Message-Id: <1.5.4.32.19980616063550.006b3694@tscnet.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 23:35:50 -0700
To: baidarka@lists.intelenet.net
From: stephen <syahn@tscnet.com>
Subject: Re: [baidarka] Line of the spirit
At 01:26 PM 6/15/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>
>stephen wrote:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Today was very happy for me. I started making pieces for my first skin
>> boat(my 4th kayak,the others were plywood). I'm building a BRINK Baidarka.
>> Your joking about carving the spirit line got me to thinking about this
>> topic. The magic and mystery of life of our forbears is a wonderful part of
>> life to rediscover and participate in. Our life is too safe and
>> scientific,it's inhuman. Now, I don't want to make a spirit line with my
>> tabelsaw. I don't have a crooked knife. What should I use?
>> Thanks Steve Yahn Seattle
>
> Spirit lines, like everything about the traditional baidarka are strictly
>functional at least in the culture of the original builders if not necessarily
>in ours. Baidarkas, like everything else had to operate in the conventional,
>temporal world as well as in the spiritual world. For those contemporary
>builders that do not subscribe to the beliefs of the orignial builders, spirit
>lines may have a strictly decorative function and may thus be optional.
>
>On some of the baidarkas in the Leningrad Museum as documented by Zimmerly, the
>spirit lines in the gunwales are actually deep enough to possibly have some
>mechanical contribution to the performance of the baidarka, but in later
>baidarkas, the function of the spirit lines seems to fall squarely into the
>spiritual realm.
>
>The carving of spirit lines was not restircted to Aleutian boats either. I saw
>one Bering Strait boat in the Chicago Field Museum that had a spirit line
>carved on every visible member of the frame, including the ribs and deck
>beams. These lines were quite shallow, not deep enough to affect the
>mechanical properties of the boat, but the builder must have considered them a
>significant part of the boat in order to carve them, and must also have had
>enough spare time to carve them.
>
>My thinking along these lines is that if your intent is to replicate the
>original baidarka experience, then you should follow traditional building
>practices as closely as possible. My experience has been that the purpose of
>many baidarka features, though not obvious at the time you build the boat will
>reveal themselves to you as you use the boat.. Or to put it another way, do not
>dismiss traditional practices as irrelevant until you have had a chance to try
>them out.
>
>Wolfgang
>
>
>
Yes your right. When the grain runout is too excessive the cutting tool
tries to run off the job. A good hint.
Thanks Steve Yahn