Paranormal ProductsInstruments, made by one hand since 2003
V · L-Rods and Dowsing Tools

The oldest amplifier of the hand

Rods made to the physics of the thing rather than to the folklore, in drawn brass on steel pins, with handles that hold only wood.

Agricola to ChevreulWhat the Rod Does

The dowsing rod is the oldest amplifier of the human hand, and the one whose physics is least understood by the people who sell it.

Agricola drew miners with forked hazel in De re metallica in 1556 and disapproved of them, which tells you the practice was already old. Water, ore, lost things, the dead: the rod has been asked about all of them. In 1833 Chevreul explained the pendulum and by extension the rod, and the explanation has not needed revision since: a tremor of the hand, produced by expectation and below the threshold of awareness, delivered into a mechanism designed to make it enormous.

The L-rod is that mechanism perfected. A right-angled rod sits in a sleeve; the sleeve is held level; the long arm is free to swing. The arm is in unstable equilibrium, balanced on nothing, so the smallest tilt of the wrist sends it swinging with a violence out of all proportion to the cause. Two rods crossing over a spot is a spectacle, and it is manufactured by the grip. None of that makes the instrument worthless. It makes it an honest amplifier of whatever the dowser's hand already knows, or believes, and there are people who have found water with it for forty years and would not be argued out of it by me.

sleevearm, free to swing any wrist tilt
Unstable equilibriumThe arm is balanced on nothing. Any tilt of the wrist, and it swings. The drama is engineered into the grip, which is not the same as saying it is meaningless.
Boards of three eras, and a pair of L-rods
Boards of three eras, and a pair of L-rodsA 1940s Swami Mystery Talking Board, a modern pentagram board, and a hand-stencilled homemade Ouija from the early twentieth century, its GOOD BY cut by someone who had never seen the trademark. Brass L-rods at the left.

What I MakeOn a Pin, Not in a Tube

Made to the physics

Because the rod is an amplifier, the engineering that matters is the freedom of the swing. The sleeve must let the rod turn without friction, which means a bearing and not a tube: mine run on a brass sleeve over a polished steel pin, with a hardwood handle turned around it, so that the rod swings from the pin and the hand holds only wood. The rods are solid brass, a quarter-inch, drawn and not cast, because cast brass is never straight and a rod that is not straight has a bias built in. The arms are matched to a hair so that a pair swings alike.

The Y-rod, the forked stick, I make in the traditional way in hazel or in a springy hardwood, and in a modern form in two brass rods joined at the tip, which holds its tension when hazel would dry and go dead. The tension is the point: the rod is held in a bent spring and the hands are the release.

The tools

What it is not. A rod does not find water, ore or the dead. A dowser might. The rod's whole job is to show the dowser what their own hand is doing before they know it themselves, and mine does that with less friction and less bias than any I have handled. I make no other claim for it.

CommissionOpen an Instrument

Name the instrument, the timber, the stones, the wording, and what you intend it for. I reply with a drawing, a quotation, the current number in the register, and a date range rather than a date, because timber and the sky both keep their own time.

The RegisterEnter Your Name

The register is written to when a numbered instrument is completed, when one becomes available, and when a new family is opened. It is never sold and never lent.

Occasional, and never passed on.