I really like the idea of taking a damaged wood turned bowl rough and fixing it with wood inserts. In this project, I made segmented round inserts from maple and walnut wood. I cut out the knots from a monolithic maple wood turned bowl blank and replaced them with the round segmented pieces. In both the insert and the cut out in the bowl, I made a 3ﾟ taper on the contacting surface of each. I cut this taper with a 3ﾟ tapered bit on the CNC machine. This taper allowed the insert to be pressed into the bowl to get a very tight fit.
What I really like about the way this project turned out is that the wood grain of the bowl and the geometric inserted pieces talk to each other. The inserted pieces aren’t just in a random place. They are where the knots were so the form of the grain and the form of the segments have a relationship. I think this is what makes this art as it goes beyond random adjacencies.
