Segmented Bowl Designer — User Guide

Getting access

1. Sign in with your free Drawing Store account (email + the code we send you — no password).
2. Design for free. Draw the profile, spin the 3D bowl, and see the ring stack — there's no charge to design.
3. To unlock a cut list you spend one cut-list credit. Your first cut list is free. After that, credit packs are on the product page.
4. Prefer to own it? The Desktop licence is a one-time purchase — the Windows app on one computer, yours forever, with unlimited cut lists. It adds the desktop-only extras: colour 3MF printing, Blender export, true-size PDFs and real board photos on the 3D. Current price is on the product page.

The screen at a glance

• Half profile (left) — draw the bowl's wall. The app mirrors it and overlays the numbered rings, the blanks you buy, and any joint you have set.
• 3D bowl (right) — the finished piece, spinnable and coloured by species. It draws whatever you are building: a ring stack, a stave barrel, a lid lifted clear of its bowl.
• Chart list (bottom) — every ring's dimensions and angles, with the wood shopping list above it.
• Top bar — Width, Height, Wall, Ring height, Segments, Allowance, Kerf, Base.
• Undo (Ctrl+Z) — steps the whole design back: the profile, the settings, the woods, the lid, a pattern you assigned. A whole drag of a profile point counts as one step, not one per frame. It greys out when there is nothing left to take back.

Starting a bowl

Plans opens two things. At the top, Start a new bowl: pick Build (segmented rings or staves), Lid (none or lift-off) and Base (segmented block or floating), and press Create. Below that are 10 finished designs to open and take apart.

Reset curve is separate and unchanged: it puts the profile back and clears every ring's wood and pattern, without changing how the bowl is built.

Drawing the profile

1. Click in the editor to add points along the bowl's outer wall, base to rim.
2. Drag a point to move it. Double-click (or double-tap) a point to delete it.
3. The app draws a smooth curve through your points, mirrors it, and lays numbered ring rectangles over the wall — those are your glue-up rings.

Shape controls

Golden guides

Click Golden to lay proportion lines over the profile. They mark where the golden ratio falls across the bowl's width and height — the 0.618 and 0.382 lines. A small box reads out the bowl's own width-to-height ratio beside 1.62 : 1.

With the guides showing, a point you drag snaps onto them, the same way it snaps to the grid. Height and radius catch separately, so you can pin the widest point at the golden height without giving up the radius you wanted. The guides hold still while you drag: they come from the bowl's overall size, so otherwise the line you were aiming at would move as you approached it.

The cut list

One row per ring, rim at top, base at bottom:

Gaps — the open-segment look — are painted on the Segment Map with the Open swatch. An open segment costs nothing in the cut list, the board feet or the quote, and the 3D leaves the gap. The Sides column shows how many of the ring's segments you make.

Species codes

Every wood in the app carries a two-character code — MA Maple, WA Walnut, WH White (Holly). It appears on the swatch, in the dropdowns, on the glue-up chart and in the printed sheets. There are 46 species, and a good half of them are a shade of brown that colour alone will not separate, on screen or on a mono printer. The code is the same everywhere, so a wood is called one thing from the palette to the bench.

Segment Map — painting by segment

Segment Map turns the ring stack into a grid: one column per segment, one row per ring. Paint a species into individual cells and the 3D repaints as you go. This is how stepped Southwest and Navajo designs are built — the ones you cannot describe with “wood 1 and wood 2.”

• Palette — every species, each swatch showing its code. The In use row above it holds just the woods already in this design.
• Open — the dashed swatch at the end of the palette. Paint it on a segment to leave that segment out: a hatched gap on the map, a gap in the 3D, nothing on the cut list. Paint a wood over it to put the segment back. For a regular spacing use a motif fill with Open selected: Stripes, Repeat 2, Block 1 opens every other segment.
• Rows — click a ring number to select it, then shift, mirror or fill the whole row. The Pattern picker on the same bar gives the selected ring a segment-face pattern (see Feature rings).
• Undo (Ctrl+Z) takes back a whole drag, not one cell.
• Paint by segment off puts every segment back to its ring's own wood. The painting is kept — switch it on again and it returns.

Rings — every ring's wood at once

The RINGS bar sets the wood of the whole stack in one go. Pick Wood 1 and press Apply to all rings for a bowl of one species. Pick a Wood 2 as well and the rings alternate, one of each, up the bowl. Start says whether wood 1 sits on ring 1 or on the rim. Painted segments and stamps stay on top of whatever you apply.

Motif — filling the map in one click

Most segmented designs are a rule, not a hundred separate decisions. The grid is the bowl unrolled, so a diagonal drawn on it is a helix on the finished piece and a V is a chevron. Pick a wood, choose a motif, press Fill map — every ring is painted at once.

• Repeat is how many segments before the design starts again. It only meets itself cleanly at the seam when it divides the segment count — 4 or 6 into 24, not 5. The bar says so in amber when it does not, before you cut wood rather than after.
• Block is how many segments in a row take the wood inside each repeat. Repeat 4, Block 2 gives two segments of the wood, then two of the ring's own, round every ring. It applies to Stripes and Diagonal. The other motifs have their own shape.
• Leans flips which way the design winds.
• One wood is enough. The motif paints the wood you picked; everything it misses keeps its ring's own wood, so the two read against each other.
• Keep paints the motif on top of what is already there instead of replacing it — that is how you lay a diamond in one species over a diagonal in another.
• Patterned rings and switched-off segments are left alone, the same as when painting by hand.
• A fill is one Undo. Try one, look at the 3D, take it back.

Stamp — drawing one wedge of the bowl

A stamp is a design you draw on one wedge of the bowl, repeated round it. In the STAMP row set Repeat, the number of times the design goes round, and press Create…. The wedge opens: every ring, rim at the top and ring 1 at the bottom, as wide as one repeat. 500 segments with Repeat 5 is a wedge 100 segments wide. Each row sits half a segment over, the way you glue the rings, with the ring's own wood faded behind every cell.

• Draw on it. Pick a Wood, then click or drag to paint cells in it; click a painted cell again, or right-click, to clear it. Every cell keeps its own wood, so a wedge can carry as many woods as you like. Clear empties the wedge.
• Drop a shape. Pick Shape — Diamond, Hexagon, Triangle or Chevron — set its Size (the widest row, in segments), and a click drops it centred on that cell in the chosen wood. Rotate turns it upside down. Each row of a shape is one segment wider or narrower than the next, which is what keeps it symmetrical on the brick stagger.
• Fill a pattern. The second row fills the whole wedge from a rule: Nested diamonds (bands of A, B, C out from the centre), Diamond flower (a field of A with one diamond of B round a centre of C) or Diamond outline (a line of B on A). Pick woods A, B and C (leave C at the dash for two woods), set the Band width in segments and click Fill. It fits any wedge width and joins itself round the bowl; paint cells or drop shapes over it afterwards.
• The edges join. The right edge of the wedge meets the left edge of the next copy, so a shape can run across the seam. A sprite dropped near the edge wraps round.
• Apply to the bowl stamps the wedge round the bowl Repeat times and switches Paint by segment on. The wedge stays a thing: click it on the map to pick it up, move it round with the arrows, mirror it, change its Wood 2, or Remove it. Edit… opens it again with its cells in place. Change Repeat there and the app cuts the wedge to the new width.
• When Repeat doesn't divide the segment count, the wedge is as wide as the whole part and the leftover segments at the seam belong to no copy. The note says how many.
• Resolution is segments × rings. 32 segments by 12 rings has room for motifs. A recognisable animal wants 48 or more segments and a tall stack.
• The wedge leaves patterned rings, rings on their own segment count and switched-off segments alone. Every apply, move or remove is one Undo. The wedge saves with the design and opens still movable.

Glue-up chart

The printed counterpart. The bowl drawn standing up, ring by ring, viewed from outside — then a list, in glue-up order from ring 1, of which wood goes in which position. Alternate rings are drawn offset half a segment because that is the brick stagger they are glued with. A struck-through run is a segment switched off. Patterned rings are left out, because they are cut from one blank rather than glued segment by segment.

Ring templates

One segment per ring, printed at true size. Cut one and lay it on the paper. If the angle is a fraction of a degree out you see it immediately, instead of finding out after ninety-five more and a dry fit that will not close. Print at 100% — not fit-to-page. A solid base prints its diameter instead of a segment, because there is no segment to cut.

Segment kit — cut files for a machine

Every segment of the bowl as a blank, laid out on the boards you actually have, with a cut file per board. Segment kit (desktop only). The blanks come out oversize on purpose — the waste is your turning stock, exactly as on the cut list.

Board width is the question, length is the answer. Lumber comes in whatever width it comes in, so you tell it the width in your hand and it tells you how much length to buy, per species.

Match the grain round each ring. Normally every other segment is cut end for end so the pieces interlock, which is most of the yield — and which makes the grain alternate round the finished ring. Tick the box and every piece runs the same way up so the grain is continuous. It costs more board, and the box tells you how much for the bowl in front of you rather than quoting a rule of thumb.

Boards are split by thickness and named by machine. Half an inch and under goes on a laser, thicker on a router, and each file says which. A quarter-inch ring never shares a board with three-quarter stock.

Write kit files makes a folder: a cut file per board, the nesting drawing, an assembly sheet and a shopping list. Print PDF gives you the same thing on paper — the shopping list, the cut list and one page per board with every piece marked with its ring.

Strip & mitre — cutting it by hand

The other way to make the same segments, and on a one-off bowl the quicker one. Strip & mitre (desktop only). Rip a strip to each ring's width, set the sled once, and cross-cut the segments off it. Minutes, where a router takes an hour. It also uses less wood: a strip is ripped to the exact width the ring needs, instead of nested onto a wide board with gaps between the lanes.

It gives the four numbers you need standing at the saw:

• Rip to — the strip's width, which is the ring's radial depth.
• Miter — the sled angle. On nearly every bowl it is set once and never moved. The sheet says so when a design needs more than one setting.
• Seg Len — where the stop block goes. It is the long edge of the segment, not the short one.
• Cuts — how many come off that strip.

Two kits, one calculation. Pick Cut segments and the box holds loose mitred pieces. Pick Uncut strips and it holds strips ripped to width and length, with the customer making the mitre cuts. Same wood and the same saw settings either way. What changes is who does the cross-cutting, and the drawing shows it: loose pieces, or one solid strip with the mitres marked on it.

Some things a saw cannot make, and the sheet names them rather than pretending. The machined rabbet on a floating base is turned on the lathe. A solid base is a bandsaw blank, and a feature ring is your own glued stick.

Print sheet gives you the lot in the order the work is done, with each strip drawn to proportion.

Stave construction

The other way to build the same shape: instead of stacking rings, glue N long boards edge to edge into a barrel and turn the profile into it. Open Staves (on the desktop: Construction → Staves). The 3D draws the barrel, the grain runs up the vessel the way a board's does, and the half profile shows the blank you actually buy.

Placing the board on the curve

Two blue dots sit on the half profile, one on each end of the stave blank. Drag one to slide that end of the board in or out — the board tilts about the other dot. Use it when you want the wood biased toward the outside or toward the bore instead of sitting centred.

• The allowance splits into two numbers once the board is off centre: outside and bore are no longer the same.
• With Auto on, the board thickens to keep your allowance on whichever face has become the tight one.
• A bad placement is not corrected for you — being able to look at a bad one is the point. The drawing goes amber instead.
• Recentre puts it back. Nothing else about the design changes.

Touching a dot without moving it does nothing. The board only counts as placed once you actually shift it.

Lids

Two different joints, and which one you get depends on how the bowl is built.

Turning a lid on

How you switch a lid on depends on how the bowl is built, because the two constructions have nothing to part at in common.

• A ring stack — open Lid and set Parts above layer to the last layer of the body. Everything above it becomes the lid. Set it back to — no lid to turn the lid off again.
• A stave barrel — there are no layers to part at, so Parts above layer is greyed out and the lid is set by HEIGHT instead. Open Staves and type a Rim height (or drag the rim line on the half profile). Everything above the rim becomes the lid. A rim height of 0 means no lid.

A ring stack — a tenon

Lid → Parts above layer (on the desktop the Lid button lives under Construction), then pick the Joint. A ring lid can register two ways, and they are built differently, not just dimensioned differently. Tenon is the default. Glue the whole stack, part it where two rings meet, and turn a tenon on the lid's underside to locate it in the body's bore. The parting line is a glue joint, not a cut through the middle of a ring, which is what gives the lid a face to register on. Bore and tenon are quoted as decimals, because the difference between them is the fit — at the nearest 1/16" they would print as the same number.

A ring stack — a step (rabbet)

Set Joint to Step and the lid registers on a rabbet instead, the same joint a stave barrel uses at its rim. The body keeps the outer part of its wall right up to the rim; the lid drops a tongue into the recess inside it.

• Step depth — how far the tongue hangs below the body's rim. 1/4" is the usual.
• Step land — the cut taken off the outside of the lid's first ring, which is the flat the body's rim is left standing on. You set the land; the lip inside is whatever the wall has left over, and the dialog tells you what that came to.

The lid's first ring has to be a thicker board — 1" for a 1/4" step. Its bottom 1/4" becomes the tongue, so only 3/4" of it shows above the rim. Set that height in the chart list. If the ring is no taller than the step, the app says so rather than drawing a ring that is all tongue and no wood.

A stave barrel — a lift-off lid on a rim step

A stave drum is one glued barrel with no ring boundaries in it, so the ring-parting controls are greyed out. Instead you set a rim line — drag it on the half profile — and the app turns a rabbet at the rim:

• Step — how deep the rabbet is cut down from the rim.
• Land — the flat ledge left at the rim for the lid to sit on.
• Lip — the tongue on the lid that drops into the bore and locates it.

Drag the step's handle to slide it between the bore and the outer face. If a wall is too thin to hold both a lip and a land, the drawing says so rather than quietly drawing a thinner one.

The lid follows the profile

The lid blank is a flat board, tilted — revolved, a tilted straight edge is the shallow cone that "domed" means for a lid built this way. Its inner end is pinned to the top of the lid's opening, the point at the end of your profile where the finial goes. Drag that point and the lid re-tilts to stay under it; move the rim and it re-tilts again. Finial, opening and lid move as one thing.

Both blanks are drawn overlapping at the rim, hatched where they cross. That is not a mistake in the drawing — it is real wood, bought and glued, that comes off on the lathe so the lid seats flat.

Floating base

A wide base glued straight to the bowl is the classic place a segmented piece splits: the base moves across its grain and the ring around it does not. Over about 5" across, use Floating base (on the desktop: Construction → Floating base). That is a rabbet turned into ring 1 with a disc dropped into it, made undersize so it can move.

• Rabbet — diameter and depth cut into ring 1, and the ledge left between bore and rabbet.
• Disc — diameter and thickness, with the clearance all round. Wider bowls move more, and the dialog suggests a gap for the size.
• The disc is normally one solid piece of quarter-sawn stock, which moves about half as much across its width as flat-sawn.

Switching a floating base on replaces the solid block everywhere — 3D, cut list, quote and exports — because you build one or the other, never both.

Finials

Finial (on the desktop: Construction → Finial). Pick a style, then scale its width and height. The tenon stays the size of the hole you drill, so scaling the finial never changes the joint. The sheet gives the blank to turn, the waste at the chuck, and the hole to drill in the lid.

Colours & species

• Wood — a species for each ring, the base, the staves and the finial.
• Two species in one ring — paint them on the Segment Map, or use a motif fill: Stripes with Repeat 2 alternates segments, Block sets how many in a row.
• Wood needed above the chart is the shopping list: board feet broken down by species, so you know what to buy, not just how much. Wood used inside a pattern is billed to that species and taken out of the ring's own board feet, so nothing is counted twice.
• Grain puts wood texture on the 3D. On the desktop app this is real board photography; it is a view setting and never changes the design.

The 3D viewer

• Orbit — drag to spin. Zoom — scroll or pinch. Pan — right-drag or two-finger drag.
• Colours, patterns and painted segments update live.
• With a lid set, Lift in 3D floats it clear so you can see both halves. The bowl's open rabbet and the underside of the lid's lip show at once. It is a view setting, not a cutting dimension, and it works for both kinds of lid.

Rooms and pictures (online)

In the online app the bowl sits in a room. On a phone, tap Scene. On a wide screen, use the Scene button on the toolbar.

• Bedroom, Living room and Kitchen are real 3D rooms. Drag to tilt and spin, pinch to zoom, and look straight down inside the bowl. Rustic table is a photograph: slide the bowl along the table, pinch to size it, double-tap to put it back.
• New woods gives the rings two fresh woods and matches the base and finial. Painted segments keep their colours.
• Picture saves what you see, and Record makes a short clip (20 seconds) as you turn the bowl. On a phone both go to the share sheet.
• In your room (iPhone and iPad) opens the bowl at real size in your own room. Tap once to build it, then again to view it.
• Share copies a link that opens this exact bowl in the app on any phone.

The room is only a view. Nothing in it changes a cut size.

Feature rings & the pattern editor

A feature ring carries artwork on the segment face — a diamond, a chevron, an inlaid strip. Open Patterns to draw one on a true-scale 1/16" grid the size of a segment face, then assign it to a ring in the chart's Pattern column.

Drawing a pattern

• Shapes — drag a rectangle, triangle, diamond, parallelogram or chevron onto the grid. Select to move, drag a corner to resize, and use rotate / mirror / delete.
• Poly — click grid points to outline your own shape and close it on the first point. It stays on Poly for the next outline, so a face full of strips is drawn in one go. To keep a shape in the library, switch to Select and right-click it.
• Grips — drag a corner and the whole joint line it stands on moves with it: sideways takes that column, up or down takes that row, ortho like AutoCAD. One piece widens by exactly what the piece beside it gives up, so the joint stays tight. Corners that two or more pieces share are drawn amber. Alt-drag moves a single corner on its own.
• Fill — recolour a piece with the selected wood. Grey is face that no piece covers yet, so there is nothing there to fill.
• Dim — add your own dimensions. These are the ones that print on the cut sheet.
• Grid and Dims toggle the guides. Everything snaps to 1/32".

Grey means nothing is there yet

The face starts grey. Grey is not a wood and never was — it is segment face that no piece covers. The status bar keeps a running covered % so you can see how much is left. A finished pattern reads covered 100%.

The editor holds you to how a glue-up actually goes together:

• A piece cannot hang past the face. Drag one at the edge and it stops there.
• Pieces butt, they do not lap. Drag a piece into its neighbour and it stops against it rather than sliding over it. A shape dropped on top of another is refused, with the reason in the status bar.
• Anything already drawn is left alone. An older pattern that overlaps keeps its artwork; the status bar just says so.

Patterns painted cell by cell in an earlier version are converted the first time you open them — the paint becomes real pieces, and the status bar says how many. Ctrl+Z puts the paint back if you would rather it did not.

Symmetry

Turn Symmetry on and the top-left quarter drives the other three, mirrored about both centre lines. The generated quarters are shaded so you know which one you are drawing in. Cells, shapes and seam lines follow; your own dimensions are left alone. Switching it on rewrites the pattern, so Ctrl+Z puts it back.

Fit to ring

A pattern drawn for one ring rarely fits the next one along. Fit to ring stretches it onto the chosen ring's real segment face — but not as a plain scale:

• Any band that is one wood the whole way across keeps its exact thickness. A 1/8" accent line stays 1/8" whether the ring is 6" or 16" across, because that is the stock you rip.
• Only the field between the strips takes up the change.
• The end verticals are widened to clear the miter — the angled cut eats wall × tan(180/N) off each end by the time it reaches the inside of the bowl.
• It writes a copy named, for example, Diamonds (Ring 5), so the original is untouched for other rings.

Feature Rings — blanks

The column on the right lists, for every patterned ring, the board feet of each wood needed to make it. That is the stock to buy for the laminated blank, carrying the truing width, the saw kerf and a length allowance.

Costing & quotes

• Quote — enter your board-foot prices once and get the material cost as a one-page PDF with a picture of the bowl. Prices stay on your machine, never in a design. Waste, labour and markup are optional.
• Wood with no price set is called out in red rather than silently left out of the total.
• Switched-off segments are excluded; a lidded stave design counts its lid board as its own line.

Saving & exporting

• Save / Open — store or reload a design as a .bowl file.
• Print all — every bench sheet in one PDF with a contents page: cut list, stave sheet, ring templates, glue-up chart, pattern cuts, lid and floating base. Sheets that do not apply are left out. Save the design first; the sheets are named after it.
• Ring templates — true-size segment templates.
• Staves / Lid / Floating base sheets — each dialog exports its own PDF with the section drawing.
• Glue-up chart — from the Segment Map.
• Export Pattern Cuts — from the pattern editor.
• STL — the 3D bowl for printing or reference. Export to Blender — a .glb with every segment as its own named solid. Export Colour 3MF — one filament slot per wood, opening pre-coloured in OrcaSlicer or Bambu Studio.

Tips

• Work bottom-up. Editing a ring's height shifts the rings above it, never below — set base rings first.
• Watch for amber on the half profile after any change. Amber means the design cannot do what you asked.
• Thin rings (accent strips — a ring made thinner than your Ring ht, 1/4" or under) stay solid unless you set a Wood 2 or paint them — that opts them into segmentation. A bowl built entirely of 1/4" rings has no strips: every ring is segmented.
• Print at 100% on anything described as true size, or every measurement on it is wrong.
• Cut one and check it against the ring template before cutting the set. A small angle error multiplies by the segment count all the way round.
• Draw the pattern, then fit it. Draw the artwork once at whatever size suits, then use Fit to ring for each ring you want it on.
• Touch works. On a tablet: one finger to draw/orbit, two-finger pinch to zoom, double-tap to delete a point.

Segmented Bowl Designer · The Drawing Store · Questions? drawingroom@rogers.com