Balancing Natural Edge Bowls Questions and Answere The Pen ...

Making a Sphere in a Cubeby Fred HolderWhen we visited the Vicmarc factory in September2006, we were introduced to two Australian Woodworkingmagazines, which we subscribed to upon returninghome. In issue Number 65 of Australian Wood Reviewthere was a photo of two cubes with spheres inside thatwere made by John McBrinn from camphor laurel andredgum. Mildred said, “You can make me one of those.”I thought it sounded interesting, but didn’t have anyidea how to make it.The ball was much rounder, but my sanding was notacceptable.Figure 1. Photo of the two cubes with sphereinside made by John McBrinn and published inIssue #65 of Australian Wood Review.My first attempt was a total failure. I thoughtmaybe I could start with a sphere and use the ChineseBall tools to cut a loose sphere inside a sphere. I wouldthen convert the sphere into a cube. That didn’t work,so I cast aside that idea.The next attempt, I made a tool from an old woodchisel, I think it was a 1-1/2” wide inexpensive chiselfrom Harbor Freight. I decided the sphere should be inthe neighborhood of 2-1/2” in diameter for the 3-5/8”cubes of maple that I could come up with from a verydry board. I decided to hold the block in my Nova TitanChuck, which has 5 inch jaws. I had previously madesome wooden inserts to assist in holding a cube. Thisone was not a complete failure, but the ball was not veryround and the wood had some cracks in it. I gave it toMildred and she said that is a good start.My third attempt was a bit better, but I was stillnot very happy with it. My fourth attempt was quite abit better and was made on my Vicmarc VL-100 evslathe. My finish on that one turned out to be a disaster.Figure 2. This photo shows my fifth attempt thatthis story is about. Is it perfect, no, but it is thebest that I’ve come up with to date.I finally decided to make at least one more and photographthe process. The following set of photographsillustrate the process and the captions describe what Iwas doing. I’m not sure I’ll attempt to make anotherone of these, but I challenge my readers to give this atry and perhaps document what they did differently thatwould make this project a bit easier to accomplish.Figure 3. This photo shows the basic items used tomake this project.[Continued on Next Page]Page 33 More Woodturning June 2010