How I got started in woodturning
Hi David, I am 70, I don't have the facilities to do work now. Pardon my grammar I am not good with words. 20 years ago I did some wood turning, it is not traditional wood turning, but nevertheless it was turned on a lathe. I will send you the history of this piece. My first conception of the (4) spiral lamp I did some years ago. I was at a friends house, she and her daughters showed quarter horses. I was sitting in the living room, on a wall there was three long shelves filled with trophies, one trophy in particular caught my eye. It was a single spiral with a cup on it. The trophy was made of-- plastic--.(Pop metal). In my mind's eye, I could see the single spiral made of wood. It put my mind to thought, mentally I designed a way the single spiral could be made of wood. A thought came to mind, that would make a beautiful lamp. How can I put a hole through the middle of a spiral, in my mind I designed a way to do that also. While giving this more thought, I would need a cylinder of wood, dissected 360° from top to bottom, but there are 4 spirals in the cylinder of wood. Thus, was the birth of the 4 spiral lamp; ( Five minutes later). At this time, I had a business in North Miami Florida, building designer mailboxes. One of my designs, I sold to the Fulton Corp. Fulton Illinois. I designed and produced, built the tooling, the machinery, and the hardware. It went nationwide and is still on the market, I received a royalty for 10 years. I had the facilities in place to work on the lamp. The five minutes it took to design a method to do the lamp, took three years, and $75,000 to implement. Since there was no machinery to do these applications, I had to develop and build the equipment. Dissect a cylinder 18 in. long, 10 1/2 in. Diameter, Into 4, 360° spirals, make each one of the spirals round, and bore a hole through each spiral. The one and only, the prototype, is made of green cypress, cured with PEG-- polyurethane Geico--. ( All) woods can be used. The 1 spiral, the 2 spiral, the 3 spiral. All are good spirals, when one or more of the 4 spirals did not work out, I used those to make the 1, 2, and 3, that's how they came about. I was hoping at the time to put it in production, I was unable to come up with the funds to do so. ( It become my labor of love) I did take it to two trade shows on Miami Beach, one was for the home interior designers, the other was for the general public, I had very good feedback at both shows. If I had a product to sell, I could have sold out everything. Over the years I have improved on curing the wood and other aspects of the project.
P. S. Go to this web site for pitchers.
http://home.bellsouth.net/p/pwp-lampman
In the AAW picture gallery, look under (lampman) have a wood day. Dan