A Good Read: The Principles and Practice of Ornamental or Complex Turning
By Nick Carter
The Principles and Practice of Ornamental or Complex Turning by John Jacob Holtzapffel is one of those rare books that will completely blow your mind. A compilation of techniques for doing ornamented woodturning, which is dependent on a highly complex apparatus for the wood lathe, ornamental turning is to regular turning as a Rolls Royce is to a Taurus.
Half of the techniques are routing around the periphery and across the face of work held in the lathe, using chucks and spindles that can eccentrically, geometrically, linearly, spherically present the work to the cutting tool. Oh right, I forgot, and elliptically! True Victorian madness. A great read for its own sake as well as for techniques that you can add to your “simple” wood turning.
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July 20th, 2009 at 11:08 am
My library has a copy. I’ve checked it out a couple times. Be warned. It is a very dense book - has an incredible amount of information, but if you’re not familiar with ornamental turning and math baffles you, this may not be the book for you.