New Project

I’m not sure if it’s just the nature of the beast, but it seems that every new project I embark upon is more challenging than the last.  I suppose there’s a blessing in that; I am sure never to get bored in this work!  That said, there’s something about the process of taking a concept from an idea to a drawing to a product that is mystifying, exhilarating and terrifying all at once.  That may be part of the charm…or addiction.  I am continually amazed, though, at how I find myself wondering at the start of a new project, can I really pull it off as I had visualized?

In this particular instance, I had designed a table base that was a pedestal, tapered from top to base with an elliptical ‘footprint’.  A simple enough idea on the face of it; however, in practice there were a few complications….like how to taper an ellipse, for starters.   Cleverly, so I thought, I laid it all out on paper with the help of my CAD program.  Simple enough, as it seemed: divide the ellipse into 4 quadrants and then each quadrant into the perfect number of components.  The computer enabled me to draw 15 distinct parts per quadrant, each wedge-shaped, and I could calculate the exact angle and thickness of the parts.  The only problem was that each one was slightly different from the other making them all unique.  Argh!  Not exactly lending itself to a productive process!  The only good news was that each one would at least be repeated 4 times.

So, once again, it’s one thing to have created something on paper, but to make the real item conform to that ideal is another thing altogether.

Here I go attempting to assemble one quadrant: