Turning a simple plate

Words and photos: Terry Martin

A woodturner with basic skills can easily turn a range of items suitable for home use, or as gifts for family and friends. For example, I have a number of flat wooden plates that we use every day for morning toast and snacks. Here I will show the basic steps so you can turn some for yourself.

Choice of wood

My wood of choice for plates is jacaranda. It is easily available because jacaranda trees don’t live long, so they are regularly felled. Jacaranda is easy to cut, stable, sands well, and doesn’t lose its nice creamy colour. When it is finished it is hard and durable. Some of my jacaranda plates are nearly 30 years old and have not deteriorated at all. If jacaranda is not available, local woodworkers will often know what is suitable.

I selected a piece of jacaranda that I cut about two years ago. The board was 270mm long, 220mm wide and 90mm thick. I cut it longer than the width to allow for any endgrain cracking. I had cut the wood through the pith and, for the purposes of this story, I marked some of the growth rings to show how they arced around the pith. With growth rings balanced like this the wood should be very stable. This is important because a plate is quite thin and if it is not stable it will tend to curl with changes in the ambient humidity.

Cutting on the bandsaw

1. Cutting the blank into two.

It is hard to imagine turning wood without owning a bandsaw. It can be done, but it means you are largely limited to using what other people have cut for you. First, I cut the board into two halves 44mm thick on my large bandsaw so I could turn a matching pair of plates (photo 1).

2. Scribing the blank.

Next I scribed the maximum diameter on each board with my dividers (photo 2).

3. Cutting out the blank.

After that it was quick work to cut each turning blank with a narrow blade in my small bandsaw (photo 3).

Mounting the blank

4. Drilling the hole with the sawtooth bit.

There are several ways to mount a plate like this on the lathe for initial turning, including a screw chuck, faceplate, vacuum chuck, and even between centres; but I chose to drill a hole with a 50mm sawtooth bit to allow me to hold it in expansion mode with my Vicmarc VM100 chuck standard jaws. Any screws or recesses should not penetrate to the wood that you need for the plate (photo 4).

Most beginners make their recesses far too deep, but I only needed enough for the chuck jaws to seat firmly against the base of the recess and for the shoulder to be deep enough so the surrounding wood didn’t split when I expanded the jaws. My recess was 8mm deep.

Turning the base

5. Using a pull cut to true the base.

With the blank on the lathe, I turned away the excess wood using a pull cut with the handle down. The long, thin shavings are evidence of a very efficient cut. This is because the wood is being sliced at a very acute angle (photo 5). If it’s more comfortable, you can use the more traditional cut and push the tool away from you into the wood. It will do the job, but I urge you to try the pull cut – but remember, you need to hold the handle down until it is almost vertical.

At this point I had to remove so much wood that I realised I had made a mistake – I should have cut the board into three blanks as there was enough for that. I had been a making a number of much larger pieces and didn’t downsize my thinking. I should have remembered the old rule: measure twice and cut once. Never mind, my compost bin loves the shavings.

6. Marking the outside diameter of the chuck jaws.

Once the base was flat, I marked the diameter of the 128mm chuck jaws for my VM 120 chuck. This is done by setting the chuck jaws so they are perfectly round, then using the dividers to transfer their outer diameter to the wood. When you do this, put downward pressure on the left leg of the dividers and don’t let the right leg touch the wood (photo 6).

The trick is to centre the hinge of the dividers in line with the centre of the spinning blank and eyeball the points so they are balanced each side of the centre. With practice, muscle memory will guide you and you won’t find yourself jabbing around trying to match the two points.

Cutting the recess

7. Undercutting the dovetail recess.

To create a dovetailed recess in the base, I used a pointed scraper with a point angle of 80°, which gives me a 10° undercut to accommodate the dovetailed jaws (photo 7). I only cut the recess 1.5mm deep. Again, many turners think that a much deeper recess will make the chuck hold more firmly, but this is deep enough.

8. The finished base.

When you are mounting the wood on the chuck, all you have to do is close the jaws slightly, firmly press the blank onto the chuck so the jaws seat on the bottom of the recess, then open the jaws and they will be in full contact with the entire diameter. Because of this, they will leave no indentations in the edge of the recess. I turned the area inside the base to the same depth, then added a few decorative grooves with the diamond point scraper (photo 8). The underside of the rim was left for after I remounted the blank.

Turning the rim

9. Undercutting the rim.

10. Using the round double bevel scraper on the underside.

Again, I used my favourite pull cut to undercut the rim (photo 9) To finish the concave line of the rim underside, I used a double bevel scraper (photo 10). This tool is commonly called a ‘negative rake scraper’, but I find that a very pretentious name that doesn’t clearly describe what it is. A scraper with two bevels is much the same as using a skew chisel as a scraper and it works very well, so I call it what it is – a double bevel scraper.

11. Reducing the whole piece to the rim level.

Once I was happy with the underside of the rim, I again used a pull cut to reduce the thickness of the whole plate (photo 11).

12. Final cuts for the top of the rim.

Next I cut inwards with the bevel rubbing to set the thickness of the rim, following the curve of the underside (photo 12). I sanded both sides of the rim and, in the process, rounded over the outside edges to give a soft feel for the hands.

Finishing the middle of the plate

 

13. Scraping the bottom.

After reducing the thickness with my gouge, I used a slightly rounded double bevel scraper to true it, taking very soft cuts and constantly checking with a small ruler for flatness (photo 13). You can see from this photo that the top bevel is much shorter than the bottom one. You only need to grind the bottom bevel to sharpen and the top bevel will cut just as well, no matter how short it is, so you only need to grind it infrequently.

14. A plate to enjoy using for many years.

I used a power sander to sand the whole piece, starting with 240 grit and finishing with 400, then a final rub along the grain with 000 steel wool (photo 14). The finished plate feels light, but strong, and once it has a few coats of oil, I can imagine a nicely buttered piece of multigrain bread on it.

Terry Martin is a wood artist and author who lives in Ipswich, Qld. Learn more at terrymartinwoodartist.com