reflections

 So at the conclusion of this project there are many things that come to mind:-

The maker culture falls into different categories. By categories I am speaking not so much about the actual ‘products’ that are created or produced, as the demographics. There has always been a maker culture, but the last 40 – 50 years has seen a significant decline, I will venture to suggest, as the consumer culture grew and became more invasive in our society, many more things were made commercially to entertain (distract) us and for us to buy and use.  With the economic meltdown since 2008 there has been a remarkable surge in the maker culture due in part to people having to look to other ways to make (no pun intended) a living, and in part to the incredible advances in computers, software and the manufacturing equipment associated with this.

I have always considered myself as a maker but this has had high and low points through my life. In younger years I was always interested and active in making things; things that required research, technical understanding and construction (a particular point in high school). School shop projects, model railways, aircraft, boats and of course painting and drawing, were all in the spectrum. Working life resulted in a decline primarily to time availability but this came back to some degree when my own children became part of my life, only to decline again as they grew older, entered the workforce and indeed appear to go through the same cycle. The only difference, fundamental difference, is that they are children of the Electronic Age and firmly part of that demographic.

Of later years, I have become more active in the maker culture and this particular project has brought me back closer to that, re-kindling an interest. With my generation and the following one (baby boomers I believe) we have the time to revisit this and even revive some of the older crafts. The generation subsequent to this are finding themselves displaced before they are ready or willing to retire and caught between the old and new (digital) manufacturing technologies. They are however finding new ways to make a living, drawing from their life experiences and the extremely user friendly new technologies. The younger generations who have grown up with this new technology have found new ways to be entrepreneurial with it and create a new industrial/consumer age albeit on smaller individual scales and in concert with the new technology.

The opportunity to make this object, a pantograph, really stimulated my interest. The origins of the instrument, of which I was unaware, went back 400 hundred years and the inventor was an accomplished individual. Christopho Scheiner could be paralleled to     da Vinci judging from his CV which has been compiled by Richard S. Westfall for the Galileo project. Scheiner invented the pantograph in 1604 and details of his invention were published in 1631 in a pamphlet entitled Pantographice seu ars delineandi. The isometric drawing of Scheiner’s pantograph is part of the publication and while there are many images of this instrument online today, the original drawing provided the design that I chose to work to. What was of immediate interest was the access to original documents/design that was five centuries old and this was possible through the Web; Chris Anderson states in his book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution “The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent, and work together on the Web” (32). I have no idea how I would found so much information, original sources, so quickly and relatively easily, without the Web. While in the past information was recorded but not necessarily readily available in an accessible fashion, the Web has certainly changed this in reality for the better. There have been times in the past where information or knowledge was restricted, controlled and while that can still be an issue today, the Web and the Internet have broken down barriers and disseminated infinitely greater amounts of information and knowledge to far wider audiences than ever before. Aldus I am sure would be happy to see this today; as he said in 1496 “My only consolation is the assurance that my labors are helpful to all, and that the fame and use of my books increase from day to day, so that even the ‘book buriers’ are now bringing their books out of their cellars and offering them for sale” (Barolini, H. 30)

With  a re interpretation of the drawing I was able to produce a technical drawing that allowed me to seek out present day materials that would permit me to reproduce Scheiner’s instrument as close to original as possible. During the process of material selection at the local hardware store I found that dimensions of the arms would be difficult to handle in the manufacture and risk distortion in the final object, so I selected a different size of material to overcome this issue. The basic process of manufacture was relatively straight forward; the measuring, cutting and drilling tools that I have available were quite adequate for the tasks however despite careful application I did encounter some control and accuracy issues. On reflection a mitre box and better clamping tools would have been an asset and actually access to a drill press would have permitted greater control over that process. In addition, more control over the manufacturing process would have been possible if I had used a harder wood; the wood that I selected was softer and this caused more drift in the cutting and drilling process.

All in all however, I have achieved the construction of a working Pantograph based on Chistopho Schnieder’s original design using readily available modern day materials reapplied to a 17^th century design which in turn was available through the internet. An interesting and informative exercise that has afforded me an opportunity to research and make an object that I otherwise would have not have pursued; these days I normally use digital photography, projection and Google Sketchup, coincidentally all part of the digital world that we now inhabit.