Ornamental Turning is a specialized art form bearing little in common with plain wood turning.
The tools used to practice it have much more in common with industrial machinery than plain wood turning, but the two are often associated with each other.
This is an oversimplified comparison because with Ornamental Turning, there is always a twist: an essential complexity of tooling that presents challenging riddles to the users, with tools that are more often as beautiful as they are functional, making possible an infinity of variations on single themes, requiring an astonishingly high level of accuracy that must be used in striving for precision and perfection. This is the machine we use when we create the three dimensional Mandala patterns on our Mandala Rings.
The first time I saw a Rose Engine lathe gently rocking back and forth as a fly cutter carved into a piece of African Blackwood, I was mesmerized. The Rose Engine lathe to my thinking was used for incising lines, engraving into metal for use in watch dials and jewelry and precious metal boxes. That engraving work is most widely known as guilloché. This is something different. It is 3 dimensional.
Ornamental Turning is specialized art form unto itself.
The tools used to practice it have much in common with industrial machinery and also plain wood turning. This is an oversimplified statement because with Ornamental Turning, there is always a twist: a complexity of tooling that presents challenging riddles to the users, tools that present an infinity of variations on single themes possible, a high level amount of accuracy that must be used in striving for precision and perfection.
The Rose Engine lathe is the ultimate Ornamental Turning machine.
