Saga of the Sphere

I had yet another piece of spalted Beech that I had been waiting to work on, but I left it a little long and it developed a drying split, plus the spalting was pretty uninspiring, so the decision was made to turn a sphere (I use the term loosely, turned freehand a sphere is pretty difficult, well it is for me anyway, I have no jigs, only a paper template)

So, after turning and hollowing it was an obvious candidate for colouring, this was done and sealing and lacquering commenced, during the lacquer stage though i got a bit of a run and so i ran the lathe very slowly to even it out, it was running backwards, no problem, or so I thought, sometime in the next half hour while I was making breakfast the chuck screwed itself off the lathe and the entire assembly crashed to the concrete floor, busted the split wide open and fractured right across the middle as well as several nasty scratches and dents.

I was a bit peeved.

Nothing daunted, I set to making an attempt at a repair, these are the stages after I got the wood back in place (by means of the hammer pictured!)

I found it interesting that the wood was turned a pale green by the colouring when I sanded it back. In the end though I managed to make a reasonably good repair.