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.
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| The first Pair I made. |
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| 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.
