I recently took on the challenge of learning to carve (or at least improve my carving skills). I wanted to find a few carvings in some of the styles I hoped to emulate so I could study which tools and what kinds of cuts had made them. After searching for a while, I had a few dozen carvings I was “watching” on eBay and I purchased a few pieces. I received a batch of carvings in the mail this week and upon close examination, four of them were not actual carvings or even made from wood!
I was not expecting that what I would learn from these pieces is that many of the “carvings” I had picked out were actually plaster molds of carvings and not carvings themselves. Notice the molding lines along the edges of each of the pieces below.
I’ll note that none of the sellers I bought these from were aware that they were not actual carvings, and they immediately refunded my money when they found out. People weren’t knowlingly misrepresenting these, they had been genuinely fooled as well.
It seems that creating the perception of something without the truth of the matter supporting it goes back much farther than the current political cycle… The idea of things needing just enough perception of truth to sell it taken to the extreme of today’s politics is downright disgusting.
Some science to go along with it:
A scientific principle that applies when manufacturing something like this that I teach in my science class but I think goes relatively unnoticed most of the time is the idea of expansion and contraction. This is evident to most woodworkers when considering the movement of wood primarily due to moisture content, but temperature is perhaps a larger culprit in most settings. Consider that the original carvings that these were based on were probably larger than the actual castings. If these are plaster than the loss of moisture might bring a 0.5% to 2.0% shrinkage, not huge, but noticeable.
Consider the implications: We use iron rebar in concrete because they have roughly the same coefficients of expansion. Train tracks and roads tend to “buckle” in summer. The average depth of the ocean is about 12,000 ft. Water has a linear coefficient of expansion of about 0.0007% per degree (C). So if we experienced say… two degrees of change in the ocean, that would result in about 1.7 feet of ocean increase not including any additional volume from melting. Just the physics of molecular movement… What other instances of expansion and contraction in everyday things can you think of?
Szience.com 