A Reader’s Chess Table

A reader of this site wrote in about a week ago with a comment that I am reproducing here:
“From Keith and Kirby:
My Daughter and I were inspired by your floating branch chessboard and just finished making our own. If you would like to see photos, send us a response. We made a wooden box as a base and place the stems through both sides of box and then filled it with “Good Stuff” to create a stable base. Then we glued a few small plastic leaves around the top to make a sparse canopy. A good glue gun was essential.”
               I liked the pictures of what Keith and his daughter produced so much that I asked if I could post a few of those pictures here on “dovetails”. With his permission, here are some of those pictures.

Very Cool!

Sliding Chart Table

I am certainly aware of twenty-first century navigation technology, GPS, Chart-plotters, radar-sonar-depth-finder thingies that are probably an Mp3 player too. I feel sure these are very valuable, in their own way, and I am not putting them down. In fact we have several hand held GPS on board our friendship sloop and have found this technology gives great piece of mind if we get caught in the fog, however, I still like the process of route-planning and plotting on paper charts. To some degree this is ingrained habit, I learned to navigate at a time when electronic navigation was less reliable and out of the price range of the average sailor. But I also like the tactile process of flipping through charts, and I feel that the process of shaping a course with dividers, parallel rulers and a pencil allow me to have a much better grasp of the navigational hazards. The process of route planning on paper charts also helps me visualize what tides are doing at any given time. I think another aspect of my appreciation of paper charts is that I go to the boat to get away from computers, phones, and the like.
              The big problem with paper charts is space; space to lay them out, and space to store them. On bigger, blue water vessels, built in navigation stations can be both spacious and comfortable. On our sloop (35 feet on deck) we have other pressing space demands below so we don’t have the luxury of extra space for a nav station. Our solution was to build in a slide away chart table over the quarter berth. It allows the navigator to stand in the cabin out of the weather but remain in sight of the helmsman, which makes it easy to relay information back and forth. The table has a built in drawer for charts, a removable fiddle-rail, and can be locked in the open position or in the closed position. When locked open and in use, the navigator stands below and just to starboard of the companionway and can brace himself, or herself, between the chart table and the companionway ladder.       

                
              We used heavy-duty stainless steel slides designed to hold up to 100 pounds of weight, realizing that the table would be leaned on and used as a handhold when it is locked in the open position.
              One of our biggest concerns about this addition below was that it would make access to the quarter berth so awkward that no one would want to sleep there. I built a mock up of the chart table and climbed in and out of the quarter berth half a dozen times before finally deciding that this solution was indeed workable. After years of living with this adaptation, I can confidently say that while the table does make the access to the berth a little more difficult, getting in and out of the berth is not the feat of gymnastics that I had envisioned.
              The long and short is that I have had many occasions to bless this innovation, particularly in heavy weather, where the navigator can confidently plot, verify, and look up data, in a sheltered space, but can still easily communicate with the helmsman.

Long Bows and Fletching

Some people discover that they unconsciously collect arcane trivia; I seem to collect arcane skills. Among these is the art of the bowyer, or bow maker, and that of the arrow maker. The reason for acquiring these skills is no longer entirely clear to me other than the fact that I have always found a certain poetry in archery and the long bow has always seemed to me to represent the epoch of archery. While I may not remember why I learned these skills in the first place, I was able to find my bow tiller and a whole box of fletchering tools for making arrows.
                The reason I dug out these items of archaic craft are that my ten-year old niece discovered archery this summer at camp. Her mother suggested to me that a bow with arrows appropriate for her size and strength might make a good Christmas gift. It turned out that I was even able to find some ash billets that I had dried and stored years ago for bow making. As I started to assemble the parts for this Christmas gift, I rediscovered my own bows and quiver. My arrows had remained in remarkably good condition, while most of my bows had dried out because it has been years since they have seen any use.

                The new bow came together quite quickly along with a new leather quiver, wrist-guard, and a flight of five arrows. The bow is made from a solid piece of ash with a classic cross section that is sort of “D” shaped. It is about five feet six inches tall. I would love to experiment with Oregon Yew, but it has become rare and expensive. Ash is both cheap and locally available though it is prone to dry out and become brittle over time.
                If I needed any kind of reward for my efforts, the delight on my niece’s face and the envy on her brother’s faces, when she unwrapped her new archery set Christmas morning was it. We set up a target in her back yard so she could practice. I only wish the weather had been better and that they had a bigger back yard because it was so much fun to stand behind my niece, coach her shots, and watch her evident enjoyment in practicing this ancient art.                

                 If you are looking for more information on longbows, I would recommend Longbows; a Social and Military History  by actor/historian Robert Hardy; an excellent resource.

PVC light saber

Regular visitors to this site are familiar with wooden toys that I have written about (see the “Toy Page”, on the right or click on the “wooden toys” category) but I had an interesting recent experience with a toy made of plastic.
           My older nephews are fascinated with Star Wars; actually obsessed might be a more accurate term. My twelve-year-old nephew calls regularly with leading questions about how he might make a real light saber. My grasp of physics and quantum mechanics gives out long before he runs out of questions. After numerous phone calls and some experimentation, he decided he might settle for something that just looks more like the “real thing” than the toy light sabers you can buy. What we came up with was this:
           We took a section of 1 ¼” PVC pipe for plumbing waste lines and cut it to make a handle, we got a length of  ½” inside diameter PVC water pipe and cut it to length for a….I’m not sure…do you call it a blade? Well for lack of a better term, I will call it a blade; we then got a PVC adapter that allowed us to connect the “blade” to the handle. Then my nephew got some self-adhesive reflective tape (he asked for it for Christmas) and covered the blade with it. In a dark room with light directed at it the effect is really rather neat, and in a photograph with a flash the effect is even better.

           We did spend almost $7.00 at the hardware store, but quite a lot of the PVC I had left over from other projects. Overall, it was a satisfying experiment. My nephew is going to see how the light sabers look if two opponents have them in the dark and they are wearing headlamps. I will keep you posted.