Having not used a lathe since I was in High School ( many years ago ) I decided to just get a cheap second hand one and give it a go.
One of the main thing I had been wanting to do was turn some pens for people for xmas presents and the like. So I started off with pen turning and then I discovered segmented turning. Instead of making a bowl from a large and costly bowl blank I could create a patterend bowl from small pieces of wood glued together.
The first item I made this way was a three wood bowl, a layer of dark walnut, then two layers of sapelle and the bottom of the bowl was beech.
My next challenge was to make a pair of salt and pepper grinders for my mothers birthday. I decided to make them as a segmented project as I wanted to make a contemporary set of grinders which you could easily tell the salt from the pepper mill. In the end I decided to have a three quarters one wood / one quarter another wood with a 45 degree twist up the side.
For the salt mill I used three quarters ash and one quarter sapelle and I reversed this for the pepper mill.
The pepper mills were created by taking a number of layers composed of three rectangles of one wood and one of the contrasting wood. These were glued together using Titebond II to create the layers, sanded flat on a belt sander and then the layers were glued together with a 45 degree off set to create the twist pattern. The base layer and the top of the mills were kept as one colour of wood.
The main issue I had was with the glue weakening when I was drilling through the center of the pepper mill. I had roughed down and shaped the mill before drilling the center, one of the segments came loose so I had to glue it with cyano-acrylate and let the piece cool down. Once that had happened then I was able to complete the piece. For the second mill I drilled the center hole before shaping the piece and was more aware of the temperature of the wood.
