Perpetual Calendar Stone (archival quality)

thingiverse

Photos 2-6 show a genuine CNC-milled tooling board foam made using a 1/32" drill bit. It was two-thirds the size of the original model. This STL file can be downloaded here, and it's the same one that was used. Inspired by Cosmo Wenman, who recently wrote on Medium: "It's an inversion of the goal of creating access to physical space. It takes a collection and projects it outward so people outside the museum can access designs directly, wherever they happen to be. What I'm advocating is not anticipating particular installations, uses, or audiences. It's dumping data online so users outside the museum can use it in ways we could never anticipate or plan for." This object satisfies a wide range of interests: 16th-century calligraphic ornaments, stone-etching, black-letter typography, elaborate ligatures, the history and use of almanacs, fine art as domestic and portable objects, and German culture from the Late Baroque era. It's closely related to manuscript scribes who wrote with ink on vellum. This technique seems to have been developed 500 years ago to write beautifully in stone! As far as I know, everything on the stone was handwritten with a special medium, and then an acid bath brought the negative space down just a few millimeters, creating a subtle relief with some lines as thin as a hair. In German, the technique is called Steinätzungen or stone-etching. Creator: Johannes Helsspect Ratisponensis F. (John Helsspect of Regensburg created this) Date: 1599 Dimensions: 11.5 x 17.5 x 0.75 inches Weight: ~24 pounds Material: Solnhofen limestone Date Acquired: September 6, 2014 From Where?: Bobingen, Germany (180 miles west of Regensburg) A damaged pocket-size version can be found in the British Museum. His famous contemporary is Andreas Pleninger [1555-1607]. A very special thanks to Sean O'Reilly and 3D Printsmith LLC for making this all possible. They used a calibrated structured light scanner and mapped numerous close-up shots to a macro view of the stone. Thank you all for downloading! I hope you enjoy it and look at it closely, it really rewards you with a wealth of detail when studied closely! Stephen Chow chow@brandeis.edu