Wooden Top (Catastrophe + Recovery) from Scrap

For my scrap challenge, I tried to make a wooden top (actually, I tried to make a few). I chose 3 pieces from the scrap bin, I knew I was going to laminate a couple pieces together so I chose two matching pieces and one center piece.

Before gluing them together, they needed to be cleaned up to get nice surfaces for gluing. I ran each piece through the thickness sander on both sides and ripped the cedar piece down to a smaller width.

I then glued the denser wood to the cedar. In retrospect, I wish I made the whole top from the denser wood.

Once mounted on the lathe, started to rough it round (after sharpening my roughing gouge) but then realized that this forgiving process of taking a squarish piece and making it round is really satisfying, so I got a couple people that were at the space to try it out. Instructed them on how to hold the tool and make passes at it. I love sharing the feeling of turning some wood.

I brought a couple parts down into small sections so I could mount the handle in the chuck. In retrospect, I wish I had just finished the top profile as-is with all this attached rather than try to part and re-mount in the chuck.

After parting the pieces off, this is where everything started to go wrong. Pieces were breaking because the small handles were supported in the chuck, but the handles are made of cedar (since that was the center wood). Things broke, etc. I finally jammed the majority of a broken top in-between the chuck and the dead center and turned very very lightly. After lots of failure (but a good time) I ended up with this:

I thew a stain on it (first one I found in the cabinet, wasn’t too picky), and this is the final result:

Unfortunately, I ran out of time so I ended up making some scrap from my scrap:

I had a good time and learned a few things…

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