I’m currently acting as the bouncer at a middle school dance. Being the bouncer involves bouncing the kids that want to leave, back in. It’s rather the other opposite of the typical nightclub, I imagine. Instead of keeping folks under 21 out, I was keeping them in, and their parents out beyond the alleged velvet rope.

In between guard dog duties, I made a dozen or so sketches of possible Kavad designs. As I said in an earlier post, one of the critical challenges in this sort of thing is filling up all available space inside the storage space, while still assuring that the hinges and pivots work correctly, and the box opens properly. The sketches served the purpose of identifying which kinds of parts belonged where, and how they should fit together.

But of course, as I’ve said still earlier on this channel, Brunelleschi wrote, “errors in the sketch are magnified in the model.” it’s easy for 2D mistakes — in perspective, in mechanical comprehension — to creep into the 3-D iteration of the design.

More than this, though — it’s clear that the kavad design cannot be divorced from the story told. If you want to tell certain stories of the Bible, the kavad must open so that Torah stories appear first, then Tanakh stories (yes, really I mean Na’vi and Kethubim stories), then gospels and letters (leaving aside for a moment that a Jewish kavad would be inherently heretical…). If you’re going to tell the story of the US Civil War, the box must unfold so that the story progresses from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, from Harper’s Ferry to Ford’s Theater, while certain characters like Lincoln, Lee, Davis and Grant are more or less constantly in view (I’m picturing a little fold-out Uncle Tom’s Cabin in there, as well.)

Anyway it’s late, so let me get to my point. Without good drawing skills, it would be difficult at best for me to explain my thinking on this project. I couldn’t do it in words, because the words that describe a kavad are its own story, and the story and the kavad that tell it arise as a consequence of one another.

So practice your drawing and sketching skills. But recognize that your sketches may or may not get you to the point where they are comprehensive explanations of a three-D object. It may not be possible to do it.

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