I usually gather images of an item I intend to make. These often have an interesting pattern/shape/finish and are used as design inspiration but sometimes they are just something I'd be happy replicating. In this case I had a few dozen examples and refreshed that with a few more but an older image of a tapered wastebasket looked the best to my eyes.

In addition to the shape, I liked what looked like fine vertical laminations. An image search revealed that this was a Bamboo wastebasket so the laminations were sort of part of the manufacturing process, and something that is necessary to make any larger Bamboo woodwork. The Walnut color isn't usually a feature of Bamboo but I hear stains are a thing.

I decided to replicate the design in shape, color and construction although I would use Cherry rather than Bamboo. The original seemed to have upwards of 100 layers around the circumference but I didn't think the look would suffer much from a more modest number and aimed for 72. And, er...missed; it ended up with 80.

The first thing I needed to find out was whether I could even cut the staves well enough with the equipment I had. They needed to be tapered in two dimensions with shallow angles and have straight and flat-enough surfaces to be able to laminate them together cleanly. The only good choice was the radial arm saw so I started setting that up to check out what it could do.

At the time of this photo, I'm fairly far along in the process. I've cut 5 or 6 test staves and the quality and size look like they should be acceptable. For consistent cuts I've added a stop with a removable section and clamped it the appropriate distance and angle to get the end-to-end taper I need.

On the left is a piece of Cherry I'm using for the test staves.

I wanted to use as much as possible of each Cherry piece while losing as few fingers as possible so I decided the Cherry would need to be clamped in place so it didn't have to be hand-held.

I had already added a clamp reaching over the short fence at the back and here I'm adding another for the front of the board.

Like the one on the right side of the photo, these are simple hold-downs consisting of a screw threaded into the saw table along with a wooden toggle that gets tightened down with a threaded knob.

This shot shows the complete setup. The spacer to the right of the Cherry piece is set in place while the Cherry is snuggled up to it and the clamps are tightened, then the spacer is removed before the cut is made. This allows the cut piece to fall away from the blade on the return stroke to prevent marring.

...like that.

The blade is set to a shallow angle to cut the radial sides of each stave. Once a stave is cut off, the Cherry piece is flipped end-for-end so the next piece is correctly angled.

This shows a slightly-speeded-up sequence of cutting a couple staves. There were over 70 to do so I had plenty of opportunity for videos...

Once I proved to my satisfaction that I could accurately cut the staves, I was ready to do it for real. And then eventually stick them all together.

My calculations suggested that I'd need a width of about 27" of cherry at 11" long. This pile (after subtracting ugly edges and the odd knot) should be just about enough.

I started by planing all the boards to around 0.8" thick.

To avoid handling too many thin pieces as the cuts narrowed the boards, I glued some 11"-long sections together side-to-side so I could work with fewer but wider boards. Fortunately I had enough wood that I didn't need to use any of the staves that had the glued joint in them.

And then I started cutting staves.

It didn't take too long until I had enough for the whole body, plus a few spares just in case.

Mind you, I did need to stop and empty the duct collector since more than a quarter of the wood was turned into sawdust.

I used masking tape and later a more-sticky binding tape (the lighter-green stuff) to hold together four groups of 18 staves. Then those four were assembled into a full circle.

The diameter looked kind of small and the ruler agreed. I'm not sure what exactly happened since the staves seemed to be the correct size but ultimately both top and bottom diameters were about 0.6" smaller than I was aiming for.

It doesn't sound like much but the proportions definitely looked off (not helped by the fact that there I'd left an extra inch of height as well).

After some fiddling with the drawing I decided the best solution was to just insert some extra staves periodically to move the diameter out to what I wanted. Using non-tapered staves would increase both top and bottom diameters by the same amount which was exactly what was needed. As a bonus, the straight-sided staves should be pretty easy to make.

That ends up putting some "ripple" in the surfaces but they will be smoothed on the lathe anyway so that was a non-issue.

I reconfigured the radial arm saw back to normal which meant it cut vertically and square and then cut the 8 straight staves needed plus a spare. I cut them a bit oversized and then planed them down to the desired thickness.

In this photo I'm adding the staves to the planer sled.

They went in every 9th stave.

The wastebasket body was opened up by strategically removing tape and then I started somewhere in the middle with the gluing.

I glued the body in groups of 10 or so staves then let those dry before gluing more.

The glued and re-taped body went onto the lathe between the chucks and I stretched a rubber strap (half of an old bike tire inner tube) around to apply radial pressure to the glued joints.

I had actually bought a length of rubber surgical tubing for this purpose thinking it would be just the thing. Unfortunately it stubbornly rolled down the slope no matter how tight I wrapped it. It even did that after I cut it open in a futile effort to get it to lie flat. The inner tube had no such problem.

The rubber strap was clamped at the end to hold the tension while the glue dried. This photo was taken after the 112th Grey Cup, which you may have heard, the Riders won.

It was a bit early for 2025 Grey Cup merchandise so I modified my 1989 shirt as a stand-in.

After a couple days of gluing it was able to stand on its own without the assistance of green tape.

The wastebasket at this point was just an empty tube but it needs a bottom and a bunch of smoothing out and shaping on all surfaces and ends. The plan called for the bottom to be inset so I needed a way to hold the top so the bottom could be accessed. I also wanted to ensure that it was turned radially again so I needed to be careful with the centering at both ends.

The approach I took was to add a temporary "cover" at the top that could be attached to a faceplate for turning. But I also wanted the bottom stable and securely centered so I ended up adding a temporary floor as well, an inch or so above where the actual bottom would sit.

The temporary floor started out as a plywood disc. After cutting, it was rounded and the edges tapered on the belt and disc sanders to nicely wedge into the interior.

Like that.

It was glued into place and will be cut out once its work is done.

I also needed a piece to act as a cover, so a larger disc was cut out and sanded in the same manner.

The cover is equipped with a faceplate to allow turning of the wastebasket for the first phase of the lathe work.

The glued body wasn't quite round so I used the sander to modify the cover to roughly match the interior for better wood-to-wood contact. In this shot I'm checking the fit before doing more sanding.

I needed the cover to go into the body at just the right angle so the gluing was done on the lathe. I started by applying a generous amount of glue to the cover edge.

Then with the tailstock centered and pushing on the temporary floor, the body was mated to the cover.

This shows the tailstock pushing on the temporary bottom. Just ignore the fact that the body is spinning in this shot...

The wastebasket body is hollow so it was going to need a proper bottom. There were a few considerations:
1. The bottom should be inset into the walls for an integrated fit;
2. I didn't want seasonal expansion/contraction of the bottom to force the body apart;
3. There ultimately needs to be a circular foot integrated into the bottom, and
4. I need to turn the body from the bottom without wrecking the bottom.

Eventually after abandoning any simple approaches, I came up with one of my custom way-too-many-steps plans;
1. Use the inset temporary floor and cover faceplate to allow access to the bottom to turn an appropriate inset
2. Use plywood (made from Cherry) for the floor so seasonal expansion is minimized
3. Add a thicker layer to the bottom that will eventually be removed except for the foot portion, and
4. Glue a disc to the foot layer to hold a faceplate for turning. It will all be removed with most of the foot layer at the end.
5. Whew!

Step 1 was already in place so the next thing was to make a plywood floor.

I rather arbitrarily decided on a 5 layer plywood with about 1/16"-thick plys, all of which I managed to get out of this one piece of Cherry. They were cut extra-thick and would be further smoothed and thicknessed on the drum sander.

The 5 plys (plus a spare) were run through the drum sander numerous times to get both sides flat and smooth, ending up at around 0.063" thick.

Lamination time!

I used a slow-set epoxy to give me enough time to spread it on four surfaces and set up the clamping. I aimed for 0.004"-thick epoxy layers which worked out to about 7 ml of epoxy required and here I'm pouring the hardener into the resin before giving it a good stir.

The epoxy was spread evenly between each layer with a small notched spreader that I whipped up for previous work.

Each cherry ply is laid with the grain at right angles to the one before, which is what gives the plywood strength in all directions and the reluctance to expand with humidity changes.

The stack of 5 glued plys was clamped - firmly - between flat surfaces until the epoxy set.

This shot shows the resulting plywood which is about 5/16" thick, complete with some epoxy smears on the surface due to fumbling during the clamping operation. A bit of sanding will get rid of those.

Steps 3 and 4 above describe adding a thicker layer to the bottom to provide material for a turned foot plus adding a disc for mounting a faceplate.

Both of those are shown in this photo; they have been glued on to the 5-ply bottom piece and a barely-in-the-shot clamp is holding things together until the glue sets.

Upon drying of the wood glue, a faceplate was added and the base was cut roundish on the band saw and then made perfectly round through the good offices of this large scraper in combination with the magic of circular symmetry.

The wastebasket body then was moved to the lathe and attached using the large faceplate on the glued-in cover. The first step was to shorten the bottom end of the staves by half an inch or so to hit the target 10" height.

Then it was a matter of cutting a slot at the base that matched the diameter of the bottom.

Once a close fit was achieved, the bottom went back on the lathe and its edges received a generous coating of glue.

...and then the body was mated with the bottom, the other end being centered to ensure "squareness".

We have now arrived at stage Whew! where the wastebasket is finally ready for some shaping.

To measure diameters of this largish piece, I broke out the Big Calipers.

I used my standard technique of cutting periodic slots to the target diameters.

...and then the extra wood between the bases of the slots was removed, mostly with this roughing gouge.

Once the first crude outside shaping was done I thought I'd better do a bit of inside work.

I cut through the cover and floor plywood discs to release any stresses they may be adding. I then did a rough rounding of the inside to improve the balance.

The outside could then be shaped and sanded with this photo showing the first round.

When it was done I wasn't very satisfied with the finish (due to some chipped areas) so I took off a bit more wood and re-sanded.

With the outside shaping done, I switched to thinning the walls from the inside.

The green ring around the vessel is a strip of taped-on plastic that prevents the stabilizing wheels from indenting the wood.

This is a shot of the hollowing setup with the captured hollowing jig and a laser spot showing cutter position.

I mostly used this tiny carbide cutter to do the inside turning. Here I'm checking the position of the laser dot using the little black jig.

The carbide cutter works well but the small size (or maybe me using the small size) leaves a pretty rough surface.

To smooth things out, I would switch to a much wider cutter and take a light pass over the walls as a finishing step.

And then the inside was sanded. I started with a coarse grit on a rounded form and spun the vessel to level out the most egregious bumps.

Sanding around the diameter as above leaves fairly obvious scratch marks since the sanding direction is across the grain.

So then all those scratches needed to be removed by sanding with the grain direction using increasingly-fine grits.

That was a couple days worth of sanding and let me tell you my right arm was very happy when it was done.

The last bit was shaping the bottom.

I cut a slot to form a jam chuck to fit the top and then put the wastebasket in place with the tailstock pressing on the bottom to hold it firmly.

Bottom shaping was started by transforming most of the faceplate disc into sawdust.

Then the bottom was shaped; The edges were left thick to form a foot while the center area was removed down to the plywood.

This shows the finished bottom after some sanding. That center bit just has to be removed.

Once it was off the lathe and most of the bottom nub was sawn off, the remains were ground down using an abrasive bit on a Dremel rotary tool.

That was followed up with some Dremel-sanding-disc work which smoothed off the grinding remnants and then hand sanding did the final smoothing.

That's pretty much it for the woodworking. The last bit was to add initials and the year to the bottom.

The varnishing was pretty straightforward. I used three coats of Minwax Fast-Dry Poly in Satin finish (or technically "Warm Satin" since a recent re-branding).

As usual, the color popped out nicely with the application of the varnish.

Done

Looking in.

Downside up.