Emiliano Achaval collaborates with Troy Grimwood to make a beautiful drinking vessel

For this months’ article, I’m once again working with New Zealand artist Troy Grimwood. With our first article, he showed us how to do his famous Sea Form. I wanted to do a collaboration piece with him. Our Editor suggested a double- handled lidded goblet. As always with these challenges, there was a catch. The handles had to be part of the block of wood – they could not be glued on. Cutting handles on a scrollsaw after making a pattern and then gluing them is a relatively simple project. The hardest part is to get a nice, even match where the handles meet the goblet. I approached Troy with the idea. After some sketches and discussions, he told me that he’s never done anything like this project. But he’s not one to shy at a challenge. Even if it takes us a few tries, let’s do it, he told me with a big grin, it’s going to be a fun one. That’s the intended purpose of the Editor’s Challenges, to leave your comfort zone, to do something you have never done before. I do not like to call a project that is not successful at first a failure – I call it a lesson learned.
We chose a beautiful piece of curly acacia koa – a native endemic species to Hawaii – for the main part, stem, and base. We made the lid out of curly mango and topped it off with a small African blackwood finial. To be able to take pictures, Troy started the project. He got to do the hardest part, turning the main goblet and handles part. He also turned the stem and base. I did the carving and sanding of the handles, which took me some time. I turned the lid, and finally, finished this fun collaboration with the finial. It was fun solving some of the problems we encountered as we moved forward with the project. There is always a way, sometimes more than one. You have to think it through and find a way; everything is possible when you are having fun with a friend. I hope you enjoy doing this project as much as we did.
























You just completed the fifth and final piece of this project. You can use a dab of glue to hold the parts that need it. We chose not to. It adds an extra wow factor when you show it to a friend and they see how all the pieces come apart and how nicely they fit together. I hope you have as much fun as we did. Until the next time, Aloha from Hawaii.