Maxed Out: I'm Radioactive, But in a Good Way
July 25, 2012 |Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Well, as usual I don’t know whether I'm coming or going – so many things are happening in my life that it's difficult for my friends and family to keep up to date. In fact, it's difficult for me to keep up to date!
The Mighty Mosaic
On the bright side, you will be pleased to hear that my ongoing project to construct a massive mosaic version of Vincent Van Gough's masterpiece Starry Night is still underway. When last we talked, I had scaled my working drawing up to be about four feet wide on a big piece of white card.
The entire mosaic is going to be mounted on a large rectangle of 3/4" plywood. I decided to give the piece some "depth" by implementing the rolling hills in the mid-ground and the big tree in the foreground using multiple layers of 1/8" thick pressed board. As you may recall from my previous column, this is much more complex than it may at first appear. In the case of the tree, for example, each layer has to be 1/8" wider than the preceding layer. The image below shows a close-up of a small area of the tree drawn on my white card – the different colored lines represent different "depths" – and the three horizontal-ish lines represent the mountains in the background.
The next step was to transfer these images onto multiple pieces of pressed board, which involved cutting the white card, tracing an image, sticking the card back together again, cutting it on a different line, and so on and so forth. Again, this really is a lot more complex than you might suppose; you will realize what I'm talking about if you try to do something like this yourself.
Next, I attempted to cut the patterns out of the pressed board, and this is where I ran into a mega-problem. My electric jigsaw made the board vibrate too much to get a clean, accurate cut, and my little Dremel simply wasn't up to the task. I ended up asking a cabinet maker who has a bunch of industrial-grade tools to help me out.
Everything came back yesterday and it looks great. The following picture shows all of the pieces laid out on my driveway at home.
Tonight I'm going to start sticking everything together – I will post an update in my next column showing the current state of play prior to my starting adding the mosaic tiles themselves. Speaking of which…
Van Gogh Glass
Way back in the mists of time, when I first conceived this project, I originally planned on making the ceramic tiles myself. One of my friends does pottery as a hobby. He has his own kiln and he said that he and his wife could help me mix the glazes to get the different colors I required. But then I ran across something called "Van Gogh Glass," some samples of which are shown here.
Wow! Isn’t this amazingly cool? If you do a Google search for Van Gogh Glass, you will find it all over the place (which makes it all the more strange that I've never heard of it before). As you can see, this glass features stunning colors, streaks, and designs; also, it has a backing similar to a mirror, which is said to give an amazing effect.
So now I'm in a bit of a quandary. I think my first step is going to be to track some of this glass down and see what it looks like "in the flesh," as it were. If it looks as good as I think it will, I may be tempted to use this for my mosaic (I will be cutting it into small tiles as though I were doing stained glass). Apart from anything else, using Van Gogh Glass to re-create a Van Gogh image has a certain symmetry about it.
But my follow-on thought is this: Should I use this glass for the entire image? I'm tending toward saying no. I'm thinking that this would be magnificent for the different portions of the night sky in the image, but I may use different materials for the hills and the tree. You have to remember that I'm not an expert here, so if you have any thoughts on this I would love to hear them.
Random Stuff
Do you recall my homemade Geiger counter project? I couldn’t get it to work, so I ended up sending it to my friend David Ashton in Australia; David is an expert at diagnosing and fixing electronic systems. One of the problems I had was a lack of a radioactive source to test it. (Once he fixed the problems with the circuit, David tested it on some radioactive materials at a local hospital. He even posted a video of the Geiger counter working.) So it was somewhat ironic that the day after I'd dropped my Geiger counter in the post to David, someone sent me a couple of radioactive marbles, which are still sitting here in my office.
More recently, I discovered that you can purchase a can of uranium ore from Amazon.com. Give me strength! They really do sell just about everything these days, don’t they? If you have a few minutes to spare, you really should bounce over to Amazon to check out the comments that people have posted about this stuff. Some of them had me laughing out loud.
The other thing to watch for is at the bottom of the Amazon page where it says "Customers who viewed this item also viewed…" People do look at some strange things. Actually, I'm ashamed to admit that I was trapped myself, because I ended up adding a book to my Christmas wish list. The tome in question is The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montaque. Once again, the comments had me laughing out loud.
And speaking of laughing out loud, I saw this great video on YouTube recently. The idea is that someone has placed a pillar in the middle of a small town square. On top of the pillar is a big red button with a sign saying "Push to add drama" You just know that someone is going to push that button, don’t you? But what will happen? This really is very funny indeed. It's the sort of thing that I wish I could be there to see, so long as I wasn't the one pushing the button. Click here to see this video.
Isn’t the world a wonderful place? Until next time, have a good one!
Clive (Max) Maxfield is founder/consultant at Maxfield High-Tech Consulting. He is the author and co-author of a number of books, including Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronics) and How Computers Do Math featuring the pedagogical and phantasmagorical virtual DIY Calculator. To contact Max, click here.