Week 8 Group A Lab Data

For this week’s lab, we made the frame of a viking tent out of trees from the arb. Under the tutelage of Maeve Gathje, we got to experience each step within the process of transitioning a tree to pieces of timber. The total lab took us approximately five hours, given the four hour lab and the extra hour during Friday’s class.

Quantitative Measurements

Debarking – The total amount we, as a group, debarked was about half one of the tree trunks. These measurements were taken based upon the debarking of the tree’s exterior circumference (ie. not just one strip is completed).

Person	Time	Length Debarked
Hope	~ 10 minutes	25 cm
Elek	~ 10 minutes	30 cm
Glen	~ 10 minutes	32 cm

Shaping – This was difficult to acquire data for because I found myself always holding a tree-trunk for someone or personally working with the axe. That being said, the ideal distance for the initial axe knicks in the tree was about 5 cm apart. I also found that my partner and I had to switch constantly because we kept getting tired after a bit. After one rotation section (~ 30min), we had completed both sides of a tree trunk which was ~ 675 cm. This means that our rate of production was about 22.5 cm per minute.

Cutting – We scaled the tent to 60% of the original which meant that we had to adjust the original measurements:

Tent Piece	Original Length (cm)	60% Length (cm)
p.326, shear leg	410	246
g.318, shear leg	410	246
l.322, transom	450	270
o.325, shear leg	410	246
h.319, shear leg	410	246
n.324, transom	450	270
i.320, side ground pole	570	342
r.328, side ground pole	560	336
b.312, ridge pole	505	303

Tent Assembly – It took approximately 10 minutes for us to assemble the full frame during Friday’s class period.

Qualitative Measurements

• Dragon Heads: the drawing of the dragon heads was not inherently difficult but the communication between those drawing and those carving the wood speaks to aspirations of visual uniformity and non-written methods of communication. I found that it was difficult to carve the dragon because I did not always know what the original artist meant by certain symbols.
• A difficult component of the Cutting part of the lab was trying to figure out the right place to drill the holes. For some of the Tent Pieces, the instructions specifically did not give any details on the location of the holes and thus we had to use our best guess with regard to general stability alongside standardization.
• With regard to data collection, I found it interesting how varied the recorded data could be. Thinking back to the lab, there were a lot of elements that had the potential to be measured which made it difficult to isolate the most important aspects.