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.

Pendulum Board

Here is another one of those items that I thought I had posted about, but that I can't find on the blog. I made this pendulum board a few years ago.

It is made from a piece of 1/4" hardboard, about 12" square. It has several coats of black paint on it, to give it an old lacquered look. Then I used sand paper to weather the corners a bit.

The design was made on my computer, partly from elements lifted from the Rider Wait tarot deck, and arranged in a significant pattern for use in reading the perturbations of a hanging pendulum. It is a form of divination.

The design was printed out and then photocopied onto 11"x17" paper. I hand tore the edges around the design to make it fit onto the board and so it would have a deckle edge that would blend seamlessly with the wood.

I coated the board with gloss polyurethane wood finish, which served as finish for the board and also as an adhesive for the paper. Then more polyurethane on top of the paper. The paper was thoroughly soaked with polyurethane, which is what made it turn an aged yellow color, and also how it is decoupaged to the board.

Once dry, I drilled small holes near the four corners and inserted upholstery tacks into the holes, using CA glue and friction to hold them in place. Lastly, I added some thin cork pads to the back side.

I made about a dozen of these in my initial batch, and I sold about ten of them in my shop. I have a second batch in production.

Turning an Acorn Pendulum (First Project Video)

Well, I said I was thinking about doing it, and now I've gone and done it. I've published my first video to YouTube. I can definitely say that videos are not going to be replacing my regular blog posts any time soon. A blog post takes me anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours to write and publish. Just the editing of this first video took me over 8 hours!


Clearly I need more practice at, well... everything. But especially video making and editing. The original raw footage was a little over fifteen minutes, and the final video was just over five minutes. Of course, I do expect that things will go a little faster when I am more familiar with the editing software, but from everything I've seen and heard, video editing will always be a slow process.

As a bonus, I have also embeded the very first video I shot, which was just an editing test. It's pretty bad.


If I do continue making videos, I will most likely embed them here on this blog, just like this. But you can always subscribe to my YouTube channel, so you won't have to sift through all the blog posts just to watch videos. If you have any comments or feedback on the video, post it here or in the video's comments. Enjoy.

Pointy Pendulums

A couple of weeks ago I made another batch of hardwood pendulums on the lathe. This time, I used the scroll chuck, so I was able to get them to end in a nice sharp point (which is something I can't really do with a drive spur and live center).

I also started using some more exotic wood species than I had in the past. Now I am using walnut, jatoba, sapele, soft maple, and black ebony. Oh, and I finally got them down to a more reasonable size.