Marjorie's Lazy Susan

Marjorie is taking a cake decorating class and told me that she need a 14 inch lazy susan to use when decorating round cakes. I volunteered to make her one.

I went to the hardwood store and found a beautiful piece of zebrawood that was 8 inches wide. I bought a three foot chunk of it. I cleaned up the edges and then cut it into three foot long pieces. I cut each of these in half at an angle, resulting in 60° angles at the "point" of each piece.

I turned all the points to the center and ended up with a solid (well, I tweaked a couple of the angles to get rid of any gaps). I laid it on a flat surface (the peninsula in the kitchen) and drew a circle the desired size.

I drew marks across the joints and used a bisuit jointer to make pockets for two biscuits between each segment.

I used a sabersaw to cut along the circular line. Here are the six segments showing the biscuit pockets.

Here they are, about to be clamped. I didn't get a picture with the clamps on because I was working in the kitchen and dinnertime arrived. In my haste to get my mess out of the way, I forgot to take a picture. I used a band clamp around the outside and three bar clamps from various angles.

After the glue had set, the lazy susan bearing was attached to the bottom of the disk and a sanding disk was inserted into the table saw. The disk was rotated against the sanding disk, sanding off the high points, until there were no more high points and the disk was round. The top and bottom edges were rounded over with a 1/4 inch radius router bit. It was then sanded using a random orbital sander with sandpaper grades starting at 50 and going to 320. Here is what it looked like at that point.

Finally, it was given two coats of Danish Oil Finish and a coat of satin wax. Here is the disk before the bearing was put back on. The bearing is a 12 inch bearing, and instead of using a wooden base, I simply applied "ScotchTread" to the bottom of the metal bearing, giving it a nice non-slip surface.

Here is a closeup showing some of the zebrawood grain.

Marjorie made her request Monday afternoon. I was able to get the finished product into FedEx on Thursday for delivery to her on Friday.