Arabesque
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You begin with a nice tree. Cut it down; cut it up; and send all the good boards somewhere else.
Once you're down to the mill-seconds lumber, you think of something that will look hard and
take a long time to finish, and then you start calculating.
Depending on board length and
pieces to be cut, wastage = 17% to 12.5% for end snipe; 10% to .1% for left-over cutoffs;
33% to 27% knots, cracks and other imperfections; plus kerf wastage from sawblade, all together
amounts to about 35% usable, though there may be enough left-over pieces to make a second sculpture.
Eventually you figure out how much
wood you will need, and how much waste there will be, and how unsure you are about how much waste
there will be, and finally you decide how many boards to start with. Then add 25%.
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The boards are all marked to be sure that they are run through
the jointer and planer a sufficient number of times to completely reveal fresh, flat surfaces.
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Planer shavings from project.
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Because the thickness planer can leave the first and last few inches
with slighly less wood, the last three inches of each end of each board is removed.
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The boards are divided into two piles for cutting, one for the
wedge-shaped pieces and another for the strips, depending on which length causes less waste
for each board.
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A jig is used for all length cuts to ensure accuracy
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Next, the short sections are ripped to width. The pieces
from each board are kept separate by stacking them in layers. Anytime a defect (crack, resin,
cross-grain, knot, etc) is encountered, it is marked with an X so that it won't accidently
get used.
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Again, a jig is used for these ripping cuts, both for accuracy
and to keep hands away from blade. The clamps are made by deStaCo and are wonderfully precise.
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The nearly square cross-section pieces are each ripped into
two nearly equal pieces, then ripped once more to a little less than the narrower of the two
widths to be sure they all end up exactly the same thickness.
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Next the wedges are cut.
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All the wood has been cut, and there are 506 wedges and
1039 strips. The final sculpture will use 424 wedges and 413 strips. The uncomfortably
small margin of extra wedges will hopefully be sufficiently compensated for by the fact that
almost all of them (except for both ends) will be hidden inside the scultpure.
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After dry stacking a number of possible variations on the original
idea for this sculpture, a decision is made about which model to use for the finished
sculpture and what it will look like.
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All sorts of jig making and testing brings the shop to
its most cluttered state before things are ready to proceed with the assembling.
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Four stations are set up for assembling, allowing
gluing on one to proceed while the glue cures at the previous station. When two stations
have glue curing, a little sanding touch up can be done at a third station, until ready to
assemble at the fourth station.
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The first is a basic frame for assembling the first
four pieces, and later to fill in with five more evenly-spaced wedges.
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Detail of gluing frame: corner where both edges of
overlap are protected from glue spillover by grooves in clamping cauls.
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Detail of gluing frame: one of two corners where one edge
is protected from glue spillover by groove in clamping caul.
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Detail of gluing frame: the corner where neither edge of
overlap needs protection from glue spillover.
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Within a few days of beginning to glue, the fishing weights
will be replaced with traditional clamps to press the two wedge pieces down onto the two
rectangular strips.
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The same basic frame is next used to fill in with five
more evenly-spaced wedges.
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Next, in the second jig, five evenly-spaced strips are added to
the other side of the basic frame.
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Sandpaper glued to quarter-inch glass makes sure any uneven assembly
so far doesn't accumulate as the final structure is assembled.
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The hair-raising step is getting 49 drops of glue accurately placed
(this is no time to have to start scraping off glue that was inadvertantly placed on the wrong piece
of wood or in the wrong place).
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The clamping jig uses four specially made clamps and four correctly
beveled clamping cauls (wood protectors).
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One of the real frustrations is getting a fair way along in the process
(in this case 14/61 finished), and finding a nice shape that could stand on its own as a sculpture - and
would, if it wouldn't then be necessary to start again from the beginning. Maybe later an assistant
will make some of the intermediate stage sculptures.
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Temptation #two: (20/61 finished)
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Temptation #three: (26/61 finished)
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Eventually the sculpture gets too big to work on while standing on
the floor and a milk carton is used to get a high enough vantage point for placing those 49 drops
of glue.
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Finally, over three months after beginning, Arabesque is finished, but
not before spending three days and coming up with about 150 possible names, none of which seemed right.
The impasse was broken while listening to CBC's Jurgen Gothe when he announced the next piece of music:
Three Arabesques by Nikolai Medtner. The sculpture is a stylized letter A, from one vantage point it
looks like the ballet posture, an arabesque, and from another point of view it looks like a stylized
caligraphic Arabesque. Perfect!
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