Martin Saban-Smith

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Martin is a specialist in the visual presentation of woodturning using the Golden Ratio to ensure the piece looks correct visually. He also urges all turners to sketch out their designs before getting on the lathe. He strongly believes this helps prevent scope creep especially as the wood on the lathe is generally being turned at 90 degrees from how it will be seen when finished. His demonstration piece was almost identical to what Les Thorne did for our seminar but we had Martin’s take on how he uses a set of Golden Ratio callipers to make life very easy even if you are unsure about the maths involved. The picture shows how the two outside points measure a distance or diameter as we would expect but the inner arm points to the “Golden” spot where the visual balance of the object is achieved. For his demonstration piece it was the widest point of the body in the ‘onion’ shape. Martin has also just published a book which explains these principles in great detail and all of the the projects in the book are drawn to scale so you can just take the measurements directly from the book using callipers. These very inexpensive callipers can be found under a search for ‘Golden Ratio callipers for artists’ or they are also to be found as used to measure eyebrow distances (who knew)!