"They think I'm making shave ice or selling hot dogs," he says. "They don't see what I'm really up to." While some might be disappointed to find that it's not ice he's shaving—it's wood—most are intrigued. It's not every day you come across one of Hawaii's finest wood artists turning bowls at the beach.
The idea was simple enough: Hammer, who's been at this for twenty-six years, wanted to get out of his home studio just up the street from one of the world's most beautiful beaches. "A lot of woodturners would love to be working outside, but it's a difficult thing to achieve," he says, perched on a dune overlooking the topaz waters. Not least because to turn, you need a lathe. That sent him on a multiyear journey to engineer one he could tool around with. "You'd be amazed at what they can put on a tricycle in India," he says: water tanks, cooking stoves, generators. But so far as he knows, no one has bolted a woodturning lathe on a tricycle.
While Hammer is wont to shrug off grandiose claims, the mobile lathe he's (probably) invented might be the world's first. At 350 pounds it's a bit of a beast, but it has everything a woodturner might need: storage for gouges, chisels and blanks, portable battery in the rear basket, custom-machined legs to stabilize the trike on uneven ground (important when you're carving a chunk of wood spinning at high speed) and the educational component: Etched on a wood pane is a visual history of the lathe, going as far back as ancient Egypt, circa 1200 BCE.
Wood artist Aaron Hammer turns a bowl at Kailua Beach. Seeking to escape the confines of his studio, Hammer built the battery-powered, trike-mounted mobile lathe.
Apart from the pleasure he takes in turning en plein air, Hammer is mostly out to engage people. "The demonstration piece is really important to me," he says. "If people are interested, I'll always say, 'Hey, come on over. I'm happy to share what I'm doing.'" Certainly production isn't what he's after—Hammer creates sometimes huge pieces in his studio, but out in the wild he's limited to things about ten inches in diameter: small bowls, bottle stoppers, poi pounders, magic wands for Potterheads. While he doesn't sell the pieces he turns at the beach, a QR code on the lathe's side panel takes those interested in his work to his web site, where his remarkable creations in local woods like milo, kamani and koa are on offer. Sure it's a marketing tool, he concedes, but that's not the reason he's out here.
"It speaks to how I like to educate people and develop appreciation for this craft, for making things with your hands. And it's a model for unconventional workspaces, an inspiration for youth who don't want to fit into a cubicle to do what they want to do. Plus," he shrugs, "I get to go to the beach, which is fun as hell."
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