Turning An Inlay Tray or Platter Without Vacuum Chuck
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For this project I drew inspiration from a demonstration at the Rocky Mounting Woodturning Symposium and combined it with a monthly club challenge. The symposium demonstration by John Giem inlaid solid wood into solid wood for a coaster. I took away several ideas that I wanted to try.
However, John used a vacuum chuck. I chose to avoid a vacuum chuck and see if I could accomplish the same project.
The primary wood is two layers of cherry with internal cross banding with veneer. However, I did not laminate the base wood until the inlay work was complete. This enabled me to avoid issued with drill points going too far. I inlaid disks of walnut, mahogany, bloodwood, apple, and padauk. After the main platter was completed, I made a segmented ring to serve as a rim.
This tray is eleven inches diameter and about 1 inch tall, finished with wipe-on poly.
Enjoy.
Alan,
Brandon forwarded your email to me, I followed your link and wound up at your website with your inlay comments and video. Thanks for the favorable recognition and comments. I don’t remember for sure that during my demonstration about making the coasters by mounting a disk on a faceplate and using double sided tape to hold the coaster on the large disk. By unmounting the coaster and then remounting it using the template, the offsets can easily be achieved. I originally planned on showing that method also during the demonstration but discovered that time would not permit it.
You mentioned that you have a vacuum system but challenged yourself to make your platter without it. A few years ago, I obtained a nice of burl that would make an interesting bowl, but I did not want to destroy the interesting exterior by using the conventional method of making a tenon. I was able to use my vacuum system to accomplish the turning of the bowl without damaging any of the exterior with screws or hot melt glue. Since you seem to have inventive mind, how would you do it? After you think about it a bit, you might want to go to the AAW website and look in the American Woodturner for my articles on vacuum chucking. In particular, the article on using a compliant vacuum chuck. Keep up the good work. John Giem
John, I found your article on vacuum chuck testing and one earlier. However I did not find the article on compliant. Could you give a reference?
Off the top of my head, one alternative to a vacuum chuck could be a variant on a doughnut chuck. But I would like to see your compliant article.
Alan