A Sphere-Making Jig Named Tom

Come up with a project that isn’t rectilinear. That was Meg McIntyre’s self-motivated mission for the Small Scale Design/Build segment of the Woodworking Certificate program. “I was trying to find a way to make practical furniture that had more curves and fewer edge elements, so I drew this sketch of a coffee table with stacked spheres. I asked [Program Director] Justin [Kramer] how hard it was to turn a sphere on a lathe and he said, ‘Oh, not so hard—takes well under an hour.’” Meg smiles and explains how four days later, she had her first sphere.

“I wanted to find a more efficient and uniform way of making spheres.” She held up an ash ball in the palm of her hand. “It’s pretty cool how you can calibrate something that is round with just your eyes and look — it’s round! But it’s not really round. I wanted to make something more uniformly round. I did some digging around on the internet and I found some people making various kinds of jigs, including a guy who made this crazy tablesaw jig to make a bowling ball.” Pursuing her passion, she got in touch with him to find out how he made his jig and to see if he could offer her his design. She explains that not only did he do that, but he took the effort to improve upon the design and, as Meg explains, “he came up with this idea that was more flexible, using a router instead of a tablesaw.” 

Meg has become obsessed with making spheres. “There is something especially weird and cool about making this round shape from the inside of a tree.” When asked what she is going to produce from this sphere-making jig, Meg simply states, “I don’t know,” revealing that the nature of her passion is material-inspired, rather than design-inspired. She sounds a life-long sculptor, elaborating, “I’d like to use them as building blocks—just think about bubbles and clusters of round eggs and caviar. I want to bring out those clusters into building somehow.” And so she built 'Tom,' her affectionately-named, wooden sphere-making jig.

Meg's path to wooden-sphere sculptor has been circuitous, as one might guess. She came to Yestermorrow having been a successful manager for a host of businesses and non-profits, including a micro-brewery and an art gallery. But after working at a desk and staring at screens for 15 years, she realized that she was tired and wanted to ”press the reset button” by participating in the Woodworking Certificate Program. “Much like the spheres, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it… but something. We’ll see as it emerges.”

-- by Nic Tuff