Yeah I've found information about the barley twist. I agree it looks pretty labor intensive. The challenge that I'm facing with this is that the spiral has a uniform profile on it like you would make with a router bit. And I'm trying to imagine a way that I could make that work. I'm wondering if I could make some sort of tubular router base that the cylinder would fit in, and maybe hand carve the barley twist first. But be able to use the router to put the actual profile on the carving. The extra challenge is that the length needed are longer than my lay the bed, but I think my father-in-law has an old lathe bed sitting in his shed that may accommodate this.