Inaugural IRMA Gathering – Part 1

The first-ever gathering of the Intergalactic Ripple Molding Association (IRMA) convened at The Barn recently.  In the fortnight preceding this I was wondering how to accommodate the many folks who at one time or another said they were coming to this free event.  Not to worry.  Of the dozen or so who expressed an interest in joining me for the week, three actually did.  It turned out to be the optimal attendance, allowing for a perfect number of collaborative participants to brainstorm, design, fabricate, problem solve, debug, and finally produce moldings on both an  old machine and a new one (or at least get to the point of “proof of concept” for the new one).

The Felebien model Cor built (above) and the project mock-up he made with it (below)

Our first two days were spent deciphering, assembling, tuning, dismantling, repairing, reassembling, and finally producing some moldings on the Winterthur Museum Felebien/Moxon machine built by my long-time friend and colleague Cor van Horne.

This machine was the one described by Roubo, sort of, and was a moving-workpiece-fixed-cutterhead style with a rack-and-pinion setup for bringing the cutter and the workpiece together.

The phrase, “Now exactly how does this work?” was muttered countless times through the day.

By the end of the first day we had it assembled and working, after a fashion.