I’ve decided that I can call almost any small wood turning a weed pot, so long as I drill a hole down from the end I want to be the top. That means this one counts. It’s made from the piece of wood that’s standing up in the picture of the previous weed pot.
This thing, on the other hand, is supposed to be a top, the kind that you wrap string around from the bottom, then toss out of your hand and pull the string away fast to get it to start spinning. It still has a lot of excess wood attached. I cut it down too far at the bottom, which was on the driving center of the lathe, before taking off the excess at the other end. At that point it wasn’t stable enough for me to be able to cut away all that stuff at the top. I ended up cutting it off with a coping saw. It’s standing on a little drying rack made of half-inch mesh hardware cloth, so you can see that it’s about an inch and a quarter in diameter. I’m working small.
And here’s the finished top and a third weed pot:
I put significant elbow grease into sanding the upper surface of the top (I didn’t want to say “the top of the top”), ending up with something like 1200 grit paper (or maybe it counts as crocus cloth). You can see the reflection of the blue crochet cotton in the finish. There’s a brass nail head at the point of the top for a spinning bearing, and it does spin nicely. If I had escutcheon pins I’d use one of those; as it was, I had to file the head of a brass finishing nail to a dome shape. These are all finished with walnut oil from Hannaford’s natural foods department.