Making a Hollow Ornament Part II - The Other Parts

Vaughn McMillan

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A few nights ago I started a thread showing how I make the body of a hollow Christmas ornament. The following night I made the finial and the icicle to go with it. I figured I'd start a new post for that part. I didn't stop as often to take pics, but this will give a general idea of how I do it.

I didn't want to use up pricey ebony to decorate a plain sycamore body made of scrap wood, so I grabbed a piece of scrap hard maple and cut it on the table saw to about 5/8" square and 8" to 10" long. I'd already started making my first pass at rounding it before I remembered to take a photo.

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I use the smallest jaws I have for my Nova chucks, and hold the blank directly in the jaws with no need for a tenon.

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I marked center of the blank and held the other end in place with the live center. I don't have much pressure on the blank, since I don't want it to flex as it gets thinner. The live center is just there to keep vibrations to a minimum.

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Made round with just a few passes. I didn't go to any heroic efforts trying to keep it perfectly even or smooth, because I knew there was going to be more wood removed.

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For both the finial on top and the icicle on the bottom, I make a tenon to fit the holes on top and bottom of the ornament. I use a dial caliper to find the diameter of the hole. The numbers on the dial are meaningless. I pay no attention to them and didn't even zero out the gauge. I just want to get the physical dimension with the inside jaws so I can size the tenon to match the outside jaws. In this photo I'm getting the size of the hole for the icicle at the bottom. (You may remember that the bottom hole is smaller than the top hole.)

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Then I use a parting tool to make a square shouldered tenon to match the calipers. Afterward, I undercut the face of the shoulder a little bit with a pointed detail gouge, to help it mate more firmly and fit the curve of the ornament body. (Hard to see in this photo...you'll just have to take my word for it.)

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Here's a trial fit. Even with the undercut, the outer edge of this one isn't making contact with the ornament body. No big deal, since I'll be making a bead at that joint anyway.

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A few minutes with the detail gouge, and then sandpaper to refine a few of the curves, and I'm pretty much done with it except for shaping the tip and parting it off the blank. Notice the step in the tenon at the end of the blank? That's because the first test fit was too loose, so I just did another tenon next to it, and left it a bit bigger. It won't matter because all of that will be hidden inside the ornament.

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Almost done shaping the tip and about ready to part it off. I do the last few cuts one-handed, using my left hand to hold the workpiece an keep it from flying off the lathe. It's spinning at about 1200 rpm in this photo.

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By the time I got done parting it off and sanding the tip a bit, it became more of a ball than a point. That's fine. It's not like I'm following an engineering drawing or anything. ;)

At this point I had a brain lapse (due to being in a hurry because it was getting late) and didn't take any photos of turning the finial that goes on top of the ornament. Just picture doing the same steps as making a the icicle, but just for a shorter piece. I used the calipers to get the size of the hole, I made a tenon and tested the fit, and then ad-libbed a short doo-dad to go on the top of the ornament.

After I parted off the finial, I still needed to drill a tiny hole in the end of it to glue the hanging loop into. I took the scroll chuck off the lathe and mounted my drill chuck in the spindle, and then used that chuck to hold the finial by the tenon so I could do any final sanding and drill the hole. I used the pointed detail gouge to cut a tiny shallow depression on the tip of the finial to help center the drill bit. In the photo below, the hole has already been drilled.

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I don't recall where, but somewhere over the years I picked up two or three VERY small diameter drill bits. (Per my calipers, they're .042" in diameter.) They are far too small to fit in any drill I have, so I use pliers to hold the bit and keep it from spinning as I guide it gently into the end of the finial as it spins at about 700-800 rpm.

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Here's another shot of the bit and the calipers, as well as the 1" eye pins I use to hang the ornament from. I trim the length of the eye pin to fit the depth of the hole, which is usually about 1/4" to 3/8" deep. Although I don't have any photos of the process, I glue the eye pin in the hole with a very tiny drop of CA glue. For this ornament, the pin was glued in place after the finial had been dyed black.

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I put a coat of wipe-on varnish on the ornament the night before, and here's a test fit with the un-dyed accessories.

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After that last photo was taken, things went downhill fast. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) I didn't get any photos of the rest of the process until I was done.

As I lightly scuffed up the ornament with synthetic steel wool to remove any dust nibs before applying another coat of finish, I noticed some dark marks under the finish at the top of the body that I hadn't noticed the night before. So I decided to re-sand it with my 2" pneumatic ROS, while holding the ornament in my fingers. In the process, I dropped the ornament on the floor and it got a couple of dings in the surface. So I sanded some more...I got rid of the dings and all the previous wipe-on finish, but still had the dark marks. Well, if you can't remove them, cover them up. :)

So I decided to experiment. I poked around in my dye and paint collection and found some green transparent acrylic airbrush paint. Hmm...wonder if that'll wipe on instead of being sprayed? A little test spot on some scrap (the blank that was left over from making the body) looked OK and thought I could make it work. I was wrong. The body ended up looking like it had been finished in finger paints by a six year old.

I pretty much gave up on it and was planning to make another body to go with the new finial and icicle. But the next evening, I got a wild hair and decided to experiment further. I dug out my airbrush and a bottle of pearlescent white airbrush paint. I did a few light coats of the pearl, to where the body looked pearl white with with green undertones. Of course it wasn't quite that easy or straightforward. The first coat of pearl was too heavy and it ran, so I wiped it off with a paper towel. The next coat came out OK, but in my handling it, I got a fingerprint in the fresh pearl paint. Wiped that off, and came up with a way to hold the body without touching it. That coat looked great...until I dropped the body on the floor and it went rolling under my table saw. That not only messed up the wet paint, but it put a flat dent in the body. Oh well, I was this far in it, I wasn't about to quit. By now, I was getting real good at wiping off the paint, so I did it once more and got a few good coats, with it getting whiter and more pearlescent with each coat.

Once I had the shade I wanted, I glued the finial and icicle (which were now dyed black) to the body with CA and hit the whole thing with a few light coats of rattle-can lacquer. It was looking pretty good, considering the long hard ride it had been through up to this point. I even set up my photo backdrop to grab a halfway decent photo of it with my phone. Because it was a phone pic taken at close range, the icicle looks a bit shorter than it actually is. I also still had the wire loop in the eye pin that I used to hang it while spraying the lacquer. (That wire loop eventually got replaced with a loop of gold embroidery thread.)

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Of course I couldn't leave well enough alone, and I wanted to buff and wax it before giving it to its intended recipient. But it got away from me at the buffer and got shot into the bed of my mini lathe/small buffing station, which dinged it up again. At that point I decided it was as good as it was gonna get, so I finished buffing and waxing it carefully, and the recipient can just hang it in the tree with the blemishes hidden. :doh:
 
It's great to see you spinning things again...and to know you are just as much a fumble fingers as the rest of us:D That ornament has earned it's place on a tree.:thumb::thumb:
 
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