Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Golden Ratio Caliper

Sometime in the distant past of my school years I learned about the Greek mathematicians who obsessed over the golden ratio.  About 40 years later I crossed the path of that strange number again when I attended a blacksmith demonstration and was shown a proportional divider which was being used to scale a larger element in relationship to a smaller element.  This was another refutation of my childhood pronouncement that there wasn’t any point to learning math because it didn’t apply to anything in my life.

I long ago rejected that original proposition and now embrace the usefulness of math.  On the other hand, this is a tool which I have used a few times but never really discovered how to integrate much  of that into my design work.

The first Pair I made.

Two Larger Versions

Below is a collection of some links relating to this tool.  It seems to me the elegance of the tool itself sometimes exceeds the elegance of what the tool can do.

I didn’t invest much time in the three versions I made at different scales.  I include a measured drawing I found in the SketchUp library.  The ratio is only a rule-of-thumb type aid so exact measurements shouldn’t matter much.