Past Work - Teapotty: Cubes of beech-wood
 | Completed teapot. It's hollow and the lid lifts off. | |||
 | The inspiration for this came partly from thinking about pixelating in 3D and partly from seeing an object made from hundreds of rods at the "Schmuck" craft fair in Munich (which I wasn't allowed to photograph). I decided to use 10-mm cubes of beech-wood because they were available for sale on eBay and because 10-mm meant I could re-use every third section that I'd generated for my plywood teapot (the plywood being 3.6-mm thick). I started by making a mock-up of the finished teapot in Rhino, pictured in this screenshot. I did this by fitting cubes into every third section of the teapot. | |||
 | I printed each section on tracing paper so I could repeat the layout of the cubes easily, and could see where extra cubes were needed to bond one layer onto the next. I made a rudimentary jig, just a sheet of ply with 2 battens fixed to it at right-angles, to make sure I kept the whole assembly straight and square. I thought small errors might accumulate. I used PVA wood glue, clamping everything as I went, using "spare" cubes to make this feasible (so the clamps would bear on flat surfaces). | |||
 | I tried to keep the grain of the cubes running in the same direction all the time - thought it would look better. I ended up using 1,056 cubes, quite a lot more than the 800 I originally estimated. Gluing took several evenings. It turns out that a lot of people view this as a "Minecraft" teapot. | |||