Forest Path Statues – Part 1 – Beginning

The location where I spent this spring’s vacation has a very interesting path through the forest – many tree stumps along it are carved into beautiful statues, some somewhat realistic, some completely abstract. I saw an empty truck parked there with link to this website  of  Czech artist Jan Kužel. The style of the statues there corresponds to statues in the forest, so it is reasonable to deduce those statues are at least in part his work. These are done mostly with the use of a chainsaw, which is very impressive.

I checked and double checked and AFAIK Czech Law does not prohibit photographing and sharing of photographs of any art that is permanently displayed on public land with unrestricted access. Which is this case. So the photographs are mine, but the art they are depicting belongs to someone else. I will post only a couple of pictures at a time, because there is a lot of them.

It has begun on a clearing with a simple table and a couple of benches, and a road sign reading “To the Mountains” on the left and “Home” to the right.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Anatomy Atlas Part 14 – Hand Muscles

Several of my pictures are about hands, one way or the other. I liked drawing hands. Not so dissecting them.

What I said about watching human heads sans skin in formaldehyde being creepy goes doubly so for hands. Mucking around in someones guts left me cold, but dead hands I have found disconcerting. In many aspects a human hand is much more intimate than, not to put a too fine a point on it, genitals. Genitals in a jar are just another organ. A hand is a part of someone’s life in a much more profound way.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Human hands are a marvel. Their flexibility is nearly unsurpassed in the animal kingdom and they are extremely good in their ability to grasp things ranging from feathers and eggs to sticks and stones. But what people generally do not know is that the strength of the hand does not lie in the muscles in the palm. Palm muscles  only position the fingers and shape the palm, but what curls and straightens the fingers – and thus gives them strength – ale muscles of the forearm, whose tendons go under a series of ligaments to the base of the last digit segment like ropes through pulleys.

I have also found that many people do not realize that the smallest of fingers – the pinky – is essential for strong grip. Without pinky it would be difficult to get a firm grip on a tool or a weapon, be it a hammer or a chisel, an axe or a sword.

The one interesting thing that Professor Kos has mentioned and I remember is the muscle Musculus palmaris longus. This muscle is not present in all people, and in some people it is present only in one hand. Its absence has no ill effect whatsoever, so from evolutionary point of view it seems to be a neutral trait.

The Beautiful Town Idstein – Part 11 – The Brewery

We have finished our day in the town in this beautiful building, that has originally served as a firefighter’s armoury/base or whatever the proper English terminus technicus is. The building has been converted into a brewery and restaurant today, and one that probably has no problem getting enough customers. Luckily we were only two persons so we have managed to get places for dinner.

I am no beer connoisseur, but of course I could not miss this opportunity and I had to drink one here. It was good and refreshing, I would not mind drinking such beer more often.

The restaurant has two storeys and in the lower room is actually the brewery, just behind the counter. Very interesting arrangement that, one that must be very comfortable in the winter, but very uncomfortable in the summer. We were there during a hot spell in the spring and even with the door open wide, the room was very warm inside – the beer was just brewing.

The meal was also very good and if you per chance ever visit Idstein, I can recommend dining at this establishment. Highly recommend. I have eaten my fill and I was sorry that there is only so much one can eat in one go without bursting.

 

 

This concludes my irregular series about this beautiful town. As a final goodbye a picture of the same town square that started it, at night before I went to sleep.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 10 – A Bolster and a Guard

Whilst the blade was the most time-consuming part, in a project like this there is still a lot of metalwork to be done. Once the handle is turned, next step is to make a bolster and a guard, and fit all these four parts together. Precision is important here. Not precision as in adhering to measurements from a drawing, but precision of how the parts fit together. I have made myself a set of measurement from the game 3D model that I aim to get near to, but I will not fuss about getting them exactly.

The bolster I have made from a piece of pipe of unknown origin that has almost the exact diameter that I actually want to have. It is also completely free of rust, which has made me suspicious whether it is not stainless steel. No matter, I have simply cut off a piece and polished it.

I did not polish it on the belt grinder all the way through the finest belts, but I stopped at around Trizact A16 and I went straight tot he buffer after that. Only I did not use the felt wheel straightaway, but a coarse sisal one with coarse polishing paste, then a felt wheel with medium polishing paste, then felt with fine polishing paste and finally felt wheel with jeweler’s rouge.

In order to be able to work with the piece on the buffer safely I have hammered it on a round dowel. During the polishing I took care to turn it in different angles against the wheel in order to get slightly satin surface – buffing in one direction only makes mirror polish and I did not want that.

The bolster is not completely round, but very slightly oval. I wanted to be able to feel the edge alignment of the dagger when held in bare hand. To further help with this I have also filed a fine grid of grooves on each side of the bolster. With that done, I could affix it to the handle. For that I have coated the relevant part with hot hide glue, stuck the bolster on there and hammered a few wooden splinters between the bolster and the handle to center it properly and to hold it in place.

With that done I had to shape the tang on the belt grinder so it was continuously ever so slightly smaller than the blade and square the shoulders (those were round prior to hardening because a sharp edge could lead to the tang breaking of in quench). To protect it from scratches I have covered the whole blade with masking tape. When the tang was shaped, I have affixed the blade in the vice with additional protection of a wet rug, and I shaped the hole in the handle to fit by the previously shown burning technique. I had to be careful for the heat to not overheat the blade base, but to be hot far enough to get a fit where the bolster was mere 3 mm from it.

Next piece in this jigsaw was the guard. I wanted that to be between 3 to 3,5 mm thick, but I had no suitable piece of steel that was not pitted too much. In the end I had to cut a piece of a structural steel V profile that was way too thick. I have spent rather more time on truing it and grinding it down to desired thickness than I wished to. Unlike for the bolster, I had no good and comfortable way to hold on that small flat piece of steel safely, so I nearly ground my finger tips off. Luckily only fingernails got slightly chewed and I have learned how to do this safely later on, when I was polishing it. I have to finish the supporting table for my belt grinder in order to do these finicky things.

When ground to slightly above the desired thickness, I have punched the centre and drawn the design of the guard. I like to make my own tools, and I have indeed made my drawing needle, but I wimped out and bought the compass. The work required to make it might be fun, but it would be way too much time that would definitively be spent better elsewhere.

Next step I have just drilled a 4 mm hole in the center, 0,5 mm smaller than the maximum width of the tang at the blade base. In order to transfer the outline of the blade base onto the steel I have poked a hole with the tang into a piece of paper – Lipton tea box was the right thickness and firmness.

Cutting the hole for the tang I have done with a fret saw. In the past I broke a lot of blades whilst doing this, but it seems I have finally learned how to do it properly this time. I broke none and it was done in lickety-split. Note the aluminium covers for the vice jaws. These are important, because I need the piece to be held firmly and safely, but I do not wish the hardened jaws of the vice damage the soft steel of the worked piece.

After cutting the rough outline of the hole came of course the most difficult part – fitting and shaping the hole to fit the tang precisely. This took the better part of an hour with fine and diamond files, and another hour or so the final shaping and polishing of the piece to the same finish as the bolster.

Here you can see the face of the guard. The other side, facing the hand, has rounded edges. I was thinking about doing that, then I was thinking about doing both sides flat and in the end I had no choice because before I figured out how to polish it properly, my hand slipped and I chamfered an edge that I did not want to chamfer. I was lucky – the result is comfortable even against bare hand and it looks good. I might however take some more time for polishing this piece. A few hand courses with coarse hematite might be needed, right now it shines a bit like a bare arse among the bushes.

Here you can see the parts assembled. Of course there is a lot of masking tape covering all the bits that I do not want to get dirty or scratched, and most of the focus is on the mess that is my workbench. But you would not expect me to show you pretty pictures at this stage, would you?

Lilac Potato Blossom

Some potatoes have lilac colored blossoms, I do not know why. It does not seem to be entirely dependent on which variety it is, since there are both white and lilac in one row and that row allegedly contains only one variety. My suspicion is however that my dad mixed up the tubers inadvertently and that the lilac blossoms are those from the red potatoes (I do not know the exact variety we bought this year).

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Anatomy Atlas Part 13 – Facial muscles

Looking at preserved human heads in formaldehyde was not one of the most enjoyable experiences  during my studies. One gets accustomed to pretty much anything but looking at someone’s actual face with removed skin is very disconcerting.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Drawing faces is one area where my skill is seriously lacking. I do not have problem recognizing people or remembering their faces, but I have great trouble picturing or recalling human face in my mind, and as a consequence I have trouble drawing it. Even when my drawing skills were at their best, I would not be able to draw an identikit. I also have trouble describing people verbally, there is some disconnect in my head between recognizing someone and remembering how they look like. I can be way over my head in love with a person, yet I would not be able to tel the color of her eyes unless I make conscious and targeted effort to remember it.

Regarding this the interesting experience is not the study of anatomy, but the study that I attempted afterward – study of arts. During the practical part of admission exams we were given a bust of Goethe to draw and I broke cold sweat. I would prefer to draw anything else but a human face.

I have passed, but only just. Therefore I could not enlist in my preferred program because It filled with people with much better scores, and I had to settle in my secondary choice. That was in the end one of the reasons why I abandoned these studies after one year, respectively that has made the inevitable decision a lot easier.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 11 – Ownership of the Means of Production

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

It can be argued that the regime in former Soviet bloc was never communist. I would agree with that and so did the regime itself. However to argue that it was not socialist or leftist would be false. The regime did try to provide for people and take care of them. And whilst it was agreed that the ideal of communism was not achieved yet, the means of production did belong to the people. Sort of.

The argument presented to us at school was a simple syllogism: Means of production belong to the state. The state consists of the people. Therefore the means of production belong to the people.

As it often is, it never is that simple and it did not work out. And the experience convinced me that ownership of the means of production by the people cannot work on grand scale. I think it might work on small-scale, on a scale of up to a few dozen or perhaps a few hundred people, not more. This is about the maximum where people can function as internally cohesive society (commune, if you wish), because at this small-scale people can manage to keep internal tabs of tits for tats. So cheaters and slackers can feel the negative consequences of their actions quickly either by being shunned by those they wronged, or by not getting their share of the produce etc. Thus people keep connection to each other and to the consequences of their actions, because those consequences – both social and economical – are nearby both in time and space.

I have already mentioned slacking at work, because nobody was motivated to work too much. What has thrived on the other hand was black market for labor. So for example if you wanted a house repaired, via official means it might take years and not be done properly. The only way to get things done was often to have “friends” help you to repair it in their free time. Such helps were paid cash without paper trail and artisans like plumbers, electricians etc. were highly sought after – and such illegal work was for them the only means to get extra money. So they skived off of work and often even stole materials from the state in order to make untaxed money on the side (immediate and personal reward – and also immediate and personal punishment if the word got around that one does a sloppy job).

Rarely anyone ever felt this is wrong. There was a great emotional disconnect between the State and its people. The above mentioned syllogism was not convincing enough. I mentioned the saying “who does not steal from the state, steals from their own family”. It was perceived by many people that since everything belongs to the state, it also belongs to ME and therefore I am entitled to help myself when the opportunity presents itself. One teacher tried to explain to us that such is not the case, that by stealing for example a sack of cement from the state of ten million people means one is only taking one tenth of one millionth of said sack that is their own, and the rest is stolen from the remaining 9.999.999 people, but I have noticed that none of my schoolmates was affected much by this logic. Those 9.999.999 people are a faceless crowd, an abstract concept too big to fit into human mind.

The problem here, as Terry Pratchett once brilliantly stated in Night Watch, was not the wrong kind of government, but the wrong kind of people. People on average are not kind-hearted, altruistic and rational. They are petty, selfish and short-sighted. Trying to make them connect with something as grand as a “state” or “nation” only works as long as they are personally and immediately affected. It cannot keep them motivated for long and for a reward that might only affect their grandchildren when the communism finally arrives and money is not needed anymore.

 

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 9 – Turning the Handle

The dagger of Ciri in The game Witcher 3 has handle turned from some yellow wood. Looks almost canary yellow in the game, but orange in the extracted 3D file without the in-game lighting. There is only one wood that I know that has such color – Osage orange – and only when freshly worked at that, it ages to dark brown. There is another wood that has very nice yellow (vanilla) color both fresh and aged, and that is Black elder. I would love to make the handle from black elder, because it is beautiful hard wood and it is a pleasure to work with. Alas, I do not have a piece big enough. So I had to go with Sycamore maple which is pale yellow and ages to slightly darker yellow.

I begun by cutting an approximately 50×50 mm rectangular block on my circular saw. Dried maple wood is unfortunately not only very hard, but also has very small pores, so it tends to burn on circular saw. There is nothing that can be done about it except to work slowly. Unfortunately I only had this one piece of big enough maple wood at hand and it had a very deep split at exactly the wrong place, so I had to shorten it to 120 mm, 6 mm shorter than I wanted to based on the proportions from the 3D game file. But since I am not aiming for exact replica and I will make slight changes to the design of the dagger anyway that should not bother me. But it does, go figure. I can gain a few mm on the bolster and on the rondel later on if I decide it needs to be done.

 

Next step was to turn the handle. This is where I can show off with my Poor Man’s Lathe that I have built twenty years ago. Unfortunately I did not have too many opportunities to work on it yet, so my experience with wood-turning is extremely limited.

First came fixing the piece of wood between the points of the lathe. On the left the drill holds not a drill bit, but a special piece with a central point and three screwdriver like flattened teeth to hold onto the workpiece. Normally I would hammer it into the wood, but sycamore wood is very hard. I had to pre-drill the holes. On the right there is a round tip that goes into a depression in the wood. It helps to put a bit of grease or a few drops of oil on this point, otherwise the friction can and will burn the wood and it will smoke.

Second comes turning the wood down to a cylinder of the maximum diameter the final piece is supposed to have. On this part it is important to work with slow rotations because the workpiece is not yet symmetrical and on high rotations it would vibrate and it could potentially fly out of the lathe and smash window in best case, or throat in worst case. Neither of these lessons have I learned first hand, and do not intend to. Better safe than sorry.

So easy does it, no rushing, slowly chipping on the edges until there is a symmetrical cylinder rotating on the lathe. Then the speed can be increased and final shape can be formed. Since this is hard wood, the angle of the chisel blade to the piece is held at close to 90 degrees and I was more scratching than cutting the wood. Trying to get a continuous cut on completely dried hardwood like this is asking for trouble unless one is very, very good and experienced at it – in best case the chisel bites in deep and no matter how sharp it is, it tears of a splinter instead of cutting, ruining the piece. Worst case the leverage could damage the chisel or tear it from one’s hands and… I shudder to think about it. I learned the first lesson here, but fortunately not the second one. For the same reason also the chisel support should be kept as close to the workpiece as possible the whole time.

When turning the shape I first turned town the part for bolster as precisely as I could under the circumstances (the circumstances being that I have no bolster prepared yet). then I turned a piece of handle down to the final width and lastly I turned the middle. Apart from the overall width on both ends I did not do any measurements and I turned the handle down to a shape that simply “looked” right to me.

After that I could remove the chisel support and could polish the piece with 80, 120, 180 and 320 grit sandpaper. This I have done partly on lathe by turning the piece and partly in hand sanding lengthwise in order to remove all visible scratches. Sycamore wood is very hard and can take very good polish, but this piece will get dirty yet no matter what I do, so there is no point fussing about that too much yet.

Last step is making the hole for the tang. I do not have a drill bit long and thin enough for this, so I drilled as far as I could and I burned the rest through with a piece of steel of approximately the right shape held in a vice and heated up with torch to red heat. This has produced an awful lot of smoke and took a lot longer than I hoped for. Not an enjoyable work, if you ask me. Not particularly safe one either. Even with the door open wide the whole room has filled with smoke hat stung the eyes even through protective welding goggles.

Towards the end, when the burnings from both ends met in the middle and actually made a hole throughout the whole handle, the smoke spouting out of the end could be ignited for a short time. That was fun to watch and a bugger to make a picture of, with burning torch in one hand and the phone in the other. I have managed only this one picture, where the flame almost goes out already. After I made hole through, I have closed the gas valve on the bomb and put the hot torch on granite stone on the table. Thus I was finished for the day with nearly thre hours of work done. Two hours later I went back to to check nothing burns and on finding my shop smoke-free I could go to bed.

Next step will be to find suitable pieces of steel for the bolster and the guard, and shaping them together with the hanlde – and the tang – so everything fits together.