from side to side to ensure even wood removal across the full face.

I needed to not only clean up the faces, but to sand them down to the marked lines. Sanding a large area is pretty slow, so I eased the center sections to help things along.

This small carbide cutter was used to grind off a bit of wood in the middle areas of both faces.

This is the look of the bottom piece after the center was eased. The face (i.e the important bits around the edge) still needs some sanding, which will also get rid of the burned section at the bottom.

With the vessel now having a big wedge-shaped gap, it was time to make something to fill the hole.

I grabbed some "eight quarters" maple and cut off a generous chunk on the radial arm saw.

The bottom and one edge were jointed to get them flat and at right angles. This would be cut into a wedge freehand on the bandsaw so I added a square piece of wood that would hold it vertical and also act as a handle.

The handle was held on with window-film tape and was plenty strong - I had trouble getting the handle off when I was done.

And then like the cuts on the vessel proper, it was sawn just a bit away from the line.

And also like the vessel, the face was evened up and sanded to the marked line on the belt sander.

On the back of the sander is a duct for the 600 CFM dust collection system removing sawdust from the bottom and back of the belt, so the sanding is mostly dust-free despite a fair amount of wood being removed.

After the handle was removed, the location of the center hole for the guide rod was marked and the drilled out. I wanted some adjustability so I made a slot rather than just a round hole.

Next up was to add the veneer to the wedge. I made a temporary gluing jig out of some scraps including the cut-off part of the wedge.

The photo caption pretty much says it all.

So who decided to screw with the "from-to" thing? It used to be: "pedestrian accidents increased from 3 in 2017 to 5 in 2018". But for the last few years, it's the wrong way around; "pedestrian accidents increased to 5 in 2018 from 3 in 2017". That's like saying "the river flows to East from West": Wrong wrong wrong. And it seems to be everywhere in any kind of professional writing like newspapers, journals etc. Maybe there was an international agreement signed by all the english speaking world to mess with our minds. The world is obviously going to pot...

Then it was time to look at putting it all together.

Once again the laser was deployed, this time using it to align matching layers in the top and bottom pieces while just sitting on the bench. I fine-tuned the wedge position and did some touch-up sanding on the top until things aligned correctly.

I started by adding the wedge to the bottom piece. Positioning was critical so to make sure it would stay in place when glued, I drilled a couple 1/4" holes and added dowels to lock it in place.

Those will disappear along with the rest of the interior wood when the vessel is hollowed.

Then it was: glue and clamp.

To add the top, the metal guide rod went in to align the centerlines of the two pieces. With a layer of glue, the top was set in place and a few clamps applied. The slope of the wedge made the rotation of the top automatically align with the bottom.

And here is the slightly-odd looking result of the assembly.

I didn't want to try to put the horribly unbalanced thing directly on the lathe, so the bulk of the wedge protrusions were trimmed off with bandsaw and belt sander, leaving this shape, vaguely reminiscent of a fungus on a tree trunk.

I used the bowl gouge to trim off the protruding bits. It was kept very sharp and I took only light cuts to try to prevent tear-out of end-grain portions of the wedge.

With only small parts of the wood protruding on the spinning vessel, it created sort of a ghost image when seen from the side. This is sometimes handy in that the profile of the ghost shows the cutting progress.

In this case, I'm cutting down the slope and the you can see where the cutter is lowering the height of the wood.

This shows the vessel with the wedge cut flush with the rest of the wood. The top and bottom pieces were of course not quite perfectly aligned, so the top has been recut to recenter everything.

One characteristic of a vessel made with stacked slices of wood is that as you go around the vessel the wood grain changes from side to end grain. Side grain usually cuts neatly but end grain often has tear-out where little chunks can break off since the ends of the wood fibers are being cut and at some angles they have little side support.

This vessel worked out pretty well, but there are visible patches like the lighter-toned section along the top edge that are imperfectly cut end grain. These are rough to the touch and usually need to be sanded out so they don't create a visible patch of different wood texture.

It usually takes a lot of sanding before the last end-grain patch disappears and by then most other scratches are sanded out.

I started with 120 grit and when the end-grain patches were no longer visible, went through 150, 180, 220 and 320 grit to produce the finish seen in this shot.

To set up for hollowing I moved away the tailstock and installed the steady rest. I used a small plastic ring (cut from a central-vac pipe) as a shield for the wood, taped on with liberal amounts of green masking tape.

On the end covering the hole was still the little piece of 1/4" plwoood that had been stuck on with a latex adhesive I use as a temporary glue. This shot shows it being pried off with a little dental spatula so the hollowing can start. Any glue left on the surface can just be rubbed off with a finger.

The captured hollowing jig was set up and this is a shot along its main shaft, holding the tiny cutter right next to the hole in the vessel.

Hollowing went a bit slowly due to the wide section of the vessel, but that was eventually done, let's say, well enough. I didn't worry much about consistent wall thickness since the inside of the vessel couldn't be seen without an endoscope.

Unfortunately, I had a couple problems with tool control causing some cracks near the mouth of the vessel, and then the cutting head spun and trashed the interior and the first couple layers. This shot shows the aftermath.

The tool has a set screw holding the cutter shaft on a flat section, but the flat section was not in the correct spot. Not sure why this was never a problem before. At any rate, a minute with a file and the problem was corrected. Which just left the vessel to deal with.

The only real way to solve the problem was to replace layers. I wanted to fix the inside gouges as well so I decided to replace the top five layers.

This shot shows a new piece of maple, already planed to the appropriate thickness with the five layer circles marked.

The circles were cut out on a small bandsaw.

And like before, the walnut veneer was marked and cut with a ruler and knife into octagons. Those and the maple discs were drilled with 1/2" holes.

Then they were all stacked with a guide rod in the center, glued and clamped to make the new end for the vessel.

The end layers were cut off (only four here since the first already crumbled away).

This is the shortened vessel. I removed the last layer of walnut as well before adding the new piece.

The new piece was clamped on by using the tailstock to push it against the vessel.

Then a bit more work with the bowl gouge and the outside profile was restored.

Next was to hollow the new section which was done with care to prevent a reoccurrence of my earlier issues.

The interior was sanded, primarily in the neck where the wood was visible. I used a small curved sanding head on this rather long turning tool.

This shows the completed top section. Now it needs to be flipped around to address the bottom shaping.

The faceplate was pulled off in preparation for removing the extra bottom wood.

I made a small jam chuck to hold the top, which simply consists of a piece of wood with a hole into which the top fits tightly.

I actually failed in the "tightly" part; the procedure is to expand the hole diameter until it is just right but I expanded it a bit too much on the last go and then it was too large. But no big deal, that's what they make masking tape for.

So the vessel was mounted on the lathe as shown, making the bottom end easier to access for turning.

Turning tools cut a large volume of wood so they need to be sharpened frequently. Here I'm sharpening my favorite bowl gouge on the abrasive wheel, using a jig that controls the grinding angle.

Here the large-diameter sections on the bottom are being removed. After that, the bottom foot will be cut, the underside profile blended in, and then small scrapers will be used to shape the section right on the bottom.

The bottom shaping is done and here I'm doing some final sanding on areas that had been altered.

The next step after removing from the lathe will be to cut off the center wood section, and then grind and sand that area smooth to complete the vessel.

That was it for the woodworking. This photo shows the finished vessel.

Varnishing was a bit of a challenge. Instead of trying to "paint" the varnish on the largely invisible interior, I poured enough varnish in, slooshed it around, poured it out, then stuffed in a cloth to sop up any excess. The outside coat was applied with a rather more conventional brush-based approach.

Since the finish on my last vessel (much more open than this one) had some trouble drying inside, I rigged up a little hose-based blower to get some air flow inside to help things along a bit.

A shot of the completed wedge vessel.