There will be more spiders from you! In the meantime, I think this green spider looked lovely when it waved at me from our plum. The way it was running around on that leaf it looked like some sort of dance routine.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Shake it to the left…
Shake it to the right…
Oh, didn’t see ya there. Hi!
Walter Sorrels musings on The Handmade Dilemma.
More butterfly pictures. I am envious of the scarce swallowtail. I have never seen one of those live. What a sight.
© Nightjar, click for full size.
Enjoy!
Iphiclides podalirius
Vanessa atalanta
Vanessa cardui
Amazing how expressive a few cuts in the wood and an occasional hole can be.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Nightjar has sent some exquisite butterfly pictures. I love the first one. The contrast between the blue butterfly and pink blossom is just amazing, and the focus is simply perfect.
© Nightjar, click for full size.
Enjoy!
Celastrina argiolus.
Colias sp.
Vanessa cardui
Our amazing breathing sacs, evolved from an invagination of our gut. Had that invagination been dorsal rather than ventral, we might be spared that awkward crossing of tubes that makes eating and breathing at the same time so dangerous task.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Id did not go too much into detail here, but I did outline the branching of bronchi and bronchial tubes somewhat. Which is an interesting issue in and of itself.
The tubes do not simply split willy-nilly, the branching is really intricate and is optimised so that at every fork the air pressure stays the same, thus guaranteeing that all tubes contribute to the air exchange and there are no (ideally) pockets of stationary air. This is no easy task for engineering, piping is difficult to make and ventilation systems in buildings often need additional ventilators added to the pipes at various places to compensate for pressure drop at some junctions.
In our lungs this is partly achieved by the fact that there are no right angles anywhere and partly by the fact that the forks are arranged in such a way as to reach all the alveoli with the shortest possible amount of piping. In modern engineering such tasks beyond certain level are allegedly sbest solved by evolutionary algorithms, because there are too many variables involved for simply designing them right of the bat.
I dug out more spider pics, because, why not?
I have made these pictures last year, but I never got round to send them. These were one of the first macro shots I have made, when I still did not know what I am supposed to do (I still do not, but slightly less so).
This spider is slightly translucent and very small – that mesh is just a few mm across, it is the texturing on a sheet of extruded polystyrene that I have used to make thermally isolating covers for my sewage treatment facility.
I love the copper colour of the abdomen contrasting with the translucent green of the thorax and the legs. It looks like made from glass or gemstones and precious metal. Actually it could be a nice inspiration for a jewelery, if it were not a spider. But maybe there is a market for spider shaped jewelry?
I just could not get a good shot at its face. It was running around constantly and in all possible directions, not staying still for a moment. But I noticed that under certain angles its eyes seem to reflect light like cat’s and I managed to catch that on a few shots. Then I have let it scuttle away, taking care to put it in a place where I will not squish it.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
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.
Cars were some of those goods that were difficult to obtain and difficult to maintain, even when you had the money – so we never had one. We did not exactly need one either, because public transport was in those times sufficient. It was not market driven and thus was not dependent on population density.
However cars were still useful and partly they became a status symbol so many people in our little town never understood why my parents did not get one. One of my mother’s colleagues was visiting us one day and she snooped around in our garden shed looking for the car she was convinced we have stashed and hidden away there. She just did not understand that my parents did not use their positions to enrich themselves and get the much coveted goods of the time.
What was fairly typical of the cars was their distribution in any given land. Someone interested in cars could probably travel in hibernation between the various lands of the eastern bloc and then recognize which country they arrived at by looking out of the window at the nearest parking lot.
In Czechoslovak Socialist Republic the far most predominant cars were Skodas, at the time of my life mainly Skoda 120 and towards the end of the regime occasional Skoda Favorit. There were zero cars from the western part of Europe and a very limited amount of cars from other countries in the Soviet power sphere. Father of one of my classmates had a very coveted Lada VAZ-2101 “Žiguli” which was admired for its sturdiness and strength as well as for being essentially very rare piece. He only could afford it – and get his hands on it – because he was middle ranking military officer of the border patrol.
The parking spaces in CZ were mostly empty and usually there was some mix of different cars despite the prevalence of Skodas. I was not used to seeing many cars all at once, or a parking space really full.
So when I was visiting East Germany for a summer camp at about eleven or twelve years age, I had an entirely new experience at that time, one that was very strong to an impressionable little child.
Rows and rows of cars stretching for hundreds of meters on each side of the street. Parking lots so cramped it was difficult to squeeze between the cars. Different colors, but all the cars were essentially identical, leading to strange uniformity. All were Trabants.
Trabants were known in CZ, and they were much derided. They were the cheapo cars for those who could not afford a “proper” car. Having a Trabant was seen as a sign of under achievement, barely better than having no car at all. There were – and still are – many derogative terms for the car, like “angry vacuum cleaner”, or “bakeliťák”.
This added a discordant note to the experience. Seeing that eastern Germans had apparently more cars than we gave me a sense of awe, seeing that the cars are of lower quality gave me a sense of superiority. However the strongest of all the memories is the sense of a complete lack of choice and of a mind-numbing uniformity wherever you go. It was my first experience of an outward demonstration of the fact that we are actually expected to blend into crowds. And that everything in the system – all the overt legal and covert economic pressures – is designed to quash individuality and make us into a uniform mass.
I did not form this opinion so clearly at that time of course, but this was the start of that realization.
I was moving old woodpiles closer to the house for winter and sorting some old planks for sawing, when suddenly I found this huge orb weaver on one piece of rotten wood. I put it carefully in a place where I could take pictures and it was kind enough to stay in place long enough for me to fetch my camera, and my PC today obliged to getting its act together for long enough for me to correct the pictures for posting (my homemade macro lens has, unfortunately, strong chromatic aberration).
In Czech, local orb weavers are called “křižák” (pl. “křižáci”) which means “crusader”. The name derives from the markings on their back which often have the spots arranged in somewhat vaguely cross-like pattern, especially from some angles. I will be most interested in their names in other languages.
I am not exactly arachnophobic, but I do not particularly enjoy unexpected encounters with such a big spider either and my first reaction is to flee. I found out that having a first thought “I must take pictures to share on the blog” helps with that.
We were told at school that no local spider can bite through human skin, but one of my friends was bitten by one on the neck and he disagrees. I was also bitten by one local spider in the thin skin on the back of the hand (I do not know the species), so I disagree with that wisdom too and I am careful with them. Not for fear of poison, but allergic reaction or skin infection are not fun either.
For last picture I cropped all the excess around the beast to show her (probably) in all her magnificent and terrible (and hairy) beauty.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
No spiders were harmed in making of this blog post. The specimen in question was released in safe location where I could not squish her with firewood. If she stayed there is another matter of course.
Today, when reading my portion of stomach turning politics on RAW STORY I noticed that one of the film ads looks suspiciously like it is talking about Queen, but Freddie Mercury was shot way too up close and the picture quality was way too good for seventies. So I looked closer. And I googled. And I found out that two of the living members – Brian May and Roger Taylor – are producing a movie about the band that is due to be released in November this year.
Now I wish I was living somewhere near a functioning cinema that would screen the stuff. My sister absolutely adored Queen when I was a kid, but I did not notice them much at that time. However later in life I found out that some of their melodies actually got embedded in my brain and to this very day Bohemian Rhapsody, Under Pressure or Radio Ga Ga are amongst my most favourite songs and Spread Your Wings is sure to bring tears to my eyes. All the more that since then I learned English and therefore can understand the lyrics, which makes it all the more powerful.
I do not listen to music much, because when I have the time (like when driving) I find it often distracting, and I rarely have time to just sit and enjoy it. But multiple Queen songs rank definitively near the very top of my personal “Top Ten”.
Maybe I should paint a picture again. I used to listen to music when painting. I miss that greatly.
I got mugged in the Memory Lane.
Ian LaSpina, AKA Knyght Errant speaks about what is and is not proper to do when one’s goal is to make a historically accurate object.
Some species of shield bug. It was very shy and kept hiding.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
I have decided to make the fittings for the scabbard from the same shovel that provided steel for the rondel. It is good carbon steel of appropriate thickness and I reasoned that after I grind it to remove all pitting from the outer side, it shall be thin just right. However, because I wanted to bend the steel at least in part whilst it is cold, I had to first anneal the shovel – in case you do not know, shovels are hardened and tempered. So I have decided to burn some more rotten wood, bbq dinner and anneal the shovel at the same time. Luckily the droughts in the place where I live are less severe than in the rest of CZ, so we do not have ban on fires (yet). Nevertheless, despite how it might appear, I am actually careful with fire – I always watch the direction in which the wind is blowing, I have water prepared and I douse all coals when I am done. And I have portable fireplace that I position in the middle of a gravel field¹.
I proceeded to make a paper template by wrapping it around the scabbard and adding about one cm for length. That I transferred onto the shovel and I cut the rough shape with angle grinder.
My improvised bending setup did not work as intended. The main problem being, that this steel proved to be extremely tough and hard, even annealed. I tried and tried, but it just did not work. After a few attempts I gave up and had to think up another way. I have decided that I have to do what I did not want to – forge it hot.
I could not go outside and make fire, because firstly it was way too hot outside for that and secondly because my improvised anvil for this delicate task was an old annealed file held in a vice. As a source of heat therefore I had to do with handheld propane torch and a few fireclay bricks as an impromptu forge. Unfortunately I forgot to make more detailed pictures of this process so you have to be content with red-hot glowing steel on fireclay brick laid on a granite paving stone laid on wooden bench. I see you cringe with my mind’s eye and I agree. For subsequent works I moved the whole assembly onto the circular saw table (also seen in the picture) which is made from metal and therefore fireproof. Needles to say, bucket of water was on standby the whole time and I checked the workshop a few times after I finished. I do not like doing these things inside, I will have to get some better setup, perhaps a mobile vice? I will have to think about it.
The bent strip did not fit neatly around the scabbard whatever I have done, so I decided in the end to shorten it even more so the ends do not meet, but lay just outside the stitches in leather. And to cover that gap with another slim strip of steel. this proved to be a very good fit all around.
I was thinking about whether to make the throat covered in steel or whether to let it be just the wood and leather on the inside. I decided to go for steel, which of course meant third piece, flat piece covering the throat with cut-out rough shape of the blade. Very rough. I was not even trying to aim for a good fit and I left a good 0,5-1 mm free space on all sides.
When thinking about how to connect those three parts in the most authentic manner I decided to go for silver brazing. I do not know how much silver is actually in the brazing rod I bought, but it costs 12,-€ a piece. Compare that with brass brazing rods that costs 5,-€ per five (or more) pieces. Whew. But I wanted to first try it with the more expensive silver rod because it has lower melting temperature than brass and my welding, brazing and soldering skills are not top-notch, to put it mildly. I also hoped that the silver solder will have less profound color contrast with the steel than the brass one would have. Which it does, but the color contrast is still very strong.
It took three attempts to braze the thing together with no gaps anywhere and I used up almost the whole rod. Oopsie-daisy, this is proving to be expensive. So when removing all the excess solder, i was filing it carefully and slowly onto a piece of paper and collecting all the silver dust into a little plastic bowl that I later have sealed with a lid. I hope to be able to mix that dust with boric acid and use it for brazing the chape. I certainly would not like to spend another 12,-€ on the chape alone.
As far as I know – and I would love to inspect some medieval originals sometimes – medieval craftsmen did not take particular care about the “back side” of the scabbards and scabbard fittings, or even swords for that matter. After all what is the point in finely polishing something that will not be seen? Today the aesthetics sense is slightly different and people expect things to look just perfect from all angles. I have decided to not overtly polish the back side, but I did somewhat polish and buff it for the sole reason that polished steel resists corrosion better. But, unlike on the front, I did not remove all pitting and I did not bother about some minor file scratches remaining visible there. And here you can see the result of my works these last few evenings. I will buff it with hematite befoe fixing it ont he scabbard for good.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The most important lesson of this exercise was perhaps that I should do these metal fittings before I shape the scabbard to its final shape and cover it with leather, and not the other way around. In retrospect it seems like something from The Collected Sayings of Captain Bloody Obvious, but fitting a piece of soft wood and leather into a steel tube should be easier than to form a steel tube around a piece of soft wood and leather. I tried to google how to do scabbard throat before I did anything of this, but I do not remember seeing this mentioned anywhere.
Last piece in the mosaic is the chape then. And then there will be pictures.
1 – The bough you can see is one that I “harvested” near the road, where it broke off of an elderly apple tree. The city seemed unwilling to clean it up, so I confiscated it for knife handles.