Cedar, Maple, Purpleheart Coasters

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 02:06:35 UT

After my recent bookstand project, I was looking for a simple project to put left-over lumber to good use. These coasters are what I came up with.

A tree is the epitome of a selfless life - it provides shelter and sustenance for decades and it is sad to see any part of such a worthy being go to waste.

In this post I describe a quick project combining cedar, purpleheart and maple. The combination is aesthetically pleasing and can be put together in a few hours with simple hand tools.

I was building this project on a tight schedule and thus things don’t line up 100% - someone with better skills or more time should produce better output.

Rounded corners are obtained by a simple principle we learn in math. Lots of straight cuts along the tangents of the desired circle, form the cicle.

I marked out the desired corner trajectory using a pair of divider calipers and filed away enough material until I obtained this result:

Then I glued my maple and purpleheart blocks like so:

Using a drill press I put in a few holes for birch dowels. The result was:

Finally I inserted the dowels with glue around them to fix them in place.

Someone mentioned compressed birch dowels to me that expand when glue is added. These I trust are going to produce much stronger structures than what I have.

Finally, I applied wipe-on poly - I have developed a strong affection for this product - incredible ease of use and very good results with minimal effort - a winner.

Here are a couple of additional pictures of the coasters in their new home.

The Cartouche Coaster Collection

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 21:57:11 UT

I just finished a new art project: Coasters with the cartouches of my favorite pharaohs + the backing digital sketch.

Presenting my new project - ancient Egypt cartouche coasters with the names of eight of my favorite pharaohs. The base material is birch and a rich polyurethane coat makes the hieroglyph etches pop out. #art #artist #woodworking #coasters #polish #wood #egypt #egyptian #history #civilization #pharaoh #heiroglyphics #sketch #horus #laser #lasercut #lasercutting

A post shared by Shriphani Palakodety (@life_of_shriphani) on Mar 27, 2017 at 7:36pm PDT

In chronological order:

Menes
Sneferu
Maatkare
Akhenaten
Ozymandias (Ramesses II)
Alexander
Ptolemy
Cleopatra

In 1799, the Rosetta Stone was discovered and it set off an arms race of sorts between reigning superpowers Britain and France. The British scientific legend Thomas Young who through the Double-Slit experiment demonstrated the wave theory of light, studied elasticity and gave us the Young’s modulus, studied capillary action and so on. Young and the French scholar Champollion raced to decipher the text on the rosetta stone. Young got pretty far with the demotic script but made scant progress with the hieroglyphic script. His hypotheses were solid, but his skillset was insufficient.

Jean Francois Champollion ran with these ideas however and delivered. Cartouches played a fundamental role in deciphering the hieroglyph script. Inscriptions on obelisks and other artifacts led Egyptologists to understand that cartouches contained the names of rulers. On lining up the names Ptolemy, Cleopatra and so on between the Greek and the heiroglyph versions of the text on the rosetta stone, the whole script sort-of unraveled itself and after a brief hiatus of a few millennia, ancient Egypt’s story was heard again.

The story of ancient Egypt is one of immense time-scales. The cartouche of Menes was drawn 2000 years after his death at Abydos - a time comparable to Jesus Christ and the modern day. From Menes to Cleopatra, we can easily count 3000 years of human history. Sneferu’s first showed the Egyptians how to build pyramids and from his time to Cleopatra, more years have passed than from Cleopatra’s time to the present day.

We are very much the same species as the ancient Egyptians - driven by much of the same dreams and needs. They gave us the pyramids, showed us how to marshall a large empire and harness human capital on an immense scale.

What will our civilization leave behind?

SHRIPHANI PALAKODETY: Posts tagged 'coasters'

Cedar, Maple, Purpleheart Coasters

The Cartouche Coaster Collection