So everything went a bit mad last November, and I’ve been trying to catch up ever since… which is why I’ve only managed to do two blog posts this entire year. So… I’m not really into the whole employer/employee thing – so have 7 sub-contractors, fellow micro-businesses… two proper industrial-design guys (Glen and Grant) full time, and 5 local artists/musicians doing assembling etc. It’s that type of neighbourhood – everyone’s kindof over-educated, under-employed. The newly precarious middle-class. Everyone is always swapping things for lemons. They’re a way for people to give each other things without having to feel like a charity case. Everyone has lemons, everyone uses them. They’re like this magical gift/swap-economy debt-canceller. (Looks out window for a bit) But anyway – I now have proper professional engineers to tell me what to do I’ve also acquired another laser-cutter… I thought it was going to be a desktop one,…

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I’ve had lots of people say “hey, have you seen this?”… A kickstarter campaign for utterly gorgeous drawings by Venezuelan architect Rafael Araujo. All painstakingly hand-drawn, with the guides etc all left in place, turned into a colouring-in book. Reminds me of a cross between Vitruvian Man and some of Rodney Matthews more delicate stuff (but without the dragons etc). The whole thing is beautifully put together – not just the artworks, but the campaign itself. I have no idea how he manages to keep things so tidy. My own workshop looks like some sort of special mess-bomb has gone off in it. I mean his entire studio seems to be in the same palette as the colouring in book itself. God I wish I could be more like that. I’m not tho. I’m a child of chaos. Still… less about me. This campaign has managed to pull down over…

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New Variant: These calipers work by having an extra arm that bisects the smaller of the two ratios. A couple of people asked me for these… so after a whole ton of experimenting with different shapes, I settled on these. There are a number of different options for the cases… available from the shop.

And of course when I say “New”, what I really mean is “about 4 months old”. I’ve shifted house – now live in a small beach community about 40 minutes drive from the Capital… just far enough away to avoid the terrible weather. The workshop is about 5 times the size of the last one, and I’ve completely filled it with junk already. Before that, this is the front lawn though: Absolutely Glorious :) It has fruit trees. Although it is 4 x bigger than my last workshop, it has descended into chaos already. It used to look like this. then this (that’s my dad making me shelves for my birthday) Until finally this happened: Shambles

A little while ago I came across this… If you take 3 golden-mean rectangles, intersecting on three different planes, you wind up with a perfect icosahedron… a 20 sided Platonic Solid. Cool.. So I made one. So there you go. The ratios of the sides of each rectangle is exactly the same as the ratios between the adjacent joints of your fingers, and the height to the length of the hypotenuse of the great pyramid at Giza and the design of Stradivarius violins. It never fails to amaze me how interlinked seemingly disparate objects are.