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Walnut Dinner Plates

I made some little lunch plates a few years ago out of scraps left over after our kitchen remodel, and they’re my favorites for small meals and snacking. I thought it would be worthwhile to make a set of dinner plates. The walnut board I had in mind for the project has been sitting in my shop staring at me for the last couple of years. It was finally time.

3 walnut dinner plates

I started by cutting the blanks out of the plank. Here’s the blank, fresh off the bandsaw, mounted against a plywood disc with a foam gasket for friction.

The first step in the turning is to clean up the bottom face. Once I had a true surface, I could mark the edges of the plate’s bottom.

With the plate in this orientation I cut the dovetailed recess for the expansion chuck and roughed out the shape of the rim. These cuts were all pretty quick.

To help me keep the rim shapes consistent, I made a little template from the first plate using post-it notes, a trick I developed 2 years ago while trying to make a matching set of bowls. There’s a full write-up on this technique in my article in the AAW Journal of August 2015 (issue 30:4). It works for all sorts of things.

Here’s one of the plates mounted on the chuck, which fits into that recess on the bottom of the plate and expands to hold it securely. The recess is only 1/8″ deep, but that’s plenty of grip. At this point I can make my finishing cuts on the bottom of the rim and take the plate down to its final diameter of 10-3/4″.

I drilled a depth hole in the top of each plate once the surface was cleaned up, so I’d know how far to go with the hollowing. You can also just measure as you go, but the hole gives you a really quick way to see when you’ve cut far enough.

Here’s the final shape, before sanding. I think it’s important that items meant for food use be easy to clean. If I had a tight little bead or fiddly detail on this surface, I’d always be trying to scrub bits of food out of it. This little shadow line gives a nice definition to the plate’s interior without being a cleaning nightmare.

Sanded to 400 grit. I reverse the lathe with each successively finer grit to make sure there aren’t a lot of poky little fibers on the surface. The grain will still fuzz a tiny bit at the first washing, but wiping the plate down with 400 grit sandpaper after that will take off the fuzz once and for all.

To finish the bottoms I make use of that big plywood plate, which is drilled out in the middle for a vacuum fitting. You might be noticing that the foam gasket is way off center. It compresses quite a bit with each plate, so I shift its position when I mount a new plate. That ensures that I’m not crushing the same place on the gasket each time, and I get a better seal. I love my vacuum chuck. You could do the same job with a jam chuck, a Longworth chuck or Cole jaws, but the vacuum chuck is more versatile and easier to use.

And here’s the set, oiled and ready to go. Dinner anyone?