A friend's sister asked if I could make an urn for his cremains. I'm still not sure how this will work out, it's at the limit for my lathe making a pot that holds about 3700 cc and I wanted something reasonably elegant rather than just a "biscuit barrel". I estimated the size from urns that are for sale on Amazon and Etsy (of course), and also from the cardboard box that the crematorium sent my brother-in-law home in. It's been interesting.

I started with a sort of rocket shape inspired by an aerofoil (he and I worked together in Shorts Aerodynamics Department before it was laid off in 1996) but that would have been enormous, and a humorous thing wasn't quite what was wanted. I decided on a simple vase, and was originally thinking of a stack of twelve sided rings to save wood on the hollowing out and by slightly rotating each layer it would have given a nice effect and overlapped the glue joints.

That doesn't work unless the joints are perfect. I might try a bowl like that from some bought 2x2 later, but for now making 2 1/4 x 1 1/4 (57 mm x 38 mm) segements 2" (50 mm) long and cut to 15 degrees at each end is beyond me as I want to use some poplar from another friend's tree and I don't have a thicknesser or a table saw. Instead I am making it from discs which I can make on the bandsaw and lathe after rough planing the slabs to fit on the bandsaw, and then using a parting tool I can "core" each disc after it's stuck on to both do the hollowing gradually and to save some wood to make a sort of scale model copy literally from the same pieces of wood. I had to make a running steady and then had to make very small wheels for it. It is noisy as anything but it works!

And we're done, and I was able to make a small urn from the discs I had cored out.