Woodturning Yew Wormhole Hollow Form

Welcome back to my shop. It hasn't been long since you've last been with me here. If you remember my last project this is mark number two. A second attempt at the same idea with a little bit of a design difference. Also I'm going to be working on a larger piece so hopefully it will keep up with being thin a little bit better and I'm changing the technique of how I'm doing everything. Right now this large piece of U which I've cut off one of the logs that I had is connected to the chuck using the wormwood screw. The idea is that I will shape it and then I will be able to flip it and reattach it to the screw on the other side and that should be better. I'm saying should because I'm not sure so we'll see how that goes and if needs be the last pieces of disconnecting the central piece I will do by hand. If you haven't seen my last video and don't know what I'm talking about I'm going to put a link to the video probably somewhere here or maybe here at the top there's going to be like a card thing that will help you go back to the other video. Okay let's start rounding this up to something resembling a round and take it from there. I don't know if you can see this you probably can there's some spalting in here which I wasn't expecting but there's also some spalting in here that's really nice. I hope that some of that will transfer to the shape itself now I'm going to just use my parting tool to flatten out both sides as far as I can go with this side and obviously this side all the way up to my support. If you remember this is my other piece so it's wider and I left it quite thick in the middle but I'm going to make it just I think about less than half than this width at the middle and it's going to be much more pronounced the curve. Okay so it's pretty much the shape that I want from here to here and I like the curve I took a little bit of time to make it a little bit curvier and as equal as I can do it by eye I'm not going by millimeters here. Welcome back and I completely finished sanding the inside of this piece. I sanded it up to 240 and then I used Yorkshire grit to give it this nice waxy shine. Well this just happened. Sadly I have a small piece missing here but I do have a lot of shavings and I think I might be able to glue this back up and use shavings to fill in the missing piece. I'm going to pick up some shavings and I'm going to mulch them into the finest powder I can and I'm going to introduce this powder to the crack so give it a little bit of CA and I'm going to finish up the edge with a little bit of sandpaper instead of with a tool. I'm just sitting here and thinking how the hell am I going to moving on. I'm going to try to reverse mount this in this hole and yeah it's going to be interesting. Let's see if this will work at all. Okay so this is unscrewed. Let me give you a closer look if I can actually get it to focus. There is a crack that formed here right in the middle of the form but we're moving on. I'm just going to try and chuck this and see what happens. Yeah I'm already feeling it. I'm not liking it. It's cracking the little spigot that I've made. Yeah we're just going to go and push through it because why not? What do we have to lose? Let me show you. So this is the spigot that I've left inside and if I get something like this then you can see that it's cracked. So that's not going to hold so so well. Well since I got nothing else to do with this we're going to try and use the cold chalk. The cold jaws on my chuck. So let's replace these jaws with the cold chalk. Obviously I got this knob here. This would have to go between it. What if I grab it like this and I press the... So guys as luck would have it these touch or barely touching the wood in the back and the little knob that was left from the other side is pinched between the jaws. So if I give it a little bit more of a squeeze not only will the knob or the whatever it is would be clutched between the sides of the jaws inside the chuck this would also... I hope the rubber thingies, plungers, will grab a little bit of the wood. So let's try that. Let's see how it looks spinning. That's not half bad. Well guys I think that's pretty much the best that I could do under the circumstances. So since I got nothing else to do right now let's try and turn this. What say you? So guys what did we learn? First of all the first thing I've learned about making this project and something that someone clued me in on Facebook a little bit after I've started is that U is famously prone to cracks. So trying to turn U very thin results in cracks and as you can see that is exactly what happened. I got a few cracks going along the thing. I'm gonna call it a thing now. So one of it was large and we were able to glue it back. Some of them are smaller and not very pronounced but still it was a good example and a very good let's call it exercise in turning using different tools and techniques. As you can see I got a little bit sloppy at the end with the sanding. Not on this side that is coming up now but on the other side. There is a little bit of you can see some rings left from the tool but overall I think this really shows up a couple of things. First that something like this can be done relatively easy and with the simple tools that most of us have in our shops. And the next thing is that don't turn too thin when you're using wood that isn't really good for it. And the last thing is that I want to thank you for joining me in this week's project and in this set of two videos. Check out my previous video to see what I've tried to do before and I hope to see you back in my shop really soon.