Gachacraft!

Gatcha-pon, or Gatcha, are little plastic balls you get from vending machines or stores. We have some in England but they seem very popular in Japan, with some really cool sets existing. Over here we're lucky if we see MicroMachines, usually these just contain cheap toys for kids or infants. Sometimes temporary transfer tattoos or bouncy balls.

So after the fairly big staff project (which is still ongoing, it's either too hot or storming! Can't catch a break!) I've taken a little time to dress a little display for this cool little gatcha set I got from Japan this Summer.

It's fairly basic, but I just wanted something to set them out there to that was a little more than just "placed on my shelf". So I got a tatami mat pattern to create a Japanese style traditional living room/lounge. With a papercraft television and stand, and a little cardboard box to store all the leftover peripherals.

I chose the Japanese setting, and intentionally went with the traditional stuff to really emphasise the setting, as all of these consoles are the Japanese versions of the consoles that we know in the west as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. I'll be you didn't know there was a huge keyboard attachment and magnetic tape drive available for it! In Japan you could even get a cartridge to run a version of BASIC through the console and create your own programs.

Anyway, perhaps I'll try this again when I get my hands on a laser printer and some real cardstock - but for now, it does me nicely.

(3DS and GBC give a good sense of scale I guess! These things are tiny!)

-Elabs, James.

Staffs, staves and sticks to walk softly with.

Here it is! The first make post. I have a couple of projects already completed before ELabs was even a twinkling idea in my head, and whilst I'm scouring the internet for employment I thought I would flesh out this blog with a couple of things I've undertaken and as many (potato quality I'm afraid..!) photos as I've got to hand after my windows phone decided to just flat out die on me.

This build started with my parents, or more specifically my father's enthusiasm for feeding his log-burner and my neighbours desire to be rid of the trees in her front garden. The wood shed was looking a little empty so an agreement was made that resulted in a day of ladders, chainsaws and near-misses! By the end of it we had well over a tonne of wood.

This is kinda focused right? Right?? Well at least I could send texts...

Well this one is better... I guess...

I managed to snag several long and straight(ish) limbs from the trees that I thought would make excellent staffs! How exciting! I've made a staff before, but this is the first one I've had a chance to make since acquiring my "new" draw knife!

Sorry for the mix in quality, I just took this one on my new camera!

 In the past I've sat there by the fire, whittling the bark off with whatever was lying around the camp site - a pocket knife, an axe or rarely a stanley knife. Usually this results in a sore thumb as you use your thumb to lever and apply pressure - but with this! Oh man! The bark just flew off! Before I knew it I had shaved the bark clean off of a couple of the "staffs to be".

2 down, 3 to go!

So for the next 2 hours, give or take, I had clamped the wood in place and merrily shaved the wood to a state where it would begin to take its final shape. The draw knife left the surface very course and pitted - but like anything I suppose, you trade off time for results. In my experience a razor blade - whilst it takes four times as long to do (perhaps one staff in an evening) it gives a better initial finish. Now that these staffs were naked - it was time to get sanding!

Rough! But starting to take shape!

There was still daylight at this point. So I decided that I would take my little Ryobi sander and start to round off some of the raised knots and smooth out the notches and flat spots that the knife had left. This is where it starts to get messy! The payoff is really high though. This step it where I get to really form how the staff is going to look when I'm done. So I start with a really low grit paper to start taking this rough material off. I think in this case I started with some 60 grit, really harsh sandpaper. After some time slowly progressing through the finer and finer grains, I ended up with a staff that looked actually round!

Before and After sanding to 400 grit. Also consistent "artwork"!

This process creates a lot of dust, so if you're doing this you might want to consider what it is you're going to be breathing in for the duration of your work. For me it's usually a bandana or something simple for this kind of work, I only break out the mask if I'm doing spraying.

Dusty jeans and enough wood shavings to displace the pre-existing woodchips!

Now there's a little gap in the pictures here, as I decided that I would be taking one of these staffs and really finishing it as a gift for mothering Sunday (my father already has one I made him! and I know my mother covets it!). So I had to stealthily take one of these away from my parents house and get it back to my flat for further sanding and oiling - I really spend a lot of time hand-sanding it. I eventually worked up to lapidary type paper of 1500 and 2000 grit. I don't know how much good it did, but it's somewhat theraputic to just sit there and buff the hell out of wood. It's weird how shiny it can get without any wet treatment. Unfortunately I didn't snap a picture at that point - but I just immediately coated the staff in linseed oil (I love the smell of this stuff!). This is really my favourite part. When the wood grain emerges from the raw wood that you've spent hours with and you really see what it is going to be spending its life looking like. I always feel happy seeing those lines just pop right out.

Post linseed oiling. 3 coats and a day to rest.

This grain was interesting, patchy and spotty rather than stripy. Not quite what I was hoping for but it really got me wondering what kind of wood it was. I think it turned out to be an ornamental cherry tree, but I'm no dendrologist! The staff was now super shiny and I was really pleased. Time now to dress it up!

Unfortunately owing to a bit of a blunder on my part (basically using Zune was just too much of a pain, so I never backed up...) and a failed phone means that I lost the few pictures I took of this step. This was for my mother on mother's day, so I thought that I would set my siblings and my birthstones in to the grip, as well as give it a textured leather grip with leather oak leaf trim.

Tada!

You can see it all assembled here, but to set the stones I used a mixture of epoxy and sawdust I got from sanding this staff - usually this process gives me a nice blend so the stones just look like they're held on with magic. This one I wasn't so happy with - but we're all our own worst critics I guess! The leaves were individually cut, then I used a skiving type tool to cut "veins" in to them - each had to be punched so I could sew them all to that band with synthetic sinew. I can't count the times I almost gored myself with a bradawl doing that! Eventually I was using a mallet at my workbench for each hole.

The actual grip is attached with nothing more than friction - I wet the leather thoroughly, made a form out of gardening wire which I placed over the leather - wrapped it all tightly in green gardening twine and left it to dry for 24hours - the tension from the twine pressed the curves that you can just about see in to the grip, it also leaves this lovely tooling in the grip by its own virtue. As the leather dries, it contracts, and the fibres kind of lock together - some people use a little PVA to glue the edges - but I'd managed to skive mine down so thinly that it was a barely noticeable overlap that really held together - even today it looks like a continuous strip with barely any seam!

The final piece.

 All in all, it came out well, and my mother was very pleased. Still have a few blanks left that I hope to dig in to real soon!

Thanks for reading the first real post. Future posts will have a lot more pictures now that I've gotten a camera sorted and can reliably get at them! I hope that my artwork improves too!

Feedback is greatly appreciated if you've found this page!

-ELabs, James.

Why "Equivalence Labs"?

Now, this first post is probably more about etymology and how my brain works that it is about making anything, but considering this page is somewhat sparse, I thought it might be good to consider it a piece of modern art - fairly meaningless without the proper context. So if you're here because you wanted builds - check back in a few days. If you're here because I'm famous in the future, well - I don't think I have any way of processing that sort of information, attention or renown. Either way - thanks for reading this far, and I hope that I can quickly tell you before you stop reading: I would really love it if you just went out and made/built/personalised something. That's my goal. I build, you build - we're the same. Equivalents.

Now - back to the etymology!

Without a doubt you'll be familiar with the word "equivalence", assuming of course English is your first language. For those not in the know, "equivalence" describes the state of two objects being the same, the root of this word can be found in the late Latin "aequivalentia" which means "Of equal force or value", a balance between things. When I had to name my efforts in creation (because what's a blog without a name?) I didn't know where to begin - I had no name, but only a concept.

When I initially started making, it was never focused on one particular skill or art. I dabbled in this, that and the other focusing on getting to the end state, and finding solutions to create the desired outcome with limited space, tools and until recently - time. This found me making strange things and no project really carried on to the next one. I've made staffs using nothing but natural "gifted" wood from my local forests, I've revamped kid's foam dart blasters to imitate futuristic space laser guns and I've even dabbled in making swords from popular videogame franchises. (I'm sure I'll get around to posting at least the finished articles - even if I don't have any build pictures any more.) Because of the mixing of my medium, organic and very inorganic, I wanted very much to go along the route of "Harmony", between raw, natural, earthly materials, and the industrial, electronic, man-made side of things. I spent a long time doodling a maker's mark before I came up with this one.

There are elements of the electronic pads you might see on a printed circuit board blended in to an Ouroboros design, with everything tending towards a cyclical design like the yin-yang symbol of Chinese philosophy. Of course there is the large equals symbol in the middle which is probably a little blunt - but aesthetics was important too!

Before really starting this project, I was studying my undergraduate degree in Psychology. One of the final modules I undertook was on emotion, which as it turns out wasn't just critical to my grade - but also in the naming of this blog. There's a term in psychology we use to describe "positivity" and "negativity" in a situation, an object or an event. This term is "Valence" and it can be used to describe "good" emotions such as happiness and "bad" emotions like sorrow, these good and bad emotions would have positive and negative valence, respectively, with good being positive and bad being negative. The lexical interest of valence doesn't just end there!

Valence as a suffix (of course, not a real English word, it just appears within other words!) pops up in other fairly common words such as "ambivalence", which we could interpret to mean "of both valences" and most importantly to me "equivalence" which we could interpret as "of equal valences". In this sense, I really want to get across my true driving concept - to inspire. I love making things, and I know there are many people out there that would also really like to start out making things, or perhaps people that would if they gave it a go! Equivalence to me represents my ambition - my hope that if I give this my all, and make things for you guys to see - perhaps you'll be inclined to give it a go!

Now don't be expecting perfect, gorgeous pieces from me - I'm a novice here and I take my time with pieces. I make mistakes. Hell - I'm sure that I've made typographical errors in this piece (which is now probably the most inaccessible piece of writing I've ever done - way to strike interest with a new audience!)

So there you have it. I've put it out there - all of the nonsense that went through my head coming up with this mark, this name ("Lab" was chosen fairly haphazardly - I'm used to saying lab, as I work in them most of the time, so why not here too :) )

Thanks for reading, and I hope future entries aren't so bland!

-ELabs, James.

Welcome to Equivalence Labs!

This is a new project focused on the artistry involved in the creation of costume and stage props with the aim to inspire more creation and to distribute techniques, tips and how-to guides - especially within the UK where the materials are different or simply unavailable!

Please stay tuned for more information in the coming days!