Finally finished

The engraving was done by another local turner and final assembly was done yesterday morning, not a moment too soon.
A quick sanding to remove some of the smoke residue and a quick coat of oil completed the job.











Assembly on this one was a bit easier, a coat of oil and placing the rods in the base. We thought about drilling holes in the sides of both masks for ribbon but eventually decided against it.












We also turned a heart shaped bowl for my neighbor's wife. I cut the heart shape before turning and the turned it as I would turn a square or natural edge bowl.

















Bottom view.


















Side view. It was left a little thicker than I would normally turn. There is a slight recurve on the wings to give it a bit more dynamic shape.

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Laser guided Pacman

I still need to make an actual jig to measure the bottom of bowls and hollow forms, in the meantime I used the laser from my hollowing system to temporarily locate the bottom of this hollow form.  When I get around to building the actual jig it will be carefully setup to measure exactly at center height.

The laser point was carefully aligned with the end of the cutting tip.  Where the laser falls on the outside of the piece should be where the inside bottom of the hollow form is.  Assuming that the cutter is bottomed out and is on the center line (I'm holding in place with one hand and taking the photo with the other) it looks like I have about 3/8" left in the bottom.  Just enough to finish it off and make a slight concave spot for it to sit on.

Next up was a sample for what I might want to do on a larger scale.  I saw a photo of a similar piece during Christian Burchard's spheres demo at the 2011 Desert Woodturning Roundup.

Turning a near perfect sphere is much harder than I initially thought.  I used Christian's technique and got pretty close but it's definitely not perfect but it was pretty close.

Can you guess how it was hollowed and how the groove was cut in the middle (or is it the other way around).  Also how was it held during these operation(s).  I'll reveal how I did it in a couple of days, after some guesses have been made.