Chackram progress, Friday and Sunday morning

The Friday before last, I  finally went out with my father to buy wood for making my chakram/wheels for lady Sun. It was hard to find (Leroy Merlin, why did you fail me?!?) but we ended up at a rather nice and professional store. To our great sadness, we found out that they didn´t cut circles (or rather "crowns/halos")--we had to end up ordering square cuts, to later cut into circles ourselves. it was a bit discouraging, but not too much.

We already had the design for the chakram, so we knew what the thickness (of the board) and measurements and such we wanted to cut the board into. In case you can´t see it too well, it´s a circle with a diameter of 1m. The inner corona should have a radius of 37cm: my Dad and I calculated (from looking at pictures) that the blades must be around 7cm and the inner "support" 6cm, making it a mere 13 cm of wood before you reach "empty circle space" as I like to call it.We estimate that the thickness should be of 12-15mm.

 

Our oh-so-professional-looking weapon design.

We ended up buying a 2.55m x 1.22m piece, and had it cut into two 1.02x1.02m pieces, with the rest of it saved as well. Unfortunately, the "lighter" version of the wood that we needed came at 10mm thickness at the most, so we ended up buying a thinner peice than we had planned as well. It´ll be easier to cut, i suppose, but I still would have liked it thicker. As soon as the pieces were cut, we took my babies home!!

The leftover pieces will work quite nicely for swordmaking, naginatamaking or just about any wooden weapon-making. Which makes me happy. I have enough for more than 2 swords, probably.

On Sunday, we got down to work. The first thing we did was draw the design onto the wooden squares.

 We used a chain (and a nail driven into the center of the board) to draw the arcs and circumferences in the design. Why a chain and not string? Chain has no give, while string and yarn does, leading to imperfect circles.

One of my (rather, LoL) original ways of  tracing everything so that all the designs ended up being symmetrical. I was too lazy to go get a clean sheet, so we used one which we´d scribbled calculations on.

We finished everything before lunch. I thought that that would be that--it was a lot of progress, frankly, for a couple of hours in the morning--but in the end, my Dad got really pumped and we decided to go for it and advance while we could later in the afternoon.