Theoretical woodworking
Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 10:52 am
Hi Guys,
Long time no writing here... last months have been a bit crazy with the moving and packing things/finishing stuff from work/planing how to make the whole thing work. I will be traveling first to Chile in May while wife stays here with the cavies enjoying the summer. Then I pick them up in september. In the meantime I need to fix the house and set up the workshop.
Anyway, I packed almost all my tools and man I feel empty. I still have a month and a half here though and want to keep on learning... so I thought about descriptive geometry. But the good old way. Somehow I'm simply cannot use 3d drawing software. I mean, I even have problems with 2D so 3D is well beyond my means. Besides I want to step out of the glass screen for a while.
I've been doing a lot of reading in Chris' blog and some old books but I still could not make head or tails of the drawings till yesterday. Since I'm an impulsive person, instead of starting with the simple roof I went for the spherical dome:
It took me a while to understand it, and my calculus-trained mind was complaining all the time about the squaring of the circle going on there.
Eventually, I went back to a simple roof and it struck me: the drawing are static representations of a process. And you need to follow the construction to understand it. I guess that's why they call it constructive proofs.
Today, I took another look at the splayed work from the "The carpenter's and builder's assistant, and wood worker's guide (1874)"
I still don't understand this one completely (in particular the size of the plan), so I took the bevel angles and put them in my keynote:
From the drawing you only get 2 bevels but the other two are reflections of those since the timber is square. Print it in paper, and fold on the lines:
It works. Sorry about the crapy picture but I'm in the office at the moment.
Now, as far as I can tell, by Thales theorem the same bevels should work for an arbitrary sized piece, so I could be able to make a mitred hoper now. Well, when I have a workshop again that is.
So, here my questions. Do you recommend any book for learning descriptive geometry? I found a PDF of la Charpente en Bois and seems really complete but a bit arid to follow, any japanese book maybe? Also, any ideas on how one studies this? You take the examples of the book and reproduce them in paper with different sizes/anlges/geometry? Make cardboard models of roofs? I'm a complete noob to drawing, so any help would be appreciated.
Long time no writing here... last months have been a bit crazy with the moving and packing things/finishing stuff from work/planing how to make the whole thing work. I will be traveling first to Chile in May while wife stays here with the cavies enjoying the summer. Then I pick them up in september. In the meantime I need to fix the house and set up the workshop.
Anyway, I packed almost all my tools and man I feel empty. I still have a month and a half here though and want to keep on learning... so I thought about descriptive geometry. But the good old way. Somehow I'm simply cannot use 3d drawing software. I mean, I even have problems with 2D so 3D is well beyond my means. Besides I want to step out of the glass screen for a while.
I've been doing a lot of reading in Chris' blog and some old books but I still could not make head or tails of the drawings till yesterday. Since I'm an impulsive person, instead of starting with the simple roof I went for the spherical dome:
It took me a while to understand it, and my calculus-trained mind was complaining all the time about the squaring of the circle going on there.
Eventually, I went back to a simple roof and it struck me: the drawing are static representations of a process. And you need to follow the construction to understand it. I guess that's why they call it constructive proofs.
Today, I took another look at the splayed work from the "The carpenter's and builder's assistant, and wood worker's guide (1874)"
I still don't understand this one completely (in particular the size of the plan), so I took the bevel angles and put them in my keynote:
From the drawing you only get 2 bevels but the other two are reflections of those since the timber is square. Print it in paper, and fold on the lines:
It works. Sorry about the crapy picture but I'm in the office at the moment.
Now, as far as I can tell, by Thales theorem the same bevels should work for an arbitrary sized piece, so I could be able to make a mitred hoper now. Well, when I have a workshop again that is.
So, here my questions. Do you recommend any book for learning descriptive geometry? I found a PDF of la Charpente en Bois and seems really complete but a bit arid to follow, any japanese book maybe? Also, any ideas on how one studies this? You take the examples of the book and reproduce them in paper with different sizes/anlges/geometry? Make cardboard models of roofs? I'm a complete noob to drawing, so any help would be appreciated.