The Hairy Hendecahedra Project (post two)

If excelsior was as ridiculously cheap and available as it once was, I wouldn't have resorted to such an odd method to try an stabilize my Corex (like cardboard, but plastic) and clear plastic tape mold. This isn't the first time I've tried pouring concrete into a Corex mold.

 The stained dodecaocta compound chilling on the deck with various other old experiments.


Didn't turn out near as crisp as the mold. I was unprepared for the weight of the concrete squishing my mold. Even though I had it sitting in a pile of sand, it still warped some. When I took a big, old rasp and tried to square it up while it was still green, (not totally cured), it was working great and pointing up nicely till I hit the Chert rocks I used to extend my scrap grout (I'd brought home the left overs from work). Then I just had to say, "I meant to do that", and like it a little crooked.

 This time I was a little more hard headed, and employed more heroic methods than a pile of sand. I thought, there's other ways to stabilize a mold. I wanted to try the dry pack, barely damp sand with just a little Portland-cement. this would work great, except it a mess, sand is heavy, yo have to break it up to get the piece out each time... Our deck is small, one fair mess fills it all. I thought what about the vacuum-clothes packing thingy. I considered a lot of stuff to harden with the vac, and settled on rabbit bedding because its cheap and smells good, and is't easy to clean up.

   As long as the vacuum is running, this worked good, sorta. Concrete dries slow, even with hot water. The plastic bag had pleats that didn't lay down, Oh yeah rubber gloves my hands were so rough from the lime in the concrete they felt furry for a week. I pulled the mold the next day, it still wasn't hard hard. I saved the spout stuff to fill with and tried ti point it up. Not so great.

even after a lot of messy tweaking it was a bit saggy not too precise and starting to get squishy (a technical term) enough I knew to let it dry. no way there's allot of these coming this way. It probably woulda worked for plaster, but I wanted furry concrete not plaster. At least I didn't burn up the vacuum cleaner, this time. I gotta say when the vac was running the shavings were very firm, but I doubt I'll try this again.

Two Flattened Spoons

The blocks have been more than fun. I am charged,
 inspired, like totally excited. Oh yeah, and embarrassed like I forgot my cousins name. Well how about another book then. It's not like I forgot you lot. Scratch (another of my digital Batcaves) that, just cause most everybody who's doing it seems to be 8 or nine, doesn't mean coding's easy as an abacus. Like you can multiply with beads on sticks, well they do make that lovely clacking sound.

Show of hands, who knows what happens to scratched, flattened, bent, stained old spoons?

 Oddly enough, I'm not sure what happened to the two flattened spoons that started me down this trail. I found them beside the highway, and put them in my pocket. They were all scratches, and flat enough to start new jobs, but as what?

What if they come back?


I liked making the story, I wanted to see the "flatware" do well.

Really The props were my favorite part and even though I had other pages I didn't love this enough to keep tweaking it. Maybe later. I wanted blocks to play with, and dream about. If I had to choose books or blocks, I needed some new blocks. Oh yeah weird new blocks, the sooner, the stranger, the better.

The Hairy Hendecahedra Project (post one)

Moss grows surprisingly well on our deck. Even with no dirt or any sort of encouragement, except proximity. The moss on this lavender filled teacup got this big before I even noticed it. I love unusual shapes especially crystally looking ones. While surfing a polyhedra site list, I found an 11 sided one at steelpillow.com, their excellent peel for a sphenoid hendecahedron. I still have no idea how to cut a block of one but they looked like fun. So I made a model, tiny. I had no intention of trying to make enough of them to do anything cool, just a vane wish. I made it outta clear plastic and Scotch tape with Sharpied edges to remind me.

Of the five space filling polyhedra on the page with the Sphenoid Hendecahedra (by Guy Inchbald), it was by far the coolest. 6 nested in a floret, wedge edge in, form 1 layer of a solid column. Flip the next layer upside down, rinse and repeat. Butted against each other, these columns also nest solidly (duh, space filling). After a couple of months of not very inspired coding, don't see Flatware County Diet on scratch.mit.edu (so far pieces still won't follow the trails on the game board). I really wanted to see something outrageous work. As it turned out, this wasn't it, but I made some interesting mistakes.

PORTALS2 STYLE BLOCKS CONTINUE TO EVOLVE

Or devolve, but they're definitely still changing. The first effort (antique storage cube) was good enough, even if a little ham-handed, to lead to further development of a Portals2 style block set. But the companion block in it's several incarnations kept development stalled for days. Marking accurately, and then the equally important burning correctly seemed at first to be the biggest challenges, But no!

 Frustrated by by my first couple of tries at burning good clear circles, I tried carving a couple. Ow, While the obviously needed carving workout was eventually justified by a couple of pretty excellent laser cubes, the extensive lowering of background required in the carved companion-cubes slowed their production to less than one a day. The worst thing though, was I was stuck with several dead end cubes, too nice to toss and too hard to fix. I wasn't ready to give up, but wasn't sure which way to jump just yet, so I tried a new direction and made the cube-symbol block from the legend (level instruction panels).

 The rebirth of the wayward laser cube was a turning point. Hey, you didn't think every carving turned out right the first time, did you? I can't speak for any other wood-cutter types, but I don't throw away every project that takes an unexpected turn.



What about the, "I meant to do that," factor? Often the detour leads to an undiscovered but equally if not more interesting destination. Hence two lack luster wood-burned laser cubes, followed by an interesting but injured carved one, followed by a cool carved but non-directional one, followed by an excellent aim-able carved one, and at last a do-able interesting wood-burned version.

All these repairs and redesigns have brought me back to the less than satisfactory carved companion cubes. Emboldened by my laser cube success I jumped the most chipped face of one of the carved companion cube experiments , and laid a couple of razor-saw cuts with the grain and patched in a complementary grained piece and clamped it up. Woo-hoo! I liked it so much I went back and fixed the lowered end grain and remarked and lightly cut my new lines. The wood-burner follows the lightly scored line very accurately, while scoring too deeply produces a double line.

PORTAL BLOCKS FROM BLOCKLOGIC

 After three or four tries I managed to make a couple of companion looking cubes good enough that they need a job, like sitting onna button. These were the ones that inspired me to carve the button. The 2nd "laser cube" was good enough to make me consider maybe making a few more. At least try a couple of more styles. I'm still hoping for a wood-burned version that's close enough to be fun to make and play with.

 Alright then, I've got eight keepers and a button so far. The antique storage cube was the first I tried and it was acceptable, but the necessary logo art was way too to dense to burn at that size. I faked the logo (simplified as accurately as possible) and was going to leave the words off altogether till Plush Neon Monkey suggested that I just fake it. Huh? "You know", he said. "Just make a fairly good first letter followed by the approximate number of uprights and down strokes with some of the cross-strokes for spice." It must have worked pretty good, Cheddar Vic tried to correct the spelling.    

BALL-O-CAPS, CLACKEY-SACK

  Alright so I'm not momentarily nimble enough to Hacky the Clackey, but I still love to slap them around. They sound great and the dead-blow nature of the ball-o-caps slows down the action just enough to make it fun.


I've made a number of these balls-o-caps over the years, but I always tied them together with soft wire. I've recently mastered tying them up with string. Here's a few of the new ones.

  In the Acorn-Bamboo article I mentioned Poly. That excellent  shareware program shows 157 shapes. Crystallographic Polyhedra by Dr. Steffen Weber also shows several really cool ones. It's under the Wireframe Polyhera heading on his homepage jcrystal.com  

BAMBOO ACORN RHOMBIC DODECAHEDRON

 Yeah one of those. Looks like it might make a pretty cool Christmas tree ornament huh? Good thing it's only mid October, it took about three hours to get this one done. After I figured out how to get the knots tight enough (hemostats) it went pretty smooth. 

 I love working with bamboo and acorns, but haven't thought of anything this interesting lately. I picked up most of the acorns in the Plush Neon Monkeys yard. Then I broke a bunch drilling the holes with an Xacto. Good thing I had a stash from past acorn projects.

 The bamboo was left over from earlier projects too. I made a whole bunch (two or three square feet) of bamboo beads, most of which split while drying. Mimosa sticks work good too. The seasonal growth is pretty soft, and has a pith core you can push out. We used to make beads out of them when we were little.

 I thought I was making a cube octahedron (intersections only) but I couldn't get the acorn caps to tie that close together. The symmetry I was after, was fours surrounded by threes. After I was done I looked for my symmetry on Poly, and found it in the Catalan solids list.

 During the assembly phase the model developed some weird tensions. It seemed like it was heading for the ditch, but I remembered the plastic strap rhombic triacontahedron Sarah (MillieKitty's human) and I assembled with pop-rivets. It developed such weird tensions that as we were getting close to closing it up, it pulled it's self into a wad. So this time I was confident that if I stuck with the symmetry and made sure all my fours were surrounded by threes eventually it would close up.

 Ok, its not a block but it is fun and thought provoking. Interpreting polyhedra is one my favorite things to play at. The plastic strap models were springy and cast cool shadows, and the pillow forms are just nice to have around. Gotta love a 32 sided pillow, eh?

  I used Jute twine cause I liked the color, but I realize now the knot tension thing would have been easier if I'd used elastic.The jute was a bit of a pain, but with a waxed end on it, getting it through the holes wasn't that bad. It definitely looks funky and organic.