How about some sort of hot plastic spray, while the lathe is running?

John

Prometheus wrote:

Hello all,

Like many of your probably have, I've turned a few vases on my lathe-
and it's not all that easy to get the finish on the inside uniform
enough that I would feel comfortable with filling any of them with
water. Bowls are often a different story, but they are not as
difficult to finish.

This, of course, defeats the purpose of a vase, if you want to have
fresh flowers in it. Since the neck on my vases is always narrower
than the body, putting something that is solid inside them to hold
water would be a big reduction in the amount of fluid it could hold.

Of course, there may be a well-established method for dealing with
this, but I haven't yet run across it, so I've come up with a theory
for your consideration.

Today, when I was a little bored at work, I was contemplating the soda
I was drinking from a plastic bottle. I recalled the economy of scale
in that industry, where a large container of the product is almost the
same price as a smaller one, and that I had heard at some point that
this is because every size of soda bottle is made from one standard
blank similar to a plastic test tube, heated and blown into a mould.
It's the same stuff, whether you make a tiny 8 oz bottle or a
two-liter Goliath. That's pretty impressive, when you consider it.

Now, while a soda bottle blank might not be the thing needed here, it
occurs to me that other plastics will soften and deform with the
application of heat and [air?] pressure. There are different kinds,
of course, but a soda bottle is a good example of what I'm talking
about.

So, if a guy were to slide a plastic tube into a turned vase, and then
use a heat gun with a blower to soften it, what do you think the odds
of that air pressure being enough to expand it within the vase to form
a tight fit are? Centrifigal force could assist the plastic's
expansion, if the lathe were on when you were heating the plastic
blank.

An alternate senario might be to place a flat piece of the correct
type of plastic over the mouth of the vase, and heat it with a hair
dryer while applying suction through a hole in the bottom with a shop
vac.

In either case, you'd (hopefully- I'm not really a plastics guy) end
up with a second vessel inside your turned vase that would be entirely
water-proof, would cost very little, and would make an item that might
be for sale to the general public much more durable and practical.

If anyone on the list happens to be involved with plastics in some
capacity, feel free to steal the idea if it has any merit and run with
it- I'd be thrilled to be able to buy vase liners that are made of the
right material and easy to use in packs of a dozen or so, provided the
price was not insanely high.

I know this may not appeal to those who are heavily invested in the
mystique of all-wood, and traditional finishing- but I think it's an
idea that might be worth pursuing for a lot of folks. For me, the
vase is all about the outside- I could care less if the interior was
covered with plastic, paint, or even that spray-in truck bed liner,
and I doubt that the stems of the flowers are going to lodge any
formal protests, either!

I'll give it a try during the holliday weekend, and report back- if
anyone else decides to give this a go, and has some success or
additional thoughts on how it might be done in the easiest possible
way, I'd be very happy to hear about it!

(Also, for your general consideration, I just tried heating a soda
bottle with my lighter, and it *will* shrink before it burns- so it's
not a thermoset product. It's quite possible that they may be just
the thing to use, and it's a good recycling trick, if you're into
that! My inital thought is that a wide-mouth bottle would probably be
easier to work with, but I won't know until I play with this a bit.)