Q. What’s the difference between a pole and
a rod?
A. A pole you hang a flag from. Any kind of
rod’s gonna cost you 1,500 bucks…
Anon.
I am a fat,
old bureaucrat, and I sit in front of a goddamned computer all day and
talk with some good people and innumerable assholes on the
telephone. Also I go to meetings.
The last
couple days I have been on my feet all day, splitting bamboo, evaluating the
irregularities and qualities of the strips, filing and shaving down the nodes,
and beginning the long process of straightening the crooked strips, and hand planing
them into triangular dimensions. My feet
hurt, my arthritic knee is singing to me, and I’m sore and tired. Toward the
end of this afternoon, the block plane began to balance naturally in my hand,
and long, even shavings of bamboo began to curl from the plane's throat as I
slowly walked the plane up the metal form and the bamboo strip from butt to
tip. There was the solid and rhythmic rasp of the sharp plane, the sweet tannic
smell of bamboo being heated and cut and shaved, the quiet conversation, the
steady and mesmerizing concentration, the satisfaction of work slowly yielding
beautiful results. All day, I smiled…nice work if you can get it!
Today we
spaced nodes and cut strips to length. We filed nodes, and straightened curves
and doglegs in the strips with heat and pressure, and we began the process of planing
the strips into their initial shape.
Pictures and a video to follow…
 | ||
| About 3 dozen strips from the original culm |
 |
| Matching up the node patterns on the selected strips |
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| Filing down the nodes |
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