This is a platter I made from purple heart wood with abalone shell inlay. Read on to see how it was made.
Starting with a large square blank about 2 inches (5 cm) thick, I first cut it to round on the bandsaw. My lathe maxes out at 16 inches (40 cm) and it wasn’t perfectly round so I had to sand off some high spots just to get it to clear the bed of the lathe.
Next, I shaped the foot and bottom of the bowl. The recess in the foot is how it will attach to the chuck when I turn it around. It was sanded to 800 grit, then sanded some more with the sanding paste visible in the foreground. Then it was cleaned with denatured alcohol and polished using tung wax finish. The rim was left fairly thick so I could cut a channel for the inlay. That will be reduced later.
At this point, the top of the platter has been shaped and a channel cut for the inlay. The platter is off the lathe on a level work surface, but still attached to the chuck. This ensures the platter will still spin true when I put it back on the lathe.
Here is the platter immediately after the inlay. I screened the abalone to separate the dust from the larger flakes. Next, I coated the bottom of the channel with the dust so that any gaps in the abalone would show abalone dust instead of wood. This was fixed in place with thin CA glue before adding the flakes.
The flakes are random sizes and needed to be arranged in the channel one at a time with tweezers, a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. Once the channel was uniformly covered with flakes, I poured clear resin into the channel to lock everything in and let it cure for a couple of days.
The last step was to remount the platter on the lathe and turn away some of that thick rim and resin. No danger of digging into the abalone, that stuff is hard as steel and a couple pieces that stuck up through the resin played hell with my chisels. Had to re-sharpen them 3 or 4 times before it was done. This also cut away the resin overflow seen in the previous photo.
The result after sanding and polishing was stunning. Below is a close-up of the rim showing the inlay and some of the beautiful grain patterns in the wood.
