Thursday, April 6, 2017

Pointy Two-Tone Pendulums

Here are some more turned hardwood pendulums. These ones are two-tone. They were made by first laminating two different colored pieces of wood together with wood glue and clamping firmly until dry. Then the laminated blank was turned round and then into pendulums. I started at the tail stock end, turned a pendulum, parted it off, then turned another, right up the length of the blank until I ran out of wood.

I intentionally made the two colored pieces of wood different thicknesses, so that the parting line did not end up in the center. I did't want the sharp tip to be on the glue line, in case there were any imperfections in the joint. And the asymmetry looks good to me.  These are half walnut, and half ...something else.

A while ago I made my first two tone blank, back when I was making the pendulums large and chunky. I made two of them like the one below. It is a large two tone, but I didn't turn a point on it. Instead, I drilled a 1/4" hole where the point would be. Then I made some small points out of a stick of black ebony, and made sure that the stem (where the eyelet and chain would attach) was turned to a diameter of 1/4" This way, the stem from the ebony point can be friction fit up into the hole in the large two tone pendulum. I also put an eyelet on the ebony point, and used a lobster claw latch instead of a jump ring to attach the chain. This way, you can use the large pendulum with the ebony point in it, or you can pull the ebony point out of it, and re-attach the chain and just use the ebony point by itself. Two pendulums for the price of one!

Most people probably don't want a pendulum this big for their personal use, but I think the large pendulums would work great of you were doing a demonstration, or teaching a class, or if you were doing pendulum divination for a larger group of people, and you wanted everyone to be able to see the pendulum easily.

1 comment:

  1. Nice idea, making a modular pendulum.
    Totally gonna do one for my mother in law, if you don't mind :-)

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