Thread: finish turning a dried bowl

Just to backtrack ...

To rechuck a rough-turned bowl at the green stage you can either cut a groove inside for your chuck to expand into, or leave a tenon inside to clamp on to, for when you come back to true it up.

So it's now dry and you mount it as per above. If it's a deep or wide bowl you will have checked to see if your setup will cope. If not, some comments below. So you now true the outside and foot. If you want to avoid faffing around with Longworths you can either cut a recess in the foot to re-rechuck (and keep the width and depth in mind from the beginning to safely do this) or dimension the foot to take a clamping chuck with or without jaw end marks.

Then you reverse the piece and finish hollowing the inside.

If you've clamped on the foot and left jaw marks, then you need Cole jaws or a Longworth to clean them up. But if you've dimensioned the foot so that the jaw ends haven't marked it, then you're done.

Another option to clean up a foot is to turn a mushroom with either a shank to fit your chuck or a MT taper to go straight into the spindle. Place some router mat over the mushroom and use it as a friction drive. (Useful for nat edge bowls). Important here is to plan it and leave a mark in the foot centre. You support the piece by bringing up the tailstock and locating the live centre point on your mark and off you go.

Leaves you the mark to clean up (off the lathe) so an alt. here is not to bother with the foot centre mark at all and do trial and error to centre it, and use something non-marking on the live centre (I use a hose tap fitting; 3/4" BSP at one end and click-fitting at the other; the wide end goes over the centre and the other is broad enough to support the piece without marking it.)

Minor error in centring can be turned/sanded out as you clean up and refine the foot. You can't tell by looking, usually.

An alt to a friction drive with a nat edge bowl is a vacuum chuck with an appropriate size diam tube.

I cut out a 15" diameter disk on the bandsaw, glued and coverd it with a a tacky shelving material, and bored a hole centered for the chuck to expand into to. The trued the tenon. Took off the disk, finished the bowl, then used the disk and tailstock to very carefully remove as much tenon as possible, removed last 1/4 inch with a very sharp chisel. Not the most pure way to do this, but until I get the router out and try a plexiglass setup, this will be great. Thanks.

Good thinking Daddy.

Another variant on a friction drive.