Seigaiha — The First Limited Edition

At the end of my last Journal entry, I mentioned that I'd already started work on the first Keiyosa Limited Edition.

This is it.

It's called Seigaiha, and perhaps appropriately for the first of these projects, it started with something very familiar to Keiyosa: an ink pot holder.

Ink pot holders have been part of Keiyosa for a long time, but I didn't want this to simply be another variation of an existing design. One of the reasons for starting these Limited Editions was to give myself permission to explore ideas that might be too involved, too time-consuming or simply too impractical for something I need to keep permanently in stock.

Seigaiha has become a bit of all three.

It combines oak, solid brass and UV printing, along with CNC machining, turning and quite a lot of work by hand.

And one of my favourite details started with a tiny piece of brass that was never intended to be decorative at all.

From a mechanical pin to a star

For another Keiyosa project, I make wooden QR code stands with solid brass feet.

The feet need to be mechanically secured to the wooden body, and part of the solution I came up with involves drilling through the assembly and inserting a tiny piece of 1.5mm brass rod. The pin locks the components together.

It's a very small detail and its purpose is entirely practical.

But I liked it.

There was something about that tiny point of brass sitting against the timber that made me wonder what would happen if I stopped treating it as something to hide.

Could the pin itself become the detail?

That little piece of construction eventually became the starting point for what I've been calling the stars on Seigaiha.

Instead of passing through another component, small holes are drilled directly into the oak body. Short lengths of the same 1.5mm brass rod are inserted, cut down and then carefully filed back until they're flush with the timber.

What's left is simply a tiny point of solid brass.

One isn't particularly noticeable.

Scattered around the body, however, they start to change the character of the piece completely.

There's also something I particularly like about using such a simple material in this way. They're not brass inlays I've bought or decorative components manufactured specifically for the piece. They're pieces cut from ordinary brass rod, individually fitted and finished as part of making each holder.

It's a lot of work for a very small detail.

Which, really, is exactly the sort of thing I wanted these Limited Editions to give me an excuse to do.

Stars and waves

The other defining part of the design is the pattern that gives the edition its name.

Seigaiha is the Japanese pattern of repeating, overlapping waves. It's an incredibly simple geometric motif, but repeated across a surface it creates something much more intricate.

I wanted the pattern to wrap around the oak rather than cover it completely, allowing the timber itself to remain an important part of the object.

This also gave me an opportunity to combine two processes that I hadn't previously brought together in quite this way.

The body could still begin as a piece of solid oak, machined and shaped in the workshop, but the surface could then become another part of the design through UV printing.

And amongst those waves would sit the little pieces of brass.

Stars and waves.

I can't claim that I began the project with some grand idea of creating a night sky above an ocean. The design developed much more naturally than that.

I had a pattern I wanted to explore. I had this little brass detail I'd become fascinated with. I had oak, a material that has always been central to Keiyosa.

Gradually, they began to belong together.

Starting with oak

The main body begins as solid oak.

The ink pot sits inside a cylindrical recess, but rather than keeping the outside completely vertical I wanted the body to taper gently towards the top.

It's a fairly subtle change, but it makes the holder feel less like a block with a hole machined into it and gives the body a more deliberate shape.

Getting there wasn't quite as straightforward as the finished shape might suggest.

Some parts could be machined on the CNC, while others made more sense on the lathe. There were also practical questions that only really appeared once I started making it: how to hold the part for different operations, how to support it while turning, and later how to hold a small tapered wooden cylinder accurately enough to print around its circumference.

A surprising amount of this project has involved making things in order to make the thing.

Jigs, holders, mandrels and test pieces rarely appear in photographs of the finished object, but they've become an important part of developing it.

That's another part of these Limited Editions that I want to document here.

Not just the object at the end, but all the slightly awkward bits in between.

Adding the stars

Drilling the holes for the brass turned out to be one of those awkward bits.

By this stage, the oak had already been shaped and the wall around the ink pot recess was only a few millimetres thick in places.

The brass rod is 1.5mm.

The holes therefore needed to be deep enough to hold each piece securely, but not so deep that the drill appeared inside the ink pot recess.

Each piece of brass was then fitted individually before being cut and filed back to the surface.

It isn't a particularly sophisticated process.

It is, however, a slow one.

And with at least sixteen stars going into each holder, repeated across a very small edition, I've become rather familiar with 1.5mm brass rod.

 

Once they're flush, the effect is much quieter than the process required to put them there.

That's probably what I like most about them.

Unless you know how the holder was made, they're simply little flashes of brass amongst the oak.

Printing the waves

Once the shaping and brass work were complete, the body could finally receive the Seigaiha pattern.

Because the design wraps around a cylinder, this isn't simply a case of placing the piece underneath the printer and pressing start.

The holder has to rotate as the pattern is printed, which introduced another round of experimenting with workholding and positioning.

Watching the pattern appear was also one of the first moments when all the separate ideas started to make sense together.

Until then I'd spent a lot of time looking at individual components: an oak cylinder, tiny brass rods, drawings, test prints and pieces of tooling.

Once the blue waves began wrapping around the oak and meeting the brass stars, it started looking like the object I'd been trying to make.

There are still more pieces to make and more stages to document.

The base is machined separately. The solid brass pen rest needs to be cut and shaped. Everything has to be finished and finally assembled.

But that's probably enough for one Journal entry.