Spiral cut bowl inspiration

This is my first post. Not the first thing I’ve made on the Glowforge, but something I was pretty proud of so I thought I’d share and see if it sparks some inspiration in others as so many of your posts have done for me.
I teach math, and I have two colleagues who are retiring this year, so I wanted to give them something as a retirement gift. I had seen the spiral cut bowls, and thought that could work well. I didn’t want to leave it plain, so I decided to add something that made it more mathy. I put the first 12,760 digits of pi going in the spiral from the outside to the center. None of the online templates for the spiral bowls were consistent in size of rings though, so I ended up making it from scratch in Illustrator. Cut it out of birch plywood, used the maple plywood settings.

After I was done with that, I decided that was simple and straightforward. I wanted to try something a bit more organic. Had to come up with a totally different technique, but some more fiddling in Illustrator and practice cuts out of draftboard and Han and Leia are the results. I had a blast creating these, and love that I have such a great and easy-to-use tool like the Glowforge to bring those ideas to life.

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Fantastic!

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A bit more Organa-ic

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Wow. You definitely kicked it up a notch.

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Great profile bowls! :grinning:

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The profile bowls are really awesome! Could be personalized in so many ways!

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Really nice!

Definitely added depth to the profile

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Ohmygosh, nerd bowls! Perfect!

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I’m bowled over. These are fantastic.

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Hans down… a stellar project!

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Arranging that spiral of digits must have been a chore… Nice!

(Ugh, how low will these guys stoop for a pun? Solo.)

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In inkscape it’s as easy as “text to path” and making spirals with a flat divergence (I want to say value = 1).

I bet it’s just as easy in illustrator?

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Once I had the uniform spiral it was just that easy in Illustrator as well. Without the uniform spiral it led to a lot of problems with the spacing.

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Uniform circular spirals I get. How you swung those profile spirals… I’d love to know the process if you’re sharing.

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Excellent! Could you post some side shots of the profile bowls to show the stand/holder?

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Sure, here are the stands. I’m pretty proud of what I came up with in order to provide enough support and cradle it properly. The current version was what I got from a couple of hours of work in Illustrator, so I’m going to modify them slightly for the final version (remember, these are just the first tries from draftboard. I wanted more support than the two supports crossing at right angles would provide me, so I designed this system that would allow me to give each one 8 supports going out from the middle ring. It also allowed me to measure each length from the hub differently, which was necessary for the profile shapes. I still want to work on the curve to make it more accurate for holding the bowls how I want.
If you look carefully you’ll notice that they aren’t the same supports for both. I created a specific one for Han and another for Leia. I’m definitely looking for ideas on improving my designs though, so if any of you have ideas, please shoot them off to me. Remember, I’m a math teacher, not really a designer or engineer. :smiley:

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Wow! Thanks for posting the photos.

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I will attempt to get some pictures together to help me with explaining. I was typing up a response and realized just how crazy difficult it was to describe what I did. What I did was actually fairly easy to do, just explaining it is not. I don’t currently have any of the steps anymore, so I will have to try and recreate them.

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Just…wow. Also I really want to stroke them with my fingers. Is that weird?

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You must do really well on those tests of spatial reasoning!

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