Popular Woodworking 2009-02 № 174, страница 56

- Great Woodshops -

BY RAPHAEL ROSEN

Using Wood to Make Waves

Reuben Margolin uses scraps to explore science, nature and math.

A

/ V this moment, Reuben Margolin is building a gigantic wooden sculpture that moves. It's titled "Yellow Linear Wave," and is one ofhismany creations-usually built out of discarded pieces of redwood, bits of leftover metal and fishing tackle - that he calls "geometrical constructions flavored by art."

"Yellow Linear Wave" is 16' long, 6' wide and has 120 rods topped with poplar blocks painted yellow. While it's made mostly from poplar and Finnish plywood, it also includes parts of aluminum and UHMW (a slippery kind of plastic).

But what does it do?

Margolin created this sculpture to explore what happens when a sine wave with three peaks is added to a sine wave with four peaks -or, in general, to find out what happens when

The artist. Reuben Margolin creates kinetic sculptures to explore the undulation of caterpillars, grass moving in the wind, the motion of the waves and other natural phenomena. In "Yellow Rings," pictured above, each spiral drive creates a wave motion in the painted yellow rings.

74 ■ Popular Woodworking February 2009

The Round Wave. A plywood cam in the center of the mechanism causes the concentric rings to rise and fall in a ripple-like fashion.