The Wood Turner:
Wood turning (for those of you who don’t know) is the art of using a lathe to “turn” wood and carve it into beautiful shapes. This can include: Jewellery, Ornaments, Bowls, Goblets, Cups, Baseball Bats and anything else you can come up with.
I was drawn to the lathe and woodwork in general during high school and made a few pieces on it but it took me quite a few years to realise I should buy my own lathe.
I bought my first wood lathe for the sole purpose of making my own earrings. This was a smart move. Now I have HEAPS of earrings to wear, I can make them whenever I need/want more, I can make them for other people and I LOVE working with wood so it helps me stay happy.
It is of utmost importance to be happy and love what you do!
“What’s in it for me” you say…
- I mostly make wooden jewellery for stretched earlobes, a piercing that you enlarge gradually over time to fit larger pieces in. I make them custom to your size, shape and material requirements.
- I really LOVE making ornamental mushrooms and mushroom bowls.
- I also enjoy making bowls, I only use natural products during the manufacturing process so they are safe.
- I have an online store dedicated to this area of my life – Atom Organics.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page to read some of the things people have said about my wood plugs and Atom Organics.
Here is a little story about how I got into wood turning later on in life:
I did woodwork in high school and it was one of my favourite subjects.
I would get notes from my teachers saying my help was needed down in the woodwork rooms during other classes that I didn’t fancy as much and I would sometimes spend most of the day down there.
I didn’t use the lathe a lot then but I had a deep interest in them. I think I only made about 4 things on a wood lathe and about the same on a metal lathe.
I was always focused on something bigger such as the many quarter pipes, half pipes, manual pads, kickers and grind rails I made for my skating.
I also made a motorised, revolving, round bed that doubled as a drum stage without its mattress inspired by Hugh Heffner’s revolving bed.
I started stretching my earlobes in 1999, a time that proved hard for me to find any kind of range in jewellery that we can find today. This lack of jewellery and a desire to stretch my lobes larger provoked me to fashion pieces of jewellery out of anything I could find (some materials of which I would never wear again).
After years of searching for more jewellery and making my own, I decided to buy a lathe and make my own earrings in a much easier and more accurate way. This was the best decision I had made in a while, now I could make any size I wanted and have them within the day.
Friends of mine started to see the jewellery I was making and began asking me to make some for them.
I was working in a tattoo shop as a professional body piercer at the time I bought my lathe, so naturally, lots of people started to show interest.
I fulfilled many orders for people with the most basic of tools and eventually got heaps of different styles and materials out there, my favourites being wood.
The reasons I am drawn to wood so much are simple, wood is so nice to wear, it isn’t too heavy, you don’t get that stench of a build up everyday and the wood goes well with oils that are beneficial for your lobes and the stretching process.
I also ended up bottling my own oil product called LobeLube™.
I persisted and kept making more and more wooden plugs for people as they asked for them, still using the same minimal set of tools I started with (including an ancient polishing wheel I inherited from my grandfather’s tool collection). The setup I was creating these beautiful pieces with was nicknamed my “ghetto setup”. You have to start somewhere right?
Since then, I have slowly bought additional tools to make even better jewellery (among other things such as bowls and smoking pipes) and have opened my own shop and body piercing studio “Benbodhi’s – Professional Body Piercing and Happy High Herbs” (aka Steel Mantra). Having my own shop has allowed a little more space to work than the kitchen table or the back alley beside the tattoo shop, a much needed upgrade!
From this point it was time to turn the side project into something bigger, a business of it’s own.
So there it is, the first story from a long story that is Atom Organics.
love my Atom organics.....got a couple of pairs....super snazzy woods
–Dean Carroll - Darwin, NT, Australia
Just got them, damn they're nice, I'll be in touch to order more in the future dude thanks, take it easy.–Shannon Patrick O'Donnell - Sydney, NSW, Australia
I need to come and see you about some new earrings soon
These guys make unreal custom wooden plugs for all the stretched ear folk. Ben at Atom Organics makes a solid product that us here at GD fuckin' love and wear the shit out of em daily..... any size, huge range of timbers and styles to suit.–Genedefect (Band) - Sydney, NSW, Australia
I'm diggin' your jewlery.–Jagger Southworth - Toms River, New Jersey, USA
benny ben's woodplugs are the bomb, honestly the best plugs I've worn...keeping them clean is so much easier than any other material I've had in my ears and they're versatility in suiting all clothing is the reason I keep coming back for more–Rob Wilson - Earlwood, NSW, Australia
I love my wooden plugs, they have stayed hard all these years and nullified the strange discharge that used to leak out of my holes. Thanks Benbodhi