Saturday, October 24, 2009

serial,even, odd, prime, fibonacci


On a recent visit to the den of the Plush Neon Monkey the spectre of block logic rose yet again. I`ve got that "crap did I carve another six fingered hand" feeling again . As he examined the first few of the arithmetic blocks I kinda didn`t want to look. "Is there some plan to how these numbers end up?"asked Plush Neon Monkey. So we began to list ways to catagorize the digits and prioritize their placement to compile an intrestesting, usefull set of number blocks. After all it`s not as much fun to finish a block like this one, deet-da-dee.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Arithmetic Blocks







Surprise, Yet another fold in the block logic. Who`da thunk tha hexahedron would get so much play. Well there`s a reason that they call`em blocks. I kinda backed into them, I just wanted something to make walls out of. The square dimension lumber at Home Depot was limited to 13/8"x13/8"x8`white wood and 15/8"x15/8"x24" oak `parson`s-table` legs (nice wood, a little pricey and hard to sand). About 5` of the 13/8" was suficient to make a fair sized pile of cube and double-cube pieces. Even with careful marking the hand-cut wobble factor was a bit disconcerting. Testing revealed that simple cubes were very popular amoung the youngest of our test-pilots. the white wood was soft, but the small size of the recess made relief symbols not very inteligable. The white wood recessed evenly,and tests with a Weller WSB25WB wood-burner made the arithmetic blocks look atainable and fun.

Monday, October 5, 2009

I meant to do that








I meant to do that, too. Well maybe not just like that. The `I meant to do that' factor doesn`t
really apply to blocks quite as easily as it does to some forms of art. The hand cut wobble factor has been humbling to disconcerting. A great deal of care was expended in precisley drawing and marking the polygons for these blocks (especially the packing set). Miter sawing every piece I can and using the sanding block and flipping the work around to keep the faces as true as possible, has still yielded some wobbly and some slightly asymitrical pieces. Well I guess block logic includes lessons in justifying. Precision length measurements seem more straightforward, and yet this dimension has given me cause to re-cut and gang-sand in an effort to make them stack better.

Ok so my ham cut blocks sometimes stack like warm cheese, hey even a crooked castle
is still pretty cool. So here`s the packing stacking set.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Indeedy, Packed!

Stacking and nesting and packing oh my! Yeah yeah, packing or crowding cylinders into a
polygon and making it fit snugly against them, has been surprisingly chalenging. The deceptively simple task of drawing patterns for snug fitting parts, requierd several attempts to just fit a poster-paper collar that didn`t bow or fall down.

How wide to not break, how thin to look like just a line, how long to fit in with at least some of the other blocks? With this set of blocks, the long piece is five and seven eights inches and the shorter one is two and fifteen sixteenths inches. The length of the long piece is also the same as three two-by-fours thicknesses.