A new challenge in my short turning career; turning a plate from a thin blank.
I picked up this thin (~3.75cm) purpleheart blank in order to try turning something thinner than a usual bowl.
This required attaching a wasteblock from the scrap wood bin so that I could turn in a mortise for the chuck to fit into. I did a poor job centering the wasteblock, which meant a long, slow start bringing the blank into round and approximately 1cm of diameter lost as a result.
I chose a mortise over a tenon thinking primarily about the profile of the would be plate/dish, and I liked the idea of a clean and flush foot.
In practice however a mortise has a considerable impact on the thickness, as you have to have the thickness on the bottom to create the mortise walls but you cannot make a dish like this very thin as you will cut through the mortise and make a hole in the center of your piece. I hadn’t taken into account in my envisioning, and had I to do it over again I would make a tenon for certain.
I spent a good deal of time practicing my pull-cuts as I shaped the outside of the bowl, which was extremely effective in creating the shape i wanted with excellent control. The cuts we clean and smooth and minimized the tear out on the outside of the bowl to a point where sanding was able to clean it up.
However I would learn the hard way about how prone to chunky tear out along the grain purplehear wood can be. The dish originally has a much more raised lip, but a minor catch created a 5mm chunky tear out in the rim which forced a radical reduction if the lip.
In the end the dish came out very nicely, and while hard to captures, the purple grain has a wonderful chatoyance, catching the light nicely when rotated.
A quick video of the chatoyance! - pic.twitter.com/t7CT21lKlN
