We had fun last night after supper trying to build a little wooden arch with Kurt's son Otto. Epi wood is a very dense,hard, heavy wood from Brazil. It has been compared to steel. It makes a great material for building miniature walls and bridges because its weightiness gives it more structural grip.
I had made building blocks from the wood cut-offs from an epi wood deck that someone had been building. Several short pieces of 2x6 had been thrown away. It was a shame to see the scraps of valuable wood being wasted.
Anyway, we dry stacked the specially cut blocks into various shaped structures and then tried spanning them over an orange, using it as a makeshift form, to support the roman arch we attempted to build.
It nearly worked. Otto and I continued and experimented with several different ways of arch-vaulting using the same orange. Even though it never quite worked, the whole thing was still a good learning experience. It wasn't just some fruitless exercise!
