GHENT STAM

The city museum in Ghent, Belgium is known as STAM and is located in an old hospital. This is the abbey dining hall, complete with the tomb of Hugo II, viscount of Ghent from 1227 to 1232.

Coffee on the go

We needed somewhere to store the cups, coffee beans, tea bags etc.  I had various pieces of recycled and recovered wood, so a cabinet on wheels was the order of the day (or the previous half year - this one took a while for me to get around to finishing).

Two doors and a drawer front were made from recycled jarrah, bevelled around the edges and then with coffee bean motifs routed into them to form handles.  The jarrah is joined from multiple pieces, with splits and holes filled with epoxy.

The drawer front was attached to a drawer made from leftover macrocarpa from some Adirondack chairs.  Dovetailing macrocarpa is not recommended.  It's even softer than cheap pine and splits easily.

Two 'trolley' handles were made from a length of broom handle and then secured in place to a recycled rimu carcass with epoxy and brass pins.

Castors came from the usual suspects (Bunnings) and the cabinet back (and drawer bottom) is leftover 3mm plywood.

The completed cabinet below shows off the raised panel effect on the drawer front and cupboard doors - a bit of a modern take on traditional cabinet doors.

And here's the completed mobile cabinet tucked under the kitchen bench ready to serve barista duty either in place or on the go.

Pre-sunrise, Orewa Beach

The world is not flat, it's a tetrahedron!

Various map projections try to approximate a sphere into a flat plane - Mercator etc, with varying amounts of distortion.  But ultimately, the flat plane is a poor substitute for the real thing.

Mollweide Projection from Wikipedia by Strebe

The AuthaGraph projection, invented by Hajime Narukawa in 1999 gets around this by essentially approximating a sphere to a regular tetrahedron and then unfolding it into a rectangular plane.

AuthaGraph map from Alexcious

Other similar projections such as by Buckminster Fuller and B.J.S. Cahill have done this before but they do not produce a nice rectangular map, without holes or 'Here there be dragons' areas of imaginary sea.

Cahill butterfly projection by Strebe

My lovely wife bought me an AuthaGraph map for the wall from Geo-grafia a while back.  The temptation was too great though, and I had to turn it into a tetrahedron, so now it has to hang from the ceiling.

Outdoor Projects

The long hot days of summer are drawing to a close, but things have been far from quiet outside.  Our small stand of 200 plantation Pinus radiata trees were logged by a very competent Ted Martin, who managed to preserve as much of the native undergrowth as possible.  The trees were starting to shade the house in winter as they got taller and taller.

Then we laid about 1200m of FSC Kwila decking around the house, using around 7000 pre-drilled screws.  This will bleed its tannins and weather to a silver colour before I stain it in a year or so.

When I say 'we' I mean I was 'junior apprentice' to John Funnell from JF Building and his guys.  I've known John for quite a few years now and have enjoyed working with him on a couple of much larger (and more challenging) projects, so this one was pretty straightforward.

Next, I laid a hexagon of decking and assembled a kitset gazebo that we bought nearly a year ago from Cameo Gazebos, with some help from John and Hamish again to get the roof onto the frame.

The end result looks pretty good I think, and now benefits from the views created by the removal of the pines.

Of course, we now have some planting to do to help the native bush regenerate, but this time nothing too tall!

Woodworking in Bhutan

Bhutan is a small kingdom at the eastern end of the Himalayas between India and Tibet (China).  We recently spent a week there visiting forts and Buddhist monasteries, hiking through forests and paddy fields and along the way meeting the friendly people who live in this truly beautiful country (and I say that having visited dozens of countries around the world).

Punakha Dzong (Punakha Fort)

There are many unique aspects to Bhutan, one of which is that all buildings must by law be constructed in a traditional style.  This typically includes lots of timber for beams, posts, joinery and furniture.  This has kept a skilled carpentry and joinery workforce alive and well.  

Courtyard inside Punakha Dzong

Monasteries and forts receive the most detail, however even houses and office buildings are constructed with intricate features and wooden joinery. 

A new building under construction in the capital, Thimpu

Timber is harvested from within the country, with the government overseeing felling and re-planting to maintain a minimum forest cover of 60%.  Bhutan is a net carbon sink; it absorbs nearly twice as much carbon dioxide as it produces from industry, transport etc and the main export is hydropower to India.

Trees are milled close to where they are felled, often with portable sawmills - the Australian made Lucas Mill was in evidence in several places we passed through.

Milling of logs in a rice paddy field

After milling, the wood is air dried in stacks by the roadside, usually with a corrugated iron roof to protect it from the rain.

Timber stacked for air drying

Complex joints (with no nails or bolts) are formed with basic tools.  Some large powered machinery was also seen. 

An outdoor joinery shop

Once the joinery is completed the components can be embellished with carving ready for assembly on site.

Relief carving

Monasteries are often high up in the mountains.  Traditionally this would have required much hard labour to haul materials up to the building site although now this is often done with a powered flying fox.  

An extension being added to Chagri Monastery

Bhutan's most famous building, the Tiger's Nest (Paro Taktsang) burnt down in 1998 but was skillfully reconstructed, using traditional methods of course.

Paro Taktsang

Kiwi Bucolic

The view from our bedroom this morning.

Morning run on the beach

City Gallery

On display in Wellington at the moment (and along with the MONIAC also exhibits from New Zealand's entries in the Venice Biennale) are Michael Parekowhai's On first Looking into Chapman's Homer:

And Michael Stevenson's This is the Trekka:

The MONIAC

I have been wanting to see this machine at the Reserve Bank Museum for several years, since reading about the New Zealand economist and inventor Bill Phillips.  As the only visitors on a cold and rainy Wellington Monday, we were treated to a demonstration of this early computer by a very informative Museum staff member.

Just after the Second World War and around the time the US military commissioned the ENIAC electronic computer (initially for calculating artillery trajectories), Phillips built a computer for assessing and demonstrating the effects of changes in a nation's economy such as interest rates, taxation, government investment and foreign trade.  The difference with Phillips' machine was that rather than using the flow of electrons to calculate complex equations it used the flow of water.

Water is often used as an analogue for electricity when explaining the 'flow' of electrons and the effects of a constriction (a resistor), a one-way valve (a diode) and suchlike but Phillips' machine was literally an analogue (in both senses of the word) computer, where the changes in the levels in transparent containers represented the various changes to metrics in the economy in a continuous (or non-digital) way.  

The device could also demonstrate the time lag between changes in one aspect and another as money flows around the economy.

Phillips built the first MONIAC while he was a student at the London School of Economics.  Copies and replicas of the machine are located at various universities and institutions around the world.