Another attempt, this time a piece of spalted beech that a friend gave me. He had roughed it to a cylinder a couple of years ago and then lost interest in turning and said that he was never going to finish it.
This time I decided that I was going to have a plan and see if I could follow it. I needed to take a fair bit of the wood off when I looked at it as some of the wood had gone from spalted to rotten (I figure any part that I can push my thumb into is not much use for turning). So when I got rid of the rotten bits it went from a 6" diameter blank to a 4.5" diameter. I looked at what I had left and came up with this:
What I had left said Vase to me, so I thought I would have a go. I am not brave enough to try any kind of hollow form, so it was going to be a quite wide necked vase. The final dimensions were to be 4.75" high and 4.25" in diameter at the widest point. Of course no plan survive first contact with the enemy.
The first thing I had to do was take it off of the drive centre and put it on the face plate (every time I try to do end grain hollowing on the chuck it just rips the wood out of the chuck, so now I go straight to the face plate and 1.5" screws). Of course once I put it on the face plate it was slightly out of true, so I had to rough it down to a cylinder again, which of course meant that the diameter was now only 4". Which of course meant that my nicely cut out templates were scrap paper as they were bigger than the available wood...
Oh well, I started to crack on with the hollowing and I was going to use the pattern as a guide only. The wood was horrible to cut. I am not sure if it was because it was spalted and very dry, but it just came out in chips and lumps and I found it really hard to get any kind of smooth finish. It did not help that with the size of the piece I could not get the rest angled into the area I was hollowing out, the underside of the rest would interfere with the rim of the vase if I tried. This meant that the tools were pretty much as far extended as I could get them, which meant that they chattered and bounced all over the place. So the inside is a bit of a dogs dinner I am afraid.
The outside was not too bad, although I am not that keen on the transition at the widest point, it is too sharp.
The base is about 1/2" narrower than I was planning as when I was undercutting the base to ensure that it was stable when it stood I got a catch which meant that I had to re-cut and refinish the lower inch of the vase. In doing so I could not get the two finished areas to blend very well.
Final dimensions 4.75" high and 3.5" in diameter. Finished with Shellac sanding sealer and clear Briwax.
All in all I think I will stay away from hollowing any deeper than a goblet until I have some more experience and some more appropriate tools.