Category: craft

DBA Army III/10c: Hindu Indian

Here is my latest DBA army: Medieval Hindu Indians “other,” army III/10c. The figures are from an Essex DBA v1 army pack, and did not include the Artillery element that is optional in the DBA v2 army list.

The army consists of 1 Elephant General (I choose the one with the red blanket), 2 Elephants, 2 Cavalry, 1 Blade, 4 Bows, and 2 Psiloi. The Artillery, if I had it, would replace one of the elephants. I have a bombard I could paint up for this army, but no appropriate crew yet.

I plan to write more about the individual Essex Elphant models soon, since I have had a horrible time finding any useful information about what they look like and how they should be painted. For now, let’s just say: these things are tanks! The two on the right are very heavily armored except for their legs.

I tried to find information online about how the Medieval Hindu Indians should be painted, but I didn’t find anything other than other peoples’ paint jobs, and indications that they were also guessing. Off white is always a reasonable choice, or red if you need some color, since it seems to be one of the most commonly available dyes. The cavalry are the only elements that have much color (other than the elephant). I chose primarily red, with green barding and some blue shirts.

The lances held by the left element here were molded on, so I left them until they break off. On the right, I used Xyston wire spears instead, since they had to be glued in place anyway.

The infantry are easy: off-white butt wraps and head wraps, with red shields. I don’t even know if these figures are appropriate for medieval era Indians; I’d expect them to be wearing a bit more armor or maybe a robe. On the upside, these guys will give me a head start on Classical Indians, and they’re compatible with the Mountain Indian figures I’ve already painted.

Was my most recently painted full DBA army Mountain Indians? It seems odd, I feel like I painted something else in between… I guess that was my 10 other DBA elements for the Persians.

Have I actually played a game of DBA since I painted the Mountain Indians? Well. Maybe 2 games, I guess… but I haven’t played with the Mountain Indians yet.

Make Your Own Game: The Game Crafter

I recently discovered a really excellent web site: The Game Crafter.

Here, you can do on-demand publishing of board games, while maintaining ownership of your creation. They have a selection of standard parts you can choose from, such as pawns, meeples, tokens, glass gems, and colored cubes. They also print and cut decks of cards, mounted game boards of certain sizes, and instruction books. Finally, they let you sell your game from their store, similar to the way a site like Cafe Press works.

I haven’t used the service or bought any games from them yet, so I can’t comment on the quality of the components they provide. However, as far as the price is concerned, this seems like an excellent way to get reasonably high quality cards printed, such that they are all an identical size (so you can shuffle them) and without running out of printer ink. The base prices seem like a manageable cost to build your own game and purchase a copy, but it seems like the margins would be really slim if you wanted to sell copies at a reasonable price.

I also discovered a similar site for books and authors: lulu.com. I’m no writer, so that one’s not as interesting to me.

Middenheimers

I decided to try painting some miniatures again, to see if it would capture my attention as my next “thing to do,” or not. The verdict is still out, but I did finish this batch of figures at least.

Here we have: one goblin, two treasure chests, and five Middenheimer warriors armed with axes, swords, and crossbows.

I never manage to take good pictures of my figures, most likely because I can’t produce enough light.

I did an adequate job painting these, but not a wonderful job. They’re fine for table gaming, which is all they’ll ever see (if they’re lucky). I haven’t painted anything in several years, at least since Ezra was born, and these figures I’ve had sitting in a box for probably 5 years or more, waiting to be assembled.

I have no clue where the goblin came from. It’s a random metal casting I picked up somewhere, not a Games Workshop piece. I started painting it last time I was painting, and decided to finish it while I was working on the rest, so it’s really out of place here.

The rest of the pieces are plastic models from the Games Workshop game Mordheim. I like the “mix and match” and posing you can do with these multi-part plastic models. In Mordheim terms, these are human mercenaries from Middenheim, but I tried to make them passable as pirates as well. I chose a civilized blue and green color scheme: maybe they pirated a shipment of fine French high school band uniforms?

There’s an equal likelihood that we’d play Blood and Swash with these. Martine’s just getting old enough for this, so maybe my secret plans to create a new opponent will finally reach fruition? She can handle the rules, but probably won’t like it when her guys start dying. Last time I tried playing with Martine, she convinced me the guys were going to start talking to each other instead of fighting. We’re going to have to work on her social skills. *

Blood and Swash is always really fun at conventions. It’s a simple, fast-paced skirmish scale miniatures game, originally designed for recreating barroom brawls in the age of Pirates. We played most recently on a regular Saturday game night, using some of Martine’s Playmobil soldiers and terrain (after she was in bed: she didn’t mind them dying when she wasn’t around). It worked really well: when Andy and Theresa’s guys died they took over a snake and a T-Rex, and chased Frank and I until we fled with the loot.

Blood and Swash has the fast gameplay of a miniatures wargame without any of the rules lawyering, combined with the open-ended nature of a role-playing game without any of the role playing (or rules lawyering); but the rules can be explained in 5 minutes and played by anyone who can count to 20. So it makes a great introduction to miniatures wargaming, but it can also be great fun as a light hearted wargame where how you kill someone is at least as important as whether you succeed or not.

It also doesn’t require many figures per player, to get started. However, I could probably use a few more just in case…

* Just kidding. Remember that post where I mentioned I like to say obviously false things for ironic effect? Besides, I think she has become much more caustic since last time we played.

Essential Skills

BoingBoing recently posted a link to 18 Essential Maker Skills and referred to a Heinlein quote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

As a dedicated Jack, the last line resonated with me: Specialization is for insects. I’m reminded of a quote which Google just helped me attribute to Nicholas Butler:

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

There is certainly value in becoming a Master. But the important part of this journey is to never consider yourself a master. As soon as you do, you essentially claim you have nothing else to learn.

I don’t consider myself a master, but I’m well trained as a know-it-all. If you aren’t skeptical enough, you might think I know what I’m talking about. But if you aren’t skeptical enough, you get what you deserve. I’m the sort of person who finds it humorous to say things which are obviously false for ironic effect.

As for the specific 18 Essential Maker Skills presented in the link above, well… “they’re wrong and I’m right,” of course (see “know-it-all,” above). Those skills are all very useful. But if I had to choose only 18 “maker” skills out of everything anyone has ever done or made, I’m not sure those are all the best choices. Many of them are too domain-specific, not universal enough, and too dedicated to the use of special purpose tools.

I’d probably start with the basic necessities in life, and move on from there. Let me be clear: I don’t claim to have all these skills. I only claim that I think they’re important.

  1. Learn how to learn. The most important skill, and the basis for all others, is knowing how to learn new skills. Different people learn in different ways, you need to know what works for you.
  2. Make a meal, from earth to plate. Whether it’s vegetable or an animal, know where your food comes from, and how to get some if you can no longer go to a store. At the very least, learn to make your own meals well enough that you’re willing to eat them.
  3. Make clothing. Again, get as close to the earth as you can.
  4. Make shelter. If I were getting more specific, I’d say “use an axe,” as this is another very basic and important skill, but that may only be because I grew up in the forest instead of the desert.
  5. Set a broken bone. Good idea, Mr. Heinlein. As you can tell: I believe staying alive is important.
  6. Make something from nothing. Become comfortable with thinking and with constructing models and ideas in your mind. Even if your ideas never take physical form, being able to think ensures you will always have something to do. Writing is a good approximation of creating something from nothing. So is computer programming, which is just writing in a different language anyway.
  7. Use tools. The only people likely to read this blog may find the concept very silly, but many people don’t know how to use even basic tools such as a screwdriver, wrench, or hammer. I remember someone who learned how to change a car tire: “That’s it?” Yes, that’s it. Just because someone else says something is difficult, that doesn’t make it difficult. You may just not be skeptical enough: try it and find out.
  8. Fix something. Anything, it doesn’t matter what: make something work, that previously did not.
  9. Make yourself happy.
  10. Ask a question. Learn to figure out what you don’t know, and how to express this in the form of an answerable question.
  11. Tell the difference between success and failure. It’s a lot easier to do well if you can tell the difference between doing well and doing poorly. When starting in a new hobby or learning a new skill, find a master and try to figure out how what makes their work masterwork. As long as you think you’re just as good as they are, you aren’t making progress.
  12. Find the value of things. Value is a very personal concept: the value of something is how much you are willing to sacrifice to attain it. If someone else values something more than you do, they may place a price on it which you don’t want to pay. Become confident enough in your ability to assign value to things that you won’t sacrifice more than you want to, when attaining them.
  13. Take something apart and put it back together again. Make sure it still works, or at least that you know exactly why it doesn’t work anymore.
  14. Formulate a plan. Can you tell someone else how to put together the thing you just took apart?
  15. Follow instructions. When you come back a year from now, can you follow the plan you just formulated for putting that thing back together?

In many ways these skills are restatements and combinations of a few concepts. Learn how to think in the abstract, solve problems, and to map between abstract concepts and real-life objects.

Clear Your Beer

I feel inspired to write about home brewing tips and techniques I’ve found useful. I am by no means a master brewer; my skills are squarely in the “Jack” category. However, I also don’t consider myself a beginner.

If no one finds this valuable, then hopefully at least someone will find it interesting or entertaining. If you’d rather read the words of a Master, pick up a copy of “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.” It is an extremely useful book.

For a long time, crystal clear transparent beer simply didn’t matter. And then one day, someone invented glass drinking vessels. Once people were able to see what they were drinking, appearance became more important. Brewers invented new techniques, even new styles of beer, when presented with the prospect of drinking out of glasses.

So, just go get yourself some “It Comes In Pints” mugs. Relax, don’t worry, and have a homebrew.

Although most beers are best when they are “crystal clear,” some styles are not considered correct unless they are cloudy. For example, a Belgian witbier (wheat beer with coriander and bitter orange) such as Hoegaarden must be cloudy.

I’m an extract brewer, and I’m not as concerned with correctness as with making beer that tastes good to me. But if you drink your beer in a glass, it can be unappetizing to look at a murky, cloudy pint, possibly with bits of floating debris. The human mind is not easily fooled: even if you don’t need a blindfold or a ceramic mug to make that beer taste as good as it really is, your Significant Other probably does.

I haven’t read a lot about home brewing in many years, so I’ll concentrate on the “how” more than the “why.” There are a few factors which contribute to cloudy beer. I’ll describe the processes I’ve settled on which eliminate these sources of cloudiness enough to satisfy me.

Cloudy beer is caused both by materials which are suspended in the water in the beer, and by solids left in the beer which are mixed back into the liquid when it is dispensed. To make your beer less cloudy, you first want to remove unwanted materials from suspension, and then remove the precipitated solids from the beer.

The first step towards clearing your beer happens in the boil pot. Near the end of the boil, you can add ingredients which help take unwanted proteins out of suspension, so they can precipitate and be removed from the beer. My preferred “fining agent” is Irish Moss, which is readily available in home brew stores. I’ve bought it in a powdered form, and also in a slightly more granular form which looks and smells like bits of dried seaweed. I add about 1tsp, 15 minutes before the end of the boil for a 5 gallon batch (2.5-3 gallons in the boil pot).

Looking back at my old beer notes, it seems that sometimes I rehydrated the Irish Moss in water before adding it to the boil. I haven’t done that lately; maybe I don’t know what I’m missing? Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Another fining agent I’ve used is Knox Gelatine, but I don’t remember exactly how it is used. Looking at my notes, it seems that the gelatine is added to the secondary fermenter and not during the boil. Lately, I’ve had no problems with just tossing the dry Irish Moss into the boil along with the later addition of hops, so I’m going to stick with that.

After you’ve removed as much material from suspension as you’re going to, you need to remove the precipitated solids from the beer. Professional brewers use filter systems to do this, but home brewers generally don’t have this luxury. Instead, the general process is to allow time for the solids to precipitate, and then leave them behind when you transfer the beer into a new vessel. Yeast also lives in suspension for much of its life, but luckily the techniques used for removing solids from your beer will also encourage yeast to leave.

Many of these points are probably very obvious to most brewers, but someone might say “Oh, I didn’t think of that.” So I’ll restate the obvious.

  1. If you’re steeping any grains before the boil, use a grain bag to contain them. This lets you remove as much of the excess grain as possible before you start the boil, and reduces the amount of solids in the wort.
  2. When you dump the wort into your primary fermenter, use a strainer. If you use loose-leaf or plug hops, they will act as a filter to catch even more solids before they enter the fermenter.
  3. After the beer has stopped obvious activity in the primary fermenter (no more than 2 weeks), transfer it to a secondary fermenter for another few weeks before bottling or kegging it. You don’t want the beer sitting on dead yeast for longer than 2 weeks, but you do want to give it more time for the yeast to flocculate and solids to precipitate.
  4. Use a siphon instead of pouring, when you transfer your beer. Move the vessels around carefully without shaking them, let things settle for a while before starting the siphon, and don’t move the siphon around once it has started. A racking cane is indispensible. Don’t introduce oxygen into the beer after primary fermentation has started; it’ll confuse your yeast.
  5. This is the hard part. When you siphon, resist the temptation to move every last bit of liquid into the secondary. Instead, leave the murky bottom layer of goo behind, and dump it: it’s good for your plumbing. You might be throwing a pint of beer away, but you end up with less goo in the rest of it.
  6. If you’re bottling, siphon the beer into a bottling bucket, and again skip the muck at the bottom of the secondary fermenter. You need to mix the priming sugar thoroughly with the fermented beer, but you don’t want to mix any remaining solids into the beer at the same time.
  7. Make sure you don’t add too much priming sugar. More sugar grows more yeast in your bottles.
  8. When pouring beer from bottles, let the bottles sit still, pour gently, and don’t pour the yeast off the bottom of the bottle. This applies to purchased bottle-conditioned beer as well.
  9. Instead of bottling, keg your beer and use bottled CO2 for carbonation. I was surprised to discover recently that around here, used soda kegs cost less than $4o. Kegs are a lot easier to use than bottles, and require a lot less cleaning and sanitization. They provide an economical way to store and dispense your beer, and you’ll generally end up with less cloudiness than with bottles. Because you store the beer under carbonation and without oxygen, it stays fresh for quite a while (possibly months).
  10. Don’t move your kegs around or shake them, if possible.

As I said before, most of this is likely to be obvious to a brewer, and uninteresting to everyone else. Sorry about that. If you had a homebrew when I told you to before, you probably wouldn’t mind so much.

That Looks Just About Right…

This is a sketch of the rodback chair. I made it before I started working on the chair using tracing paper over a photograph of the chair I was inspired by. I changed things where necessary to show the chair I planned to build.

Rod Back chairs are a later (1800-1820) “degenerate” style windsor. They typically have much straighter legs and less deeply carved seats than earlier styles and most of them used a square stretcher pattern instead of the “H” stretchers here.

I like the more comfortable deeply carved seats of earlier chairs, but I prefer the turnings used on later chairs. So, I paired the seat shape and leg angles of an earlier Comb Back chair with the turnings and square back of the rodback. Compared to the photograph I traced, this seat is carved more deeply, the swell in the spindles is higher, the posts are different, and the leg angles are different.

I took a photo of my chair-in-progress, from approximately the same angle as the photo I traced. It looks pretty close!

I like the much slimmer look of my chair, compared to the sketch. I think the angles are a bit exaggerated in my chair because I was very close to it when I took the picture.

Since the chair isn’t finished yet, I’ll take this opportunity to be critical. The front legs of the chair are splayed a bit more than the plan called for; I’ll have to see whether I built it incorrectly or planned it incorrectly. It may be only because the front of the seat is higher than the chair I planned from. That’s the main thing that looks a bit odd with it, when I look at one portion of the chair critically, instead of standing back and admiring it.

It’s quite comfortable, but I haven’t spent a lot of time sitting in it yet since I haven’t epoxied the seat back together yet.

Today I trimmed the spindles. If it weren’t for the unfortunate crack, it would be basically ready for a quick sanding and a few coats of paint.

There are a few other things that didn’t work as well as I would have preferred, but worked out in the end. I didn’t orient the seat blanks properly. When carving the wood along the join, in some places I needed to carve in one direction on one side of the line and the opposite direction on the other side, which made things tricky. It’s easier to glue up seat blanks when both halves come from the same board.

I used wedged through tenons on the post-rod joint. This worked well enough, and it’ll be strong, but I had problems with drilling a through hole without breaking the grain out on the other side of the post. I think I need to replace my crappy 1/2″ bit, as I did with my 5/8″ bit. Although these bits from Highland Hardware got good reviews in Fine Woodworking, they’ve been horrible in my experience.

I’m also not completely happy with the wedged joints between the spindles and rod. They’re a bit loose. I may dab a bit of epoxy in, while I’m patching the cracked seat. In general, I need more practice carving spindles. That’s understandable, since I’ve been working on stools lately, and I’ve been using suboptimal spindle wood.

I’m in the home stretch now. I’ve been wondering whether I have enough stamina for another chair, but Marla tells me I can’t stop making chairs (or at least parts) until I’m done clearing the wood off the porch. I guess I’ll have to at least rough out a bunch of spindles, rods, and legs.

Nearly a Chair

My rodback chair is almost fully assembled. One more night to glue things up, and then it’s down to trimming and finishing.

In fact, pretty soon I’ll probably have two chairs! Well, two halves of one chair, anyway.

When inserting one of the spindles, the seat cracked. A few of the spindle ends might have been a bit too fat, but in this case the main problem was that this hole ended up directly over a crack on the bottom of the seat. Here, the crack goes all the way through the seat. I should’ve made this spindle loose rather than risk splitting the seat, if I had realized it might be a problem.

I expect I can salvage it, though I’m not sure which glue would be best to use here. Super glue might keep the crack from spreading, but it won’t fill the space to hold the cracked parts together. Maybe urethane (gorilla) glue would work better for that, but I’m not sure how to get it in the crack and keep it there; and I wouldn’t want it to push the seat apart even more.

Maybe I’ll use both. Start by applying super glue to the edges, and letting it dry. Then, clamp the seat lightly so it can’t expand any further, push some urethane glue into the crack, and apply tape on top to keep it in place while it dries.

The worst part will be finishing it. The crack will definitely be noticeable, and milk paint doesn’t stick to super glue. I’m not sure about the urethane glue, though.

I think the rest of my seat plank is not checked on the surface the way this one is. Both of my pine seated stools have check-cracks on the bottom, which are not a problem. The difference in this case is the spindles. With 9 holes across the back, I would have had to plan a lot farther ahead to avoid putting this crack in the middle of one of them.

Chairlike

I’m making progress on the Rodback chair.

The turnings other than the stretchers are done. This maple is wonderful to turn, and it seems very stable when it’s drying. Now that I have the legs tapered, I can measure the stretcher lengths and turn them as well.

The spindles and rod are roughed out, but they’re still oversize. The drying rack worked very well, after I put a rack on it to keep the pieces from falling down whenever I bumped it.

I’ve also drilled and cut the seat. After tapering the leg and post holes, I set this picture up so I could see what the chair will look like when it’s done. I think the shape of the post turnings will be fine.

I’ve started carving the seat, but I need to sharpen one of my spokeshaves and it’s giving me trouble. Once that’s taken care of, I’ll finish the seat and “leg up:” finish the stool half of the chair.

After that, I’ll finish the rod and assemble the two posts and the rod to each other. Then I’ll finish the spindles, drill the rod, and put the rest of the back together.

Drying Parts

Dad suggested I could use my forced-air heat (as limited as it is these days) to dry my chair parts faster. I did this a bit already with some stool legs, but I had figured these parts would be sitting around long enough to be dry by the time I’m done with the stool portion of the chair.

Tonight I turned a preliminary set of back posts (I’ll see if I like the shape or not). Now I have all the turnings and spindles done for one chair, but the spindles are still much wetter than I expected. When I brought the parts upstairs to put them by a heating vent, I remembered another reason I didn’t do this yet: there’s no place upstairs the parts would be safe from kids using them as play swords, and probably hurting each other.

So, I set up a hanging support in front of the vent in the basement (and opened it, for the first time in years). It isn’t enclosed, so it probably won’t overheat things, but it’ll be a lot more dry there. I also found a use for a few of those old botched leg turnings I had lying around…

Bending Sticks

I had some free time today, so I decided to bend the rods for the rodback chair.

I built the steam box a week or so ago. The bottom board is a 11″ wide pine board, and the upper portions are made from dimensional 2″x6″ lumber. It’s heavy, but it works. There are 3 dowels set into the box, to raise the parts to be bent above the bottom of the box.

I closed the box as Brian Cunfer did: using open-celled foam (like chair seat foam). Where the box sits over the pot, there’s a 4-5″ hole. I used 3/4″ or 1″ foam at the seam with the pot to make sure it’s sealed fairly well. In each end of the box I used a chunk of 1 1/2″ thick foam to seal the ends, while still letting steam pressure out. The wood joints are sealed either with gorilla glue or silicone.

I made two bending forms from 2″x6″ lumber screwed onto plywood. One side has the shape of the rod, and there are blocks to wedge the rod against and hold it into place. The parts should dry on the form, so in order to have a spare “just in case,” I made two forms so I could bend two parts at once.

The rodback sticks are about 20″ long. I shaved one from ash a week or so ago. The other I made today, out of the odd greenish/yellowish open grained wood I haven’t managed to identify well yet.

I steamed them for 45 minutes in the steam box. The pan started about half full of water, and didn’t come close to running out. After that, you have to work quickly: bring the stick to the bending form, bend it into place, and pound wedges in to hold it onto the form.

The ash felt quite stiff when I bent it; basically what you’d expect a green stick from a tree to feel like when you bend it. It didn’t crack, so the initial bend was a success. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if it sprung back at least a bit after it has dried.

When I bent the other stick, it felt the way I remember from the previous times I bent parts. The stick resists bending pressure, but then releases. I want to describe it as a “chalky” feeling, though I’m not sure why. I’m more confident this stick will stay bent.

Neither of the bends were immediate failures, but we’ll see if they stay bent in a week when I take them out. I think it’s likely they will both work.

While I’m waiting for the spindles and rods for the chair to dry, I’ll build the lower half of the chair: basically, everything I’ve already done for stools, but with a place to install the top. I’ll drill the holes for the top before I carve it, but the upper portion isn’t assembled until after the entire stool is complete.