Chunky cherry hexagon bangle

(Originally posted on October 29, 2009)

This bangle started as an offcut from a cherry bowl that I turned years ago. The bowl was successful, and the offcut had such interesting figure that it survived all of the culls.

I picked it up a while ago and saw that there was enough wood left in the corner to get a bangle, but I wasn’t sure how to approach it. There weren’t any interesting wane edges to include, and a square wouldn’t fit, and I wasn’t in a circular mood. So I tried a few polygons and found that anything higher than a pentagon was fine. I grabbed a hex nut from a parts drawer, laid it on the work, and eyeballed out a scaled-up shape.

I had recently tried turning a bangle and hadn’t been happy with having to finish the hollowing by hand, so I drilled out a centre guide hole and bored out the bangle with a hole saw. Then I cut outside my hexagon lines on the bandsaw, and contemplated the work. It was horrible. The wobbly cutlines and bandsaw tracks were not charming, but ugly.

It was then that I began to wish I had flattened and parallel-planed the faces, because there was a quarter-inch difference in thickness from one side of the bangle to the other. I turned to the tablesaw, cranked up the sawblade for the thick workpiece, and crept up on straight sides that were roughly perpendicular to an imaginary average of the faces. Very carefully.

With the shape looking more hexagonal, I flattened the faces on a sander and re-examined the workpiece. The attractive knot and internal split had opened right up to one face, and I could pull the two sides of the split apart like a mouth. Not good now that I was so invested.

I wish I could remember which woodturner to credit for the technique, but I’ve read that cyanoacrylate glues will stabilize and fill through cracks in turnings. I decided to try it, and after packing the cracks with fine red sanding dust, I flooded them with thin adhesive.

After the glue cured, I scraped it off, then sanded to 220 grit and finished with a few rubbed coats of walnut oil. Not the shortest route to the finished piece, but then I didn’t know that’s where I was going.