About halfway through working on the basket bowl, I started thinking about “what if”…  One of the ideas, was to make a bowl where the plywood was all vertical.  I thought if I did it right, I could make something that looked like the inside of a grass hut.  Kind of a Gilligan’s Island looking thing.  Once I got the first experimental plywood blank glued up, I switched gears to making this one.  To start, I thought I’d use thinner plywood to keep the size from creeping up as the pieces were assembled.  This one is made from 1/4″ plywood.

Not to get in the weeds, but to make a circle, each piece of wood has to be cut to a very specific angle, so when they’re reassembled, they form a circle.  The formula is pretty easy to understand.  360 divided by the number of segments divided by 2.  If you want to make a 10 segment ring, it would be 360/10/2 or 18, so each piece of wood would be cut at 18 degree angles.  For this project, I figured I’d need at least 30 segments to make a ring big enough, since each vertical piece was only going to be 1/4 inch at their widest point.  So do the math and that comes down to a 6 degree angle.  I looked at the 1/4″ wide plywood, looked at the table saw, and suddenly realized this was going to be the most dangerous thing I’ve attempted.  The danger comes in when you try to take a piece of wood only a quarter of an inch think through a table saw, with the blade set at 6 degrees.  Not a lot of room between the table saw fence and the blade.  To make it at least a little better, I cut the angles at 12 degrees, which for this project, wouldn’t be noticeable.  Still only 1/4” “safety” between the fence and the blade.

Took me a bit to get up the nerve, but I was finally able to make strips of plywood, with the appropriate angle, that I could cut into pieces.  Initially, I was thinking it would make a bowl, but the 1/4″ only came out with a circle about 4-5 inches across.  Not really big enough for a useful bowl.  Add in a couple simple circles of plywood, and the blank became perfect for a small box.  If I do another one of these, I think I’ll use the 3/4″ plywood, then glue the strips together before making the beveled cut.  This will give me an inch and a half thick piece of wood to run through the table saw and mean I won’t need as many piece to make the circle.  Maybe that won’t give me the heebie jeebies as bad.

Here’s the final product, with two coats of walnut oil, followed by two coats of wipe on poly.