Ask Kaden Harris what he does for a living and he will tell you that he builds antiques from a parallel universe, and when he says antiques, he doesn’t mean old pots and clocks that sit all pretty on your shelf, but fully functional miniature Rebuchets, Guillotine and Catapults that you could use to raise hell by chopping off fingers of those who did you wrong or catapulting nuts at your secretary. Just the perfect medieval office toy, I tell you.

Never satisfied with just drive-by surfing, we cornered Mr. Harris and badgered him with questions:

Sensory: I really want to know how you first got into this. I’m sure you didn’t wake up one day and decided to sell miniature Guillotines.

Harris: Dunno how I ended up doing this. I’ve done a lot of different day jobs over the years; from cooking sewage (don’t ask) to corporate graphic design, but the end of each day would have me back doing the 2 passions: “Figgerin’ Out How Stuff Works”, and “Buildin’ Stuff”. I have built an unholy amount of stuff over the years, no shit. Once you get around the physics of the mechanisms, the form factors reflect, I guess, a post millennial mutation of the Victorian ‘Gentleman Inventor’.

Now, marketing the siege engine miniatures as executive rewards was pretty much a no brainer: If you’d just been named Salesman of the Year”, what would you rather receive as a commemorative trophy: a soapstone carving of a hooded ptarmigan (with an engraved brass plaque), or a fully functional hanging counterweight trebuchet that’ll fire chunks of sweaty cheddar all the way into the cube farm (also with an engraved brass plaque)?

No-Brainer.

AND, I get to do R&D on all kinds of wiggy stuff for new product lines. I have the coolest job ever!

Sensory: And do these models really work? Could I use them?

Harris: Yeah, the stuff all works, with varying degrees of impressiveness. The trebuchets are gravity powered, and there’s limitations as to how much mass you can stuff into the weight boxes. I market the trebs as being ‘coin operated’...park one on the corner of your desk and toss your pocket change into the weight box…by the end of the month you’ll have accumulated enough weight to toss a grape 30 or 40 feet provided you’ve taken the time to performance tune the piece.

There’s lots of variables in trebuchet math, and even with a simulation program, getting the maximum bounce fer yer ounce is less science, mo’ voodoo. Then there’s the Floating Arm Trebuchet, which was engineered by a guy in Sherman Oaks in 1994 or so…amazingly enough, it was the first real advancement in treb engineering in about 400 years, and it improved the overall efficiency of the mechanism by about 70 %, which is pretty impressive if you think about it. Anyway, the thing with trebs is ‘bigger = farther”.

Mangonels and ballistae are powered by the toque stored in a twisted skein of rope. Think ‘rubberband powered model airplanes’. Torsion skeins don’t suffer anywhere near the amount of power loss when downsized as gravity powered mechanisms do; even a teeny-weeny ballista will fire a kabob skewer into drywall. I ship ‘em in ‘modest performance’ mode, but there’s some tweezes you can do to a ballista that them a lot more manly, as it were. I don’t take performance as being the only objective, but I generally try to maintain ‘best possible case’ math when I’m fabricating. A lot depends on the personality the piece develops during fabrication (which is the only factor that really matters)

The guillotine works too, but getting any efficiency out of it was a character building experience…it’s that danged scaling effect again. Real guillotines had bigassed blades…88 pounds of well tempered iron with a razor edge falling 14 feet. A scaled down blade weighs about 2 ounces, and falls about a foot. You can see where this is going…

Just getting a blade that would hold an edge was a struggle; I ended up cutting them from old industrial circular saw blades. It is not easy to cut a saw blade, in case you were wondering. Then I cast a half pound block of lead onto the top of the blade for added mass, which gives the mechanism enough wellie to dismember veggies for a salad (remember Creepella Gruesome from the Flintstones? She had a kitchen guillotine) or lop the tip off a monte cristo #3 cigar (which is what I used to size the headstock). The Goths eat this kinda stuff up.

Now that I think about it, everything on the models works…there’s winches, block ‘n tackles, seriously complicated trigger mechanisms, the laser sights on the ballistae. Geez, I put little spring-loaded shock absorbers on mangonels to absorb the impact from the throwing arm.

Sensory: You must spend a lot of time working on them. How long does it take to develop one of these machines?

Harris: It took 6 months to come up with the next ‘Dangerous Thing’...I did a prototype of a ‘pitching machine’ sort of thingie powered by 2 sewing machine motors that was supposed to fire anything from pencils to Sharpies, but it turned out to be insanely over-powered…workplace murders would have gone through the roof if I’d brought it to market. I have a newfound respect for 2H pencils these days. Anyway, I was also trying to come up with something that might appeal to the less testosteronically inclined, and a rapid fire pencil gun (art-deco styling not withstanding) just didn’t say ‘Lady Eccentric Genius’ like I was hoping. I eventually realized that a desktop version of ‘The Whirling Hypnodisk of the Daughter of Fu-Manchu’s Ex Roommate’ would end up being ideal, and the prototype of that very thing is what I’m working on at the moment.

I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of the weekend. Did I mention that I have the coolest job ever?

related links

Eccentric Genius