May 2018 Demo – Ring Turning
I neglected to mention a couple of other techniques last month during the German ring turning demo. The description that Nick asked Arny to include described ring turning as requiring a sense of form and high imagination.
Making a Christmas tree required neither. A much more sophisticated form can be made either by embedding a
template in the ring or by making a negative template to use on the outside. The butterfly ring (obtained from the
web) shows in white a template that had been inserted into the ring of wood before turning. As you turn the ring
you turn away the wood until you reach the white template. The required sense of form is only needed to make the
template.
A second method is to create a negative template. As you turn away wood on the ring, you keep stopping to check
the form against the template. This is like turning a sphere by first turning an arc of the radius you want the sphere
to have. You use the arc pressed against the sphere to check that the radius of the sphere is correct.
Dave Buchholz
