Lost Art Press

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Fractions in the Real World

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Here’s a page from a forthcoming pamphlet I’m working on about the geometric truths that underlie – and led to the development of – all our layout tools, including (and ending up at) the sector. If you have kids around the house, you might find it interesting (maybe even enlightening) to put the sector into their hands to show them how they can physically (by hand and eye) manipulate a tool to illustrate the basic intuitive concept of the fraction.

As you’ll see when I get the pamphlet done, you can use every one of your layout tools to illustrate – that is, to perform – the reality behind the geometric math they are being injected with at school.

If you don’t have a sector, you can download (for free) a template to make one from the “shop” page at By Hand & Eye. Click here to visit that page. There you’ll find a manual for using a three-scale sector on the page as well…for a small fee to help George and I keep the lights on and the electrons flowing.

— Jim Tolpin, byhandandeye.com

Workbenches from The Empire of Germany/Holy Roman Empire and etc.

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Hellwag3One of the workbenches in Andre-Jacob Roubo’s French masterwork on the craft is called out as a “German” workbench in Plate 279 of “l’Art du menuisier.” It features a sliding deadman/leg vise, lots of storage and a complex tail vise.

While I am still searching, I’ve yet to find an historical bench that matches the image of the German bench in Plate 279 (in contrast, I’ve seen hundreds of benches that match Roubo’s Plate 11).

So what did 18th-century benches look like from the area we now call Germany? The answer, of course, varies. Here we’re going to look at a 1764 bench from “Hallens, Werkstätte der Künste” (I think I have that right; I’m not the best at reading German blackletter type).

This entire plate could occupy a book of discussion because there is so much to see and explore. But let’s stick to the bench for the most part.

It is drawn as being made from fairly thin components with joinery providing the rigidity. Tusk tenons do most of the work in keeping the base from racking. And lest you think tusk tenons are weak, please ready this fun article from Will Myers where tests them to destruction.

The first thing I noticed about the bench (besides that the tail vise was missing its dog), was the tool well. This might be the earliest depiction of a tool well I have in my archive – I’ll have to check.

Also interesting: the face vise. It’s a shoulder vise that looks like it hasn’t quite cast off its crochet origins. Check out the nice bead to the left of the hook, which is really the only ornamentation on the bench.

Finally, we have the system of dogs that works in conjunction with the tail vise. I usually curse modern manufacturers for placing the dogs and drawer so they interfere with one another, but it appears this is not a modern problem. Two of the dogs are in the way of the drawer. Sigh.

And finally finally, look below at Fig. 20. A bench like this (where the legs are not coplanar to the front edge of the benchtop) requires a board jack. And this is a nice one.

I hope you enjoy the plate as a whole – there’s lots to see here.

This is the most conventional of the German benches we’re going to look at. Next up, some vise mysteries.

— Christopher Schwarz

High in the Andes

Posted on by fitz
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Volcán Cotopaxi (5,897m/19,347ft) peeking through the clouds. Cotopaxi is about 50km from our house, and last erupted in August 2015.

I’m used to working up a sweat while involved in some heavy sawing or planing, but what I’m not used to doing is gasping for air and getting a pounding headache in the process.

The Andes are big mountains, and Quito is one of the highest-elevation metropolitan areas in the world. Fortunately, we are living in the suburb of Tumbaco, which is about 1600 ft lower in elevation than Quito proper. Unfortunately, that means that we’re still at 7800 ft.

The traditional treatment for symptoms of altitude sickness is mate de coca, or coca leaf tea. In Peru, commercially produced mate de coca, in teabag form, can be found just about anywhere, and in the higher elevation cities like Cusco, you can purchase large plastic bags of the dried leaves for only a few dollars. Just about every hotel in Cusco has a bowl of coca leaves and a pot of hot water in the lobby for you to brew your mate. Strictly speaking, I don’t think the bulk leaves are legal, but nobody seems to care (probably because they’re all drinking mate).

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Mate de coca, the quicker picker-upper.

Mate de coca is far less common in Ecuador, apparently because of greater influence from U.S. Government policymakers. There is some tension between its classification as a harmful drug and its traditional use as a natural medicinal/spiritual plant. You won’t see mate de coca in a supermarket, but you can find it if you look. (I know of a specialty gourmet coffee and chocolate shop in Quito that stocks it, for example.) The only place I’ve seen whole leaves is at the market in Otavalo, and even there it’s in itty-bitty little bags.

The active ingredients in mate de coca are cocaine and related alkaloids (of course), as well as methyl salicylate, which is chemically similar to aspirin and has analogous pain-relieving properties.

Does it work? It seems to, although it might be that it’s the methyl salicylate that’s doing the bulk of the work, rather than the cocaine. Consuming mate de coca does have a couple of noticeable additional consequences: For one thing, it has an energizing effect (which the Incas used to advantage when they wanted their slaves to work harder). It also inspires confidence, which can be a good thing when one is immersed in artistic pursuits, but is probably not such a great idea while working with tools having very sharp edges. So for woodworking, I think I’ll stick to acetazolamide and ibuprofen.

–Steve Schafer

Who Has More Soft Wax for You?

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Katy has become a little owl-obsessed while reading Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” hence the stuffed animal in her photos.

She made about 50 more tins of wax last week but we sold a bunch at our storefront on Saturday (thanks everyone). This morning she listed the remaining 32 on her etsy store here.

I hope we can work on developing the black wax a little more (our carbon black showed up), but Katy is taking a class in screen printing this coming week, so the wax experiments might have to wait for a week.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Make (or Buy) a Sector and Learn to Use it

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If you haven’t heard of the sector, it probably means you aren’t an artillery officer or a ship’s navigator working in the 17th century. An invention attributed to the great astronomer Galileo, the sector was a calculation instrument comprised of a pair of hinged plates engraved with a variety of scales that – coupled with a pair of dividers – enabled the operator to calculate proportions, polygons, trigonometric and numerous other table functions.

Gallileo-editedBy the late 1700s, documents show that the sector was also taken up by architects and artisans to lay out designs based on the once ubiquitous whole-number segmentation and ratio-proportioning system of their trade. However, as 19th century machine-based manufacturing eclipsed the traditional practices of the artisans, their design and layout tools – dividers, sectors and applied Euclidian geometry in general – faded almost entirely from use.

I have discovered, however, that a simple version of the sector can be an incredibly useful and efficient tool for creating scaled drawings (or even doing direct layouts on the stock) when working within traditional design and layout systems. As you may know, George Walker and I describe this system in excruciating detail in our hard-bound book “By Hand and Eye,” and somewhat less-so excruciating in “By Hound and Eye” – the workbook.

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With this three-scale sector in one hand and a pair of dividers in the other you’ll find that you can, literally in seconds, create equal segments between two points; derive harmonic proportional relationships along a line or between dimensions; generate angled lines to certain rise-to-run pitches; set out the facets of polygons (up to 12 sides); find the radius to draw arcs of these polygons between any two points; determine the circumference of a circle knowing its radius; and find out what your brother-in-law really does for a living.

Once you start working with our variant of this ancient calculator, you’ll wonder how you ever made do without it.

If you go to the “Shop” page of our By Hand & Eye website you’ll have access to a free-to-download template to make your own sector to play with. Here you’ll also discover a downloadable 40-page pamphlet on using the sector (offered for a small fee to defray expenses and keep George and me off the streets). For those who don’t want to cut out and assemble (i.e. hinge) the template, we also offer an assembled sector (with the “bonus” of being hand signed by George and myself).

— Jim Tolpin, ByHandAndEye.com