SLED INTO SUCCESS WITH SEGMENTED BOWLS

Start your journey toward creating beautiful bowls with the first critical step: accurately cutting and assembling the angled segments.

- TOM WHALLEY with DAVE STONE

Making segmented bowls starts with cutting strips of wood into small pieces, then gluing those small pieces together to form rings. Stack the rings, and you can create bowls and vessels with striking appearances. Forming rings with tight-fitting joints requires accurately cutting those segments with consistent lengths and angles. The key to success: a tablesaw sled with two fences. We'll show you how to calculate the correct angles for a basic bowl, build the sled, cut segments, and glue them into rings.

IT'S ALL IN THE ANGLES

Creating rings starts with determining how many pieces (segments) you want in each ring, using simple math. Start with 360, the number of degrees in a complete circle. Then divide by the number of segments you want. For simplicity, choose an even number that divides easily into 360.

A basic bowl made up of rings with 12 segments offers an easy way to get started. Divide 360° by the number of segments to determine the overall angle formed by their intersection (360°/12-30°). Dividing that number by 2 determines the angle to cut on each end of every segment (30°/2=15°). The chart on page 63 shows angles for rings with different numbers of segments.

LET'S GO SLEDDING

With your angles determined, build a tablesaw sled to cut the segments. Before you begin, make sure that your blade sits at 90° to the saw table, and that the blade is parallel to the miter gauge slot.

From 3/4" plywood, cut the base to size [Drawing]. For these 12-segment rings, mark two 15° angles across the face [Photo A]. Then cut a 45° chamfer on this same edge.