George Vondriska

Captive Ring Out of Spindle Turning

George Vondriska
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Duration:   6  mins

There aren’t many woodworking techniques that will draw more ooh’s and aah’s from your woodworking buddies than a captive ring turned on a spindle. George Vondriska demonstrates the mysterious technique in this clip. A WoodWorkers Guild of America (WWGOA) original video.

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6 Responses to “Captive Ring Out of Spindle Turning”

  1. jeff waller

    Taping adhesive to the spindle under the ring after release, permits sanding of the inner ring surface.

  2. Richard Larson

    Very cool.does not look difficult

  3. Brian

    An instructor I had (Bonnie Klien) showed me how to make a small dedicated tool for just this process. It involves grinding down a 1/8th inch allen key. Remove most of the short arm and grind the remainder to a four-sided point. Insert it into a handle and you can create a ring that is only marginally larger than the underlying shaft and is quite clean as well, due to the small size of the tool, which affords easy access to the underside of the ring. Here is an example. https://www.dropbox.com/s/v5la8iu3ao8b2ui/DSCN1701.JPG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/0jjuh3x8byqmfie/IMG_0551.JPG?dl=0

  4. Michael Bouchier

    How do clean up the inside of the ring?

  5. Terence

    It would be nice to have a bit more voice-over to describe the details on the skew cuts as you are releasing the ring. In the video it almost looks like you have the long point down but are cutting with the toe, when cutting away from the headstock, but we can't actually see the cut, and the tool positioning seems different when cutting toward the headstock. Also, a tip I saw from another turner is to wrap a piece of sandpaper around the spindle, inside the ring and then carefully sand the inside of the ring to clean it up after it's been turned free.

  6. Rustaholic

    Now here ya go showing how we do this.

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