A Moonstone

I guess this is why they call it "moonstone"?

How my camera 'saw' a 10mm stone; most moon-like.

Nice Fakes

Fabergé; gold, jade, pearls and crystal. Decorations for royal shelves I think.

Botanical models for scientific purposes:

made by The Incredible Blaschkas (though they also did work for royalty). These are made of glass, all handmade, lamp-worked. Amazing detail and colour. Years of work...

Faster Pasta

Giorgetto Giugiaro designed a lot of cars, for just about everyone; Alfa, Bugatti, BMW, Ferrari, Hyundai, Lamborghini, Toyota, Ford and more- pretty much the whole alphabet!

Even the De Lorean of Back To The Future fame;

She has unpainted stainless steel panels. Scratches are simply buffed out ( great idea).

3 of them were 24k Gold plated- but all came out of the factory unpainted.

Anyway, Giorgetto had a go at pasta too... but apparently it was a flop- wouldn't cook evenly or something.

Back to the drawing board?

Au

What Ive been doing: poring over the treasure maps...

No disclosure on location this time- titles cropped off and image file names changed...

Thats the bottom of my gold pan... crazy low-relief prospecting cameo!

Lathey Days

In case you were wondering where all that pole lathe stuff from the last post was going;

Ok - its Max Ernst and his chess set. ( thanks Mal for straightening that out)

Anyway, nice lathe work...

via Danish Pepper Mills Blog,

a taxonomic collection of Quistgaard pepper mills at Sam Kaufmann Gallery.

I wonder if there's any consensus on which is the best one? I might hire Malcom Gladwell to research this for me.

Watchmaker's hand lathe via FTJ.

Its not a steam-punk thing- dont pigeon-hole me. Its just a nice machine.

Pedal-powered ( fixed-gear too) scroll saw. FTJ ag'in.

Hard to imagine folks actually made such pretty machines.

Possibly because all the structural parts are cast-iron, dynamic curves become not only possible, but efficient and appropriate. Like how bones are structured inside?

The ol' disembodied-hands-doing-the-work-diagram.

Bow lathe and pole lathe. Making violin tuning pegs I think...

Rudimentary Lathe

A pole lathe re-enactment.

Powered by the foot-treadle + that long springy branch.

An Asterix and Obelix kind of situation!

Source...

Hand-carving a rifling guide- very impressive and resourceful.

The second picture shows the guide in use; the helical fluting is translated to a cutting tool inside the iron barrel. The lengths folks would go to eat birds for dinner!

source: contemporary makers

Stupendous Ears

Samurai helmets...

Well, they are pretty amazing in terms of metalworking, very dynamic forming.

As to function, I guess there was a status thing going on.

Imagine this face-off:

"My ears are big!"

"But my ears are substantial!"

"Oh-ho! My ears are resplendant!"

"HAH! My ears are STUPENDOUS!!!!!!!!"

Aurthur Ganson Machines

Magnifico!

Circustry

Atsuko Tanaka

A schematic for her electric dress ( covered in lights) becomes a circus of circuitry!

Neigh

Picture from Horses of the World, with in-house cropping.

My Dad came over the other day, and started reading E's Horse book, and got totally absorbed in it. He even said to us "stop trying to get my attention!" - it must be a good book!

Gold Stuff!

Pendant!

Small Aster Studs!

Trove of Aster earrings!

mmmmmmmm!