Lake Superior Woodturners announce Tom Lohman segmented bowl workshop

Turners at Lake Superior Woodturners got three full days with Tom Lohman for Making a Segmented Wood Turned Bowl Using a Gluing Jig, a class held April 12 to 14, 2026 that promised far more than a routine demo. Lohman said he would share techniques, lessons learned, fixes for mistakes, and practical tricks for building a successful project, a pitch that fit segmented turning’s reputation as one of the most precise and demanding branches of woodturning.

That precision is what gives the workshop its appeal. Segmented turning, also called ring-constructed or polychromatic turning, relies on multiple pieces being cut, glued, aligned, and turned into a finished form. Every stage matters: the cuts have to be accurate, the glue-up has to stay true, the rings have to line up, and the final shaping has to leave the bowl clean and balanced. For turners who want to move beyond straightforward cylinders and one-piece bowls, that kind of process-heavy work carries a different level of challenge and reward.

Lake Superior Woodturners treated the class as important enough to list it as old business in its April 11 meeting notice, placing Lohman’s workshop alongside another sign of a busy calendar: June 2026 demonstrations and workshops with Elizabeth Weber were already filling up. The club’s updates made clear that the Lohman sessions were not a casual add-on. They were part of a spring schedule built around advanced instruction and steady member demand.

Lohman brought a profile that matched the subject. He began woodworking more than 20 years ago, moved into segmented woodturning 16 years ago, and is a retired engineer who was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, and now lives in Rice Lake, Minnesota. He has said his work draws inspiration from Hopi and Navajo art and African baskets, which helps explain why his segmented pieces lean toward bold geometry and strong visual pattern. His public materials also show the scale he works at: one gallery entry cites a piece made from 40,896 pieces, and another project with more than 18,000 pieces that took around 250 hours.

The workshop also sat inside a much larger turning community. The American Association of Woodturners says it has more than 16,000 members and more than 360 chapters worldwide, while Segmented Woodturners, an online AAW chapter founded in 2009, says it has more than 500 members. Against that backdrop, a three-day class in segmented bowl construction was not just another club date. It was a focused run at one of the craft’s most exacting, and most prestigious, skills.