Rage Against The Night: More measurementing

My Large Art Burn [LAB] project for Alchemy — Rage Against The Night — requires that I show up this Saturday and Sunday at our venue just north of here and help harvest the lumber required to build it. And then I have to show up to build it. I may not have given this idea enough thought. Oh well, at least it’s only 40 minutes away.

With that in mind, it was necessary for me to do some mathology in order to know how much lumber I need to help harvest. (Someone’s legal restrictions, either Chattahoochee Hills or the State of Georgia, I’m not sure, prohibits us from building burnable art of a certain size from actual construction materials; I’m not sure why. So we have to scavenge/harvest trees and stuff.)

You will recall that Rage is made of three overlapping segments, palisades of saplings arched over a base.

If I want each segment to be an arc of half a circle, then I need measurements of each diameter.

I drew the base in Pixelmator Pro: 3 feet wide at one end, 5 feet at the other end, 10 feet in length. I used the scale 1”=1’, thus making it easy for me to determine the width of the segments between the ends. In the above diagram, I have made some guesses about the dimensions of the smaller ends to make sure they’ll fit within the next smaller segment.

(As I said to Ernie, our art lead, there’s going to be a lot of improvisation in the construction of this piece.)

Next I hopped over to the Circle Calculator at calculator.net, where I could put in the width as the diameter of a circle, then divide the circumference in half to find the width of the palisade I’d need to built for that segment.

For example, for the narrow end of segment 1, the width is 3 feet. A circle with a diameter of 3 has a circumference of 9.4247779607694, which is rather more precise than any burn artist ever needs. We’ll shorten that to 9.42, then divide in half: 4.71, which we can round up to 4.75, or 4’9”.

Easy, right?

I am assuming that my saplings will be thicker at the bottom of the trunk than four feet further up, enough to make segment 1, for example, 4’9” at one end and 6’0” at the other. If not, then we’ll do some improv to get it right.

I’ll have photos next week to show how well I’ve guessed at all this.