Hand-tooled excellence - # 08/46

A couple of days ago I showed you "the Archivist". This is the book she was working on at the time. I needed a tripod , but not having it available I had to make do with a steady hand. So the photo is less than ideal.

The gold tooling around the edge of the book is amazingly detailed. The macro-photo images here are heavily magnified. Just look at the detailing of the tiny thistle heads and acorn cups. With the nacked eye you can only see the detail by peering really hard and close in.

I cannot imagine how the 18th Century craftsman manged to make the stamping die that produced such tiny micro-precision work. I'm going to try and get an even better picture that will do more justice to this fine work.

Uncertainty in a multidimentional environment - #11

Here we are in the library testing the "Marque 1" plastic lid. We are placing the leather cover and then testing it all for a "zero snag" lift, and a "not too tight fit" plus some other "issues". We are also testing the stability of the plastic lid as it rests on the "equator ring" of the globe. This sounds like a lot, but there are good reasons when dealing with valuable things that are 250 years old. After this test we had to dismantle and downsize the plastic lid by 1/2 centimeter on each of the 9 sections. I was wishing for a digital 3 dimensional imaging camera linked to a computer driven cutter. Instead we have to work by eye and by hand. Lynn asks why the lining cannot be leather. Answer: we want a super smooth "lift-off" and an "invisible" underlay support, free of wrinkles. Tomorrow I'll show some detail of the highly attractive hand-tooling on the 250 year old leather cover.