This is just a vessel with an intriguing looks, appearing to be made of wrapped-up material (hence the "wrap" name, of course). The most appropriate wood blank I had for this vessel was Black locust, a wood I hadn't used before. It has some of the open-pore look of oak and unfortunately had a bit of a tendency towards tear-out when getting turned but ultimately it worked out reasonably well.

I had a tall vessel in mind when I bought this turning blank more than 10 years ago. However in the intervening years I've managed to forget what the target vessel was, making it easier to justify using about half of it for this shorter vessel.

It always seems like a waste to use a large piece for something smaller as if the potential is wasted. I always have a tough time cutting say a 3' piece off an 8' 2x4 - I always check around for shorter pieces first. I like to think that's just down-to-earth practicality, but maybe I have some Scottish blood in here somewhere...

In order avoid wasting an extra inch or two of the Black Locust to hold faceplate screws (yah there's that "down-to-earth practicality again"), I glued on a few layers of plywood. I wasn't sure how strong the glue joint would be given that it was attaching to the end grain of the block, but I crossed my fingers and gave it a try.

In this shot, I'm screwing the blue aluminum faceplate to the already-glued-on plywood after carefully marking the center of the block.

The next step was to mount the blank to the lathe and start rounding it off. Here I'm using a large roughing gouge to remove the corners of the block.

Once things were round I marked reference lines every inch to aid in turning it to the correct shape.

I used a parting tool to cut down to the appropriate diameter at each guide line, with several stops in each spot to check the diameter against the plan.

Then using various gouges I cut off most of the extra wood between the reference diameter slots.

Finally I used a large scraper to join up the bottoms of the slots and smooth everything out.

The next stage was to hollow out the vessel. For that I needed to set up a steady rest to stabilize the end of the wood. Without it, the wood can vibrate and cause wave-like patterns to be cut into the surface.

Admittedly that's sort of a neat effect, but not what I'm going for here.

Hollowing is a slow process (especially near the center where the wood isn't moving very fast) so it helps to drill as large a hole as practical. I commenced the drilling operation with a 1-1/2" Forstner bit but that only went about 4" deep. I also use the hole as a guide to determine how deep to hollow the vessel so I switched to a longer but smaller bit and drilled exactly deep enough to leave a bottom of 0.2" thickness.

These days I use my captured hollowing jig where the green slot "captures" to tool to keep it level and prevent rotation.

The upper arm is equipped with an adjustable-angle laser which allows one to visualize the cutter location from the outside.

The actual cutter is the tiny carbide disc at the end of the tool. At this point I've just started to remove wood from the top of the vessel.

Unfortunately the torque from the cutter was enough to break the smallish plywood-to-Black Locust joint that was left after turning the bottom to size (which was still about about 1.25" diameter).

To add insult to injury, not only had my glue joint let go on part of the bottom, but the top ply of the plywood had broken free as well. Ok, maybe that wasn't such a good joint.

Just re-gluing the joint wasn't going to fly so I needed something more solid to hold the pieces together. I decided to make some contoured reinforcements and glue those in place to strengthen the joint.

Here I've already transferred the curve of the joint to a small piece of maple and shaped that, and in this shot it's being cut up into six individual buttresses.

Those buttresses were glued into place between the plywood and the Black Locust and then taped in place to dry.

Here the buttress glue is dry. I'll eventually need to cut them off along with the dried glue but that should be easy enough to do.

Then it was back to hollowing. Based on the laser dot position, I'm about half way down the vessel in this shot.

The hollowing jig doesn't take much effort; you can stand in a comfortable position and just guide the cutter as needed. With conventional hollowing tools, you need a very strong grip on the tool to prevent tilting and tool rotation and usually need to lean over to get the proper cutting angle. So the jig makes the turning much less labour-intensive.

After maybe an hour or two of hollowing, it was complete. This shot shows the inside from the open end.

The inside was further smoothed by sanding.

I use this tool which is made from a conventional hollowing tool that had been rendered obsolete by the captured hollowing jig. I replaced the cutter with a rounded end which gets sandpaper taped to it, letting it sand curved vessel interiors.

This photo shows the vessel with inside and outsides done. The next step will be to remove the reinforcing fins and that big plywood base.

To work on the bottom, the piece was pulled off the lathe and the faceplate removed. Then it was flipped end-for-end and remounted to the lathe.

The headstock end is held using a jam chuck, which is just that MDF disc with a slot cut into it with a diameter that tightly fits the top of the vessel.

I started by cutting away the fins.

Of course that removed the strength from that small joint and (as expected) the plywood sort of automatically fell off.

That was a problem since I still needed to form a foot on the bottom, meaning it had to be re-mounted to the lathe.

I cleaned the remaining plywood shards off the bottom and then glued on another smaller piece of wood to let me finish turning the bottom. This new joint wasn't any stronger than the original except that I was cutting close to the center and there was less torque as a consequence. I managed to finish the turning with the joint intact.

In this shot, I'm cutting away at the bottom to form a circular foot around the outside perimeter.

The extra glued-on piece of wood was just snapped off at its iffy glue joint, leaving this nub in the center to be removed.

Removal was accomplished using the Dremel with various grinding and sanding bits, starting with this coarse rasp bit.

The contour was pretty simple so I just drew in the outline by hand.

I was going to need some way to hold the vessel solidly to carve the exterior, but that's a bit tricky to do with a curved, tapered and hollow form. My approach was therefore to hold only the flat bottom in a large clamp, with a disc in the middle to remove any "wiggle room".

I turned a disc just the right size to fit about 1/3 of the way into the vessel, with a center hole that tightly fit a 1" dowel. This shot shows the dowel and disc assembly, plus a short dowel for the bottom and a couple pads of fake leather to prevent marring of the bottom.

Then with a pad in place the dowel was inserted into the vessel to contact the inside of the bottom while the disc contacted the sides. The short dowel and its pad were added on the outside of the bottom. The big clamp squeezed the vessel bottom between the two pieces of dowel to hold it solidly and was itself mounted in the bench vise. This worked really well, giving a solid mount for the vessel and making it easy to rotate as well, just by loosening off the clamp.

This is the beginning of the carving where I'm outlining the edge of the fold with a small gouge. The section to the right of the fold will need to be lowered about 1/8".

Before I got too far with the carving, I thought I'd do the top contour so that could be incorporated into the shaping. I used a Dremel "Multi-Max" tool (vibrating saw) to cut the top off.

The saw cuts were pretty crude so I improved the smoothness of the top edge using the belt sander.

This was followed by the stage shown here of starting to bevel the top edge, also on the sander.

Then it was back to shaping, using various chisels and gouges.

The oval holes are depth guides made with a Dremel equipped with a depth stop. But unfortunately for some reason the depths were incredibly inconsistent. Due to varying surface curvature? Not sure but that's a good techinque to remember to not use again.

Once the wood was lowered close to the edge of the wrap, I was able to use the spokeshave on the further-out areas since it made much more-even cuts.

The carved areas were smoothed out using a sanding block.

I thought I would do the inside shaping before completing the outside. The inside shaping is a bit more limited and only extends two or three inches down into the vessel before it fades out.

I started by using a small abrasive bit on a flex-shaft to define the edge of the wrap.

Larger bits were used to lower the level of the wood next to the edge of the wrap as was done on the outside. Here the foam-equipped sanding jig is being used to smooth out the carved-away area.

The edge of the vessel has a straight profile on the inside with a curve on the outside. For the portion "wrapped" inside to follow the same shape, it must be undercut. I tried files but they didn't work particularly well, so I decided I needed a dedicated tool.

This undercut tool was made from an old stainless steel spatula from which I had previously harvested most of the metal. But it had a convenient sticky-outy piece which I turned into a round-ended tapering-thickness toothed and curved blade. Which was maybe 15 minutes work despite all the qualifiers.

The tool let me reach inside the vessel and cut away at the bottom of the wrapped edge, with the geometry of the blade allowing it to be done at a suitable angle along the curved length of the edge. That undercut edge was then rounded using various tools including my thin spatula-based sander. Wow - I used the word "spatula" twice in a single non-cooking web page - what are the odds of that?

With the inside shaping done, it was time to get back to the outside. The basic shape was done but the edge of the wrap needed cleaning up and shaping. These shots show a few of the steps it took to get there.

In this photo the edge is mostly shaped and I'm finishing up the shaping with a flat-faced popsicle-stick-based sanding tool of (you guessed it) 120 grit.

This outside edge didn't need to be undercut like the one on the inside but the tool sharpened up the inside corner nicely.

The last bit was to add initials to the bottom so that the providence can be proved when it is sold for millions of Digibucks in the year 2252, after being found in a dusty translunar vehicle garage attic. Just planning ahead here.

That's it for the woodworking.

The vessel would receive my standard finish of three coats of varnish. Here I'm starting on the first coat.

And of course the traditional first-coat-of-varnish shot.

The varnish on the bottom inside was a bit heavy so I set up a small fan to get some air movement and help the drying along.

Done.

This little animation shows the vessel from all angles.