I was not happy with the way the red maple burl globe turned out. It needed a bit more sturm and a lot more drang.
I’m not sure how much more of this sort of stuff I’m going to do. I think bowls are more interesting and semi-practical, whereas the large blobs of resin just attract bubbles and flaws.
Its current state is much better, I’ve cut it off the buttplug base and polished it to a fare-thee-well, with a couple coats of clear poly to top it off. But it doesn’t convey what I wanted it to convey; I think I nailed it with the icecrown memories globe, but this is artistically vague.
So, I have been re-thinking Dune and how I see it in my mind’s eye. Arrakis is red and gold and the great sand-worms guard the huge spice-blows that look like shiny pools of some kind of blood on the sand. Since I have a large pile of scraps of burl (I get a lot of cut-offs when I pull the heart out of a piece of wood to use as a knife handle) it’s not hard to experiment. I got some metallic gold flake, and red and orange and went gothic:
Inside there is a chunk of bog oak, standing out of a puddle of red-gold flake. It has red-gold runners of something pouring down its faces in cascades.
The line up the middle is a flow-line from the small batch of resin I used to attach the plywood base – it’s neat because you can see what the piece will look like when it’s all polished, sort of like a portal into another world.
I’m not sure when I’ll get to put this on the lathe but, as always, it’s promising.
Kestrel has the 3D printed sandworm in hand, and the burl that will be used as its base. I’ll post a more detailed walkthrough of the pouring of that piece, when I pour it. I will definitely go whole hog and vacuum degas the resin, then put it under a couple atmospheres of pressure.
Part of my problem may be the resin I am using. Apparently West System has a “slow cure” resin that is much less prone to bubbles. They don’t give any of this stuff away, though.
I want to try an abstract – just a clear column of resin with some colored swirls injected into the center of it using an irrigation syringe. I need to put a bit more thought into timing the set-up rate of the resin so I can add the colors when it won’t mix under the heat of curing.
Speaking of resin… I could probably get a 3D printed crysknife model, make a mold from it, and do some things. Hmm. As you probably guessed, I hate the movie prop crysknives – the idea is that a functional dagger is ground from the tooth of a sandworm – it’s not just a worm tooth in a damn handle. I imagine something much much stabbier-looking.
She took sheath in one hand and handle in the other, withdrew a milk-white blade, held it up. The blade seemed to shine and glitter with a light of its own. It was double-edged like a kindjal and the blade was perhaps twenty centimeters long.
—
“No doubt of it,” Idaho said. “Milky white and glowing with a light of its own like.” He reached into his tunic, brought out a sheath with a black-ridged handle protruding from it.
—
Paul glanced at the crysknife. There was no shearing-guard; only the slim round ring of the handle with its raised lips to protect the hand.
—
Those are all the unique descriptions of a crysknife in Dune.
I like the way that is going. The colors seem better to me. The little “window” is showing some great stuff in there.
Crysknives always fascinated me but in my mind they were more curved than what other people seemed to think. As has been pointed out there is precious little “real” information so it’s completely my imagination that they were curved.
The gold swirls in the sky look dust-devilish. Very interesting.
Is there a Dune production that just used a tooth set in a handle as a crysknife? I just went back and watched a bit of the de Laurentis Dune to check, and that crysknife is definitely ground into a knife shape, not left a tooth-in-a-handle.
From my prized copy of The Dune Encyclopedia:
http://www2.b3ta.com/host/creative/72057/1593195382/crysknife.jpg
@sonofrojblake – that’s the one I was thinking of. The newer renditions have a handle that looks sort of like a loofah cactus with a blade growing out of it; that’s the David Lynch version. It’s a nasty-looking thing but it doesn’t have the “prized artifact” look I expect. I suspect a lot of my attitude regarding this is because I see the fremen/sardaukar as more samurai-influenced than bedouin-influenced.
Google image searches for crysknives are pretty fun. There are some lovely designs. Some of Moebius’ designs for the Jodorowski Dune movie are really cool. And, I should also plug the documentary Jodorowski’s Dune which includes character designs by Moebius and ship designs by Chris Foss.
What’s the pot time of your resin? I have one for larger casts that has a 300 minutes pot time and that cures nicely. What might also help is trying to lower the temperature.
Giliell@#7:
What’s the pot time of your resin? I have one for larger casts that has a 300 minutes pot time and that cures nicely. What might also help is trying to lower the temperature.
About an hour. It heats up too much. When I cast the red Dune test above, I put the container in a pot of cool water to increase the thermal mass. That does not seem to have helped.
Another possibility is that I need to oven-dry my wood for a while before I pour the resin.
Oh yeah, an hour is way too short.
Let me see if I can find that x YouTube video where some American dude talks about the slow curing resin he uses…