It takes balls. . .well. . .spheres

[Dave Mount]

About a year ago I turned a sphere for the first time. The motivation was our 30th wedding anniversary, the pearl anniversary. Pearls aren't really SWMBO's thing, and real pearls are too expensive to buy "just because." So, I decided to turn a pearl for her (first pic).

In a rush of experimentation, I roughed out a few other spheres from chunks of wood I had around the shop, but they weren't totally dry, so I roughed out the spheres, coated them with Anchorseal, and threw them in a corner of the shop. I hadn't thought much about them since then, but tonight I was kind of between projects and looking to fill some time, and I stumbled across that bag of roughed out spheres. Decided to finish a couple of them. Did the red oak one because it wasn't anything remarkable and I thought I better re-learn the technique on something I didn't care much about. Came out better than I expected, and the knot was kind of interesting. Then I did a sugar maple burl I cut off a firewood log. I generally don't do much smaller work -- I had saved the burl because I couldn't see not saving it, and when this sphere thing came along it seemed like something interesting to do with it.

First is curly silver maple (actually done a year ago), about 2.5", the next two the red oak sphere from this evening (about 3.5") and the maple burl is about 4". Some epoxy and ground coffee in the burl to fill some voids. Apologies for the glare.

I'll add that reconstituting dried out Shellawax is a nuisance.

Best,

Dave

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[Steve Eure]

Dave, did you use a jig or free hand them? Very uniform. Nice.

[Dave Mount]

I did them freehand, though if you follow the sequence of turning the work on the x, y, and z axes, it's not really hard to do. You just keep rotating the work, compression chucked between two cupped blocks, and cut away material until it turns true.

[John K Jordan]

Dave, did you use a jig or free hand them? Very uniform. Nice.

Maybe find a video by Mark StLeger turning spheres. In one demo he turns four spheres by hand using the 3-axis method and a short piece of PVC pipe as a gauge to judge the when they are spherical, turns all four the same diameter so they can stack like a pyramid on a corian base with a groove. They are precise enough that you can give the top sphere a spin with the hand and the whole pyramid spins. The set he gave me several years ago still spins perfectly.

Dave, nice job on the spheres! (and good idea about the "pearls") What tools do you use? My buddy Jake turns spheres now with a skew he ground from a 3/8" round HSS rod. I made one but haven't tried spheres with it yet.

JKJ

[Dave Mount]

I used a 1/2" Thompson spindle gouge for roughing them out. I used to use it start to finish, but last night I used a Thompson fluteless gouge for the finishing cuts and it worked very well. I bought it a few years ago to finish the bottom of bowls after seeing Reed Gray's video on them. Over time that job passed to a 5/8" U flute bowl gouge with a fairly blunt grind and the fluteless gouge saw little use. Turning the spheres I was having a little trouble digging in with the spindle gouge on the bouncy surface while truing the spheres. Something made me think of that fluteless gouge and I pulled it out. It worked really well, easy to keep the bevel on the bouncy bits, takes a nice shearing cut. And, on a convex surface, it's almost impossible to dig in.

In reality, using a fluteless gouge is not much different than grinding a skew from round stock; the fluteless gouge is basically a skew ground from half round stock...