Rescuing a rough turning mistake

After I got a lathe, whenever I heard the city tree maintenance people fire up their chainsaws I wandered over to find out what they were trimming. I usually ended up with a hunk or two of timber worth keeping. I got into the habit of setting up bowl blanks by halving and waxing the end grain of rounds of green wood, and I now have a shelf full of the stuff. Once in a while, I grab one, bandsaw or chainsaw it more or less round, and rough turn it. The idea is that since the wood is going to move when you hollow it, you go ahead and let it, leaving enough material that you can then turn it round again later.

This maple blank was rough turned in Jun 2004, according to the pencil scrawl.

Sometimes, though, I get carried away with the hollowing and don't leave myself anything to hold onto to rechuck the bowl. I gripped the foot in the chuck, trued the edge, and then cut a recess for the chuck jaws. But when I tried to turn it around so I could shape the outside and foot, I found that the jaws could not reach the recess.

I left it sitting like that for a week or so, until it stopped annoying me. Then I realized that if I glued it to a panel, I could just thread it onto a screw. So I roughed out a panel of leftover nasty plywood and mounted it on the lathe.

A good generous bead of glue on the bowl rim...

...and clamped with the tailstock.

It worked perfectly! I was able to complete the bowl and just turn the plywood away when it was no longer needed. I'm sure I've got other blanks with this problem, so I'm glad I figured it out.

This bowl became my Dad's Christmas present, as may be obvious from the photo. That's a bicycle chainring trapped in the wood, and the maple was coloured with many stain coats of old coffee.