I made a bowl out of white oak and it turned out pretty plain.  Not ugly, just plain.  As I was turning it down, it kept getting thinner and thinner, because of how much the blank had warped as it dried, so the end result was about a quarter of an inch thick.  Nice size for a finished project, but that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room to add grooves, inlays, or some kind of texturing to lessen the “plain-ness”.  I thought about coloring the whole thing, but my experience with oak said that’s probably not a real good idea.  I decided to cut the top of the bowl off, make a ring of some other kind of wood to fit in the cut, then put it all back together again.  I’ve done it before, and it’s actually a pretty simple process.

That’s where accidents happen:  right at the point you decide what you’re doing is easy, doesn’t require a whole lot of planning, and will only take a minute to accomplish.

When I put the bowl against the resaw fence on the bandsaw to cut the top off, I didn’t really check the bandsaw to make sure it was “set”.  I had been messing around with some angles for a segmented project I’m thinking of and had moved the table off zero degrees, so the table had a slight tilt.  On top of that, I didn’t check the blade guides, and the blade was pushed off-center to one side.  When I started cutting the bowl, the two issues seemed to magnify each other, and there was a horrible “drift” in the cut that was made.  Instead of making a cut that was parallel to the top of the bowl, I ended with a horrible, wonky cut that isn’t even a straight line because the blade drifted so bad.  The line was so wavy, a segmented piece with any thickness at all won’t make contact with the bowl when it was glued back together, so I decided to use some very thin veneer to make the ring.  That was flexible enough to bend to the wonky cut, but how do you clamp it all back together?  Since it was cut on a angle, the pressure from standard clamps just caused the pieces to slide off each other.  I tried using CA glue to glue scrap wood to the bowl to keep it from sliding, but the scrap wood either broke loose or left a gap, so that wasn’t any help.  I ended up using a couple of strap clamps to  get everything to hold and it actually worked out pretty well! Next time, I need to be able to control the cut, and need to use more strap clamps to make sure the pressure on the veneer is consistent.

The end result didn’t turn out too bad!  I wonder what it would look like if there were multiple offset rings cut into the bowl?  hum…  Suddenly need to go to the shop and look for bowl blanks that are ready to be turned…