Ginormous Platter-Part 1

tim's american beauty was made by robust tools America's premier lathe manufacturer quality hardened tool rests and live centers two robust built to turn wood enjoyed for a lifetime Thompson late tools welcome to a new level of professional wood turning tools made by a woodturner for wood Turner's I gotta say myself this is pretty impressive in it I don't turn big stuff very often but to show why I have such a large large lathe and also the capabilities of it I decided to do this and it's a platter and I actually did some marquetry in the center here and no I'm not a marquetry expert there's a kit I got that helped me build this whole thing which is really nice and the reason I put the marquetry in here is teak is a beautiful wood you can actually see some nice figure in it and some curliness but this just softly sets it off a little bit more just gives it that extra pop a little extra something so it's a really neat thing to do let me get this out of the way and I came about this because cook wood sent me some wood a while back and they sent these beautiful pieces of teak I never seen anything that large and that thick it's 2 inches thick and about 26 inches square and for the longest time I kept thinking well you know I can make something out of it but I'm have to cut it up and everything else like that and like I always tell you got a waste wood to make something really nice so this time I didn't want to waste any wood to make something nice so that's why we went big now the first thing we're gonna do is mark it up to find the center so I'm taking my long ruler all the way to the edge all the way to the edge down here and I want to be as accurate as possible because being careful with your measurements from this whole project is something they'll make this a lot easier on you to turn so there we have our first mark bring this one up here come in to that corner down there I'm trying to make sure I leave enough space there because the pencil lead is pretty thick so if I'm off 1/4 inch it won't kill me so anyway there we go that's our Center now I had to dig deep to find a compass that would draw a circle as big as I want and I found this in storage and I'm not even sure where I got it probably had an art store or something a long time ago but he used to use this to draw out where I was gonna cut a raw log to make bowls out of but the easiest way to do this is I'm just gonna Center this point and then slide this until I get to about a quarter inch away from the end there and then just to make sure I'm gonna swing it back this way another quarter inch oops I'm looking good there and looking good there why am I going a quarter inch from the edge because this would might have some cracks in there that I can't see on the grain because it's darkened they sealed it everything else like that so by cutting at least a quarter of an inch into all sides of this I'll be able to see the raw wood dude fresh exposed wood and I'll see if there's any cracks in there the other piece I did there were no crack so I'm really not worried about that on this because I think these both came from the same tree just about the same section as a matter of fact so that's the first circle I want on there the second circle is going to deal with my faceplate now my faceplate I won this at my woodturning Club in a drawing one time is 10 inches across so I want to take this and bring it in to where I'm only gonna do a 5 inch circle and actually I want to do just a little bit more than a 5 inch circle so let's see here just just a tick because what I want to do is draw a circle on here there's just slightly larger than the diameter of the faceplate that will help me Center it later so I'll bring this in like so draw again we've had a sharpie I could attach into this thing it'd be a lot darker there we go that looks a little large there my measurements off here yeah let's do that again okay yeah see when you measure twice draw once okay I did six inches let's bring that back to five that is why you watch me because now you know math is important kids stay in school also I don't have an eraser so we'll just live with that mark on there so now we're making a really cool design it throws one more time and I'll show you what I'm doing here there now it's just barely exposed on there so now I can Center this easily take that off that weighs about 10 pounds by the way this weighs 35 or 40 so we're gonna go to the bandsaw and the way I want to cut this is slowly and carefully as if that goes without saying right but the thing is I want to start cutting in from an edge and I want to cut all the way around and end up on edge and just exit out here and do it in squares or corners that way I don't do the whole thing at once this is too big to mess with to do that so turn the bandsaw and just feed it in slowly [Music] and I want to be very accurate I want to stay on that line as much as I can because when I mount this big thing up on the lathe the better I cut this the war less trouble I will have actually to get it round it out right so this is one of I'm and enjoy the process moment I love the fact that has such a big bandsaw table on here because it helps your footmarks work up there and support it well it's a you have a smaller bandsaw table you can actually get yourself an outrigger that sits here holds up that in they make them this is looking good I'm gonna ride on that line that's really good we took a drive a golf ball that's right okay now I'm coming up to the side here and I'm gonna exit out there we go and now I'm gonna move on to the next corner [Music] [Music] that's a fast diet now we're down to about 30 pounds one thing I want to do before I put the faceplate on is if you look at the aesthetics of this this is about a third you know I made a little bit bigger than the third room because I thought it balanced out well but I want to make this mark on the blank that's gonna be on the faceplate side because I'm actually gonna be turning from the backside of the lathe here in a little bit and if I have that mark on there it's gonna help me out a lot so I already had measured this out and so this would be the maximum width of the lip of the bowl right here the bowl the platter there we go so this is lip okay this is face plate so let's bring the face plate up now this like I said is a ginormous face plate and I don't know where I got it where it was bought from because I won in a raffle at my woodturning club like I said so but if you look on the internet I'm sure you get to find a big one if you decide to attack something like this and I want to make really really certain yeah I'm evenly spaced on this circle I drew around here that I have the same reveal all the way around cuz that'll make a big difference when I start turning now the screws I'm using here are whoops don't knock that or that thing's expensive sheet metal screws and you could use drywall screws except they're meant to go into something very soft drywall and they're brittle so you they could hold I've used them in the past a hole but the big thing is when you drill them into untappd wood the top the top will snap off and so great you put this whole thing in then you wind up with a screw body in there that you can't get out until you turn to that point and then that's kind of dangerous so what I'm gonna do is use these because they're case-hardened steel they're meant to go into metal so they got a lot of ink behind them and so I have this is a drill or with a ratcheting system so I've got it at the highest ratcheting but watch when I drill this in and you'll hear this sound when it goes in oops I want to go the outer edge because I want to do two important ones to anchor it in first here that's backwards let's do it forwards now hear that so that's telling me it went in nicely but did you see that shift it did so I'm gonna bring it back out because these are concave in here the holes that are drilled into my faceplate so that's why I want to do two right off the top you see how this the head wallows and goes down into there see that so it went in a little crooked and when it did it cinched it and pulled it to the side so that's why I want to do one here and I want to do one opposite so I'll realign this all back up and I think I'm good there let me look over here looks I'm wide there I think said take your time on this part because it makes a big difference when you get turning there we go now put this one in on this side that backwards again but the thing about the ratcheting is it stops you from over tightening the bit the screw when it goes in that looks good that looks good now more is better what I'm gonna do is you can see I did a lot of holes in this faceplate well I'm gonna try to fill as many up as I can and that way I can make sure I have a really good grip oh yeah I forgot to point out one little thing my face plates about a quarter inch thick when you go to end of the hole there make sure when you get your screws and they only go in about so deep right there so that's gonna be a quarter it's a good going that way if you put screws in too deep you'll have holes in the top of your platter not a good thing okay anyway so I've got about 20 of these to go over Q is good [Music] okay with faceplate we've now added 10 more pounds so we're back to 40 pounds again so threading this thing on can be quite a challenge one thing to make sure is that this is not wider than the throw of your lathe or you won't be able to put this on here but see I got a little room to spare this takes a bit to get this going now we were talking about what would you actually use this for well the first name we thought we'd give this was the mother-in-law dinner plate but didn't think they'd go across a real good but hey you know if there's a flood you can get on this and use it as a life raft or if you have a small child you can make it into a wading pool or if you know some rich people have big conference tables and things like that you can make it for a big table that's decorative and it's really beautiful it's meant to go into large spaces though that's for sure you could even make it into a wall hanging there we go and that's balanced really nicely look how that's spinning that's beautiful now one thing about this it's really critical is this has a lot of momentum once it gets spinning so when I stop the lathe the lathe has a break on it and it's gonna try to slow it down with the motor well when it does that this thing has so much momentum it can break the threads loose you know what's screwed on and start unwinding that's not such a good thing so I'm going to show you something over here they'll help us lock it down see this there's a shelf a better way of saying it on the spindle of my lathe right though you can see the threads are starting right there and this is flat the idea is see this right here that's an Allen wrench screw so when I tighten this back up that screw is gonna be over Neath the flat spots on the spindle and what I can do then is take an Allen wrench like so and tighten that down so I'm not tightening down on the threads and ruining the threads on my expensive lathe because you'd have to replace the whole shaft to get that fixed I'm tightening it down on flat spots that that lathe manufacturer a robust was kind enough to put in there so I could do this exact thing because I think they figured out people are gonna be crazy enough to do things this big on this light there we go now so when the brake engages this is screwed in so that's not going to wine and fall off on my foot or something now I've got my tool rest here we're getting ready to do the edge and you can see it's clearing nicely and there's not a lot of back-and-forth so we did a good job on the bandsaw didn't we hey pat on the back anyway okay put my goggles on for this no I'm not stopping there I'm putting on my face shield because when you were working with something this large if something catastrophic is going to happen it's probably at the beginning I've checked the wood to make sure there's no cracks in it so I'm feeling pretty secure about it and I've already turned its sister piece and it went well too but you always got to be safe and I'm gonna be using my large heavy bowl gouge for this because I need a lot of strength because that's a lot of wood coming down the other thing I've done is in my setup I have my my on off right here and then down here on the floor I'm actually gonna grab and put my automatic stop here that I can use with my foot just in case something really bad happens I can just step on that real fast and they'll shut things down now zero I'm taking it down as low as I can it's not exactly zero but it's close so there we go so that's barely spinning so I'm gonna pick the speed up I guarantee you we're probably not gonna go over 250 rpm this entire project so get going you'll find a little wobble at one point and I'm standing off to the side so something bad happens hopefully it won't hit me there's our wobble gonna come past that now Issy that's bad as fast as I want to go steady my camera there it's riding on the lathe and getting a real ride of itself so anyway I'm gonna come up here got my feet spread I'm gonna come across like so something this big this is going a lot of feet per second so you just want to take your time and go very slow and take very light cuts so I have the bevel aim in the direction I want to go it engages and then I'm just moving my weight to my left and you can feel the balancing so I'm going to come back and get a little board fight in there there we go you can still hear that little wobble wobble wobble that means I'm not quite rounded out so take one more pass but again it's something that's big take your time and go slow there we go now we're in completely solid wood and you can see I'm letting the tool feed itself I'm not rushing this process at all and I'm turning the edge first because I want to do it while I have a lot of thick wood on there because if you go back later and that's a rim they'll be really dangerous and it could blow the whole piece up so that looks good Oh watch this here turn this off it's trying to engage the brake okay now the brake let loose right and this is what you call freewheeling so it's just letting it roll down and come down to a stop on its own that's the point where this thing would unscrew if you didn't have those allen allen screws in there holding this on whoops I'm hitting just a little bit we're gonna move this out just a touch because the next cut I'm gonna make is gonna clean up the face of the wood here there we go and I'm gonna do a pull cut and the reason I want to clean up the face is it gives me a nice clean starting point for any other cuts or anything else I have to do like the foot which we're gonna do Nick's again I'm gonna turn the speed down again when I start this up because I don't want to start it up at the speed I was at cuz I'll jump around now you can bring it up bring a little more speed up again while I'm talking feet per second that's not moving real fast this is moving so fast it's burning my finger so that's why rpms don't always tell you how fast you should go something this big that's a lot of speed out here that's moving really fast it's like somebody walking here and somebody running flat out over here they're going in a circle so they're doing the same RPMs but one guy is working a lot harder so anyway I'm going to take the tool I'm gonna put it on to edge and we're just gonna do a pull cut and I like the pull cut for this because it gives you an easy way of clearing up the word without engaging a lot of the tip of the tool we might get a cat and I'm not after perfection I'm just trying to get rid of the bumpiness because the piece of wood is flapped but it's not tight enough you can see it's a little bit out of round so over the drying process the board itself will warp somewhat and one way to do is to is if you bring the tool in and then try something here I must stop it's real quick because you want to make sure you have enough tool rest when you do this slow down big boy there we go okay spring is out here you can see I'm scalloping this here it's flat now you can see how it looks so this was high this as low as I haven't gotten to that yeah I'll show you over here this is gonna be the most out around so it'll start her up again there we go if its way out around you can do this you can come in here and I'm going to take the tool it's making contact and I'll push it in until I get to solid wood like that and then come here and step my way in again a little bouncy but sometimes easier and trying to drag across all this so you can use either method you want to get this cleaned up so once I get this nice and flat then we're gonna start working on the foot of the [Music] [Music] now once we're done with the bottom we got to turn the top right well the faceplates coming off so how we're going to hold this we're gonna make a recessed tenon so we're gonna expand the Chuck jaws into a hole and I know that these take a 4 and 1/4 inch recess and I want to make this recess as close to the closed portion of the jaws as possible so I don't open them up too wide so what I've done is I mark the center on here and I've got my compass it'll just get the point in there and we'll mark it so that is 4 and 1/4 inches so now I'm going to take my parting tool and I'm gonna hollow that out a little bit and then test fit the jaws to make sure that I have the right sized tenon now I'm going to use a parting tool a matter of fact this is easy wood tools new parting tool so you can just replace that tip when you need to project like this the less sharpening I have to do the better it's because we're gonna be sharpening that bowl guides a lot so I'm just pushing it in straight and take a little bit of wood so what I'm going to do is just widen this hole out for deepen the holes to me then it becomes a whole cleaned out and I'll periodically test the fit of my Chuck in there to make sure that it's the right width and once I've done that then I'll start working on the foot here and then chain making the shape of the rest of the platter but this is very important step so make sure you take your time on this one also because again you're working with large wood there was large wood comes large consequences now I've got the recess done but I need to make the angle for the tenon on my jaws to expand into in other words it goes in like that it's a dovetail so I'm using my skew here and we're just gonna bring it in flap put the point in and go it in an angle and that right there gives us a good angle for that dovetail just slide this across and smooth that out because I really don't want to just stand right there at that intersection and I've gone ahead and smoothed out the bottom down here because I want this to be finished right before I turn it around you can also see over here I took a parting tool and I made the width of my foot because I want a foot to be wide enough that it can sit on a table and not tip over so all that's slowing down the next thing we're gonna do is get this out of the way and move it over here because we're gonna want to start work on the edge and lock that down nothing's hitting because what we're gonna do is we're gonna start shaping the profile of the platter and you can see this shape it's like a long gate and s on its side that's called an OG it's a really traditional shape but you can see what it does is it lifts it up there's only two inches thick but it looks like it's a lot taller because it lifts it up off the table that's the shape we want we just don't want to go straight across like a dinner plate so now we're back out to this edge where we got feet per seconds running so we're going to turn that down turn this on and bring up the speed and I'm simply gonna start wasting wood away I don't want to go ahead and make a giant hero cut on this because it's just too much momentum coming here so you won't be as safe as possible on this so we're just going to come in here and go like so and start removing the wood now this thing is so big this light has a lot of torque it has a 303 horsepower motor in it but this has a lot of torque too so slowing down the lathe a little bit but speed is important so I'm gonna pick it up a bit you'll watch it shake flip throwing button do the right on there we go it's shaking now we just went through it and it's pretty solid now now believe it or not that looks like a million miles an hour but it's only about 250 rpm but that's about as fast as you want to go on something this this but watch how this cuts now see it's a much nicer cut because the speed is helping you out and I'm not looking very hard on the tool right now because I'm letting the word dictate the speed of the speed basically wants to cut that fast now I'm not to sharpen a few times but that's okay because you would definitely want to keep your tools sharp for this process and see this is where that long wing comes in handy because you can make contacts there and cut a nice big swath now I'm going to switch the push cut once I get this done and we'll start shaping the LG and I'll show you how we do that veneer now I'm doing full full cuts and you can see the og shape is taking shape and do it a pull cut this way is nice but I do want to do push cut in a second just to do a final clean cut and so I'll sharpen my tool before I do that but you can see it's starting to get there I have a little bit of a thick lip yet I'm gonna Whittle that down a little bit and then we will sharpen and finish the shape now you can see the ripples in the wood that the pull cut causes and it pulls the grain out a little bit so that's why I want to do a push cut and the push cut is done with the bowl gouge bring down my face shield again just gonna bring it in here and make light contact and once I get the tip running I want it now it's cutting just gonna take a very fine layer off if you get any chatter just push down on the tool rest a little harder with the tool and that gets you a clean cut oops went out of it there we go so anyway I'm gonna go ahead and follow this curve around maybe one or two passes there now clean it up enough that leaves a pretty smooth surface because this is hardwood you don't want to spend too much time sandy hi I'm on this in now I've got to turn this side of the lip because if you look at this little circle right here that's the width of the jaws of the chuck I don't have this thing on my face doing and so that's not a lot of surface area my faceplate comes out to here so I have all that rigidity from the faceplate here so when I'm turning this thin edge right here it's gonna keep the vibration down it flipped it around and tried to do this edge it would flop a lot also put a lot of torque on that hold which might not hold I got 24 screws over here they're not gonna let go so they way I'm gonna take my parting tool first and I've got my on off over here okay something happens because this is unique unique angle for me now they take that parting tool in here and go for this mark remember that's the one I made that is the width of the lip that I wanted not that one that's the decorative one right there gonna bring this in and we're just going to part in about water than in a little relief cut there whoops so you got to be careful you go too far you'll catch a bit so that's what happens here and this is a lot of torques I'm gonna draw a trail this downward scrape a little there we go this is a carbide tip so it starts all the time there we go and part of the reason is I think I had my tool rest too high because I was setting it up for my bowl gouge beforehand and didn't think about that so that's why you watch me anyway now we're gonna start a pool cut again and come out here and we're gonna clean this up until it slowly starts to get flat again and in the shape that we're gonna make is gonna go in a bit just taper in a bit so it slopes down into the rest of the platter nice little effect that way I'm gonna keep pulling here it's the same cut we did on the outside of the ogee and you can see I'm not hearing any vibration in the wood that faceplate is doing exactly what it's supposed to do they go down a little bit to them on solid wood and I'm leaving about a quarter of an inch lip on here because aesthetically that looks pretty good on the other one as far as proportionately so whittle this down a little bit now all I'm gonna do is keep doing the pulse after I get the surface where I want it and then I'm gonna sand all this and we'll be ready to turn this whole thing around but once we do that on the next episode I'm going to show you how we're gonna do that part the face and the marquetry well into the next time keep turning back to work [Music] tim's american beauty was made by robust tools America's premier lathe manufacturer quality hardened tool rests and live centers two robust built to turn wood enjoyed for a lifetime Thompson late tools welcome to a new level of professional wood turning tools made by a woodturner for wood Turner's [Music]

Channel: Woodturning with Tim Yoder

Views: 33,205

Rating: 4.935389 out of 5

Keywords: woodturning with tim yoder, tim yoder, woodturning workshop, woodturning, woodworking, platter, giant platter, wood platter, big wood platter, popular woodworking magazine, thompson lathe tools, robust lathes

Id: UzzuWvdVH4o

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018