Gus Hill Replica Indian Clubs
Mike Romiski at Rosewater Kinetics wrote to me recently about an inquiry he received asking if he could make a pair of Gus Hill Replica Indian Clubs.
The Inquiry
The inquiry came from an Indian Club collector in Georgia about a year and a half ago, it seems he has a few sets of original Gus Hill clubs. He wanted to know if Rosewater Kinetics could duplicate a large pair of clubs if he supplied the measurements dating back to about 1900s. The collector has some medals and other memorabilia from Gus Hill. The collector wasn’t convinced that Rosewater Kinetics could reproduce the Gus Hill Replica Clubs because of their size.
The Wood
Mike from Rosewater Kinetics started by going to an old lumber mill being disassembled and found a piece of a large support beam measuring 12″x12″. The exciting part was that this wood was from the same period as the original clubs Gus Hill had made.
The wood was red fir, first cut (old growth) you can see by the ring pattern that it was quarter sawed and from a big tree. Also being inside for what turns out to be a century of air drying it was very stable wood. Red fir is thought to be a softwood, all the qualities mentioned before made it very dense and quite hard.
Before hitting the switch to turn on the lathe
The old red fir beam was 12″x12″, so there was little wood to be removed after rounding in the centre. 
The lathe used had a 12″ inch centre and the wood rubbed the base rail when it was loaded for turning. So the section had to turned by hand by planing it bit by bit to clear the base rail. 
In an effort to avoid the section tearing itself out of the lathe, the wood was countersunk to accommodate the live centre, and even then once the lathe was started it looked like one of those bucking horses that used to be outside the supermarkets until the gouging was finished and the section rounded so that the final shaping process could start.
The finish is rubbed black pumice. To seal, sand and top coat were done in a water-based clear coat as the finishes of old have some health risks. 
The whole process was quite a challenge and as a pair of Gus Hill Replica Clubs were ordered the whole process had to be repeated for a second time.
30 days to complete
The Gus Hill Replica Clubs took almost 30 days to complete. Rosewater Kinetics were able to turn them out of solid sections of timber, so no glue ups were necessary in order to make them as authentic as possible.
Robert recalls that the Gus Hill Replica Clubs came out to about 22 lbs and the pair were within 2 oz of each other. They stand 34″ inches tall, and the girth about 11.5″ inches.
The collector was planning to have the clubs engraved like the Gus Hill originals.
Robert commented at the end of his email that he thought I would be interested in this. This is a great story and I would like to thank Robert Romiski from Rosewater Kinetics for sharing it, also supplying the photographs.
