“Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?…’

You dare not.’

And in the gunslinger’s mind, those words echoed: You dare not.”

—Stephen King, The Gunslinger

 

The Dark Tower. The center of reality, beyond the horizon, past the setting sun. The Tower is the titular plot device of Stephen King’s saga, The Dark Tower. I’m on the third book at the moment, and thought it’d make an interesting carve.

The gunslinger sat down across the fire from the man in black,and watched as he produced a deck of tarot cards from his cloak.

Of the seven the gunslinger drew, I was dealt three: Life, The Prisoner, and The Tower.

Life. See, the Tower was not my first idea to carve. Initially, I was going to carve the tree of life into one of the cedar rounds. I went so far as to cut a piece in two and prepare them for the machine:

When I finally got to the Carvey after fixing my file to be readable, I was given a time estimate for carving. Nine hours. Each. There was just too much detail to cover. With some tinkering, I managed to get it down to forty-five minutes apiece, still on the long side. Additionally, there was no good way to secure the round cross-section of cedar into the square clamp. I tried square backing piece, but it made the wood an awkward height where the yellow clamps were too long, but the red ones too short. I abandoned the idea, at least for the sake of this project. At least for my first time using this new machine.

The Prisoner. The card depicts a man held at the neck by a monkey on his back. The gunslinger’s monkey is his unfaltering pursuit of the tower. Mine is my ambition on these projects. From trying to laser cut the first project through now with the failed tree, I’ve been shooting higher than I can reach. That’s been costing me most of my time. Every project, I’ve had to redesign or suddenly change courses partway through to accomodate for the fact that I don’t have all the skills necessary for what I want to do. Here, I’m putting off the Tree of Life design until I have more time and experience to carve it.

The Tower. I needed something else to carve after leaving the tree behind. I browsed the Noun Project for pictures of sunsets and towers, but couldn’t find anything exactly to my liking. I took the liberty of drawing my own in Illustrator:

In Easel, I decided to take some time to experiment with depth for depth of field.The lines going out were progressively deeper, and deeper was the sun, and deeper than that, The Tower. I sanded a couple blocks of cedar smooth and to size, then ran the cut:

I was not as impressed as I hoped from the variable depth. It didn’t seem to be accurate, since the line depth ranged from just over a sixty-fourth in the file down to an eighth, but there’s clearly less variation than that. The sun turned out fine. The Tower’s window was supposed to go all the way through the block so the light shining through would make a bright contrast against the Dark Tower. That didn’t happen. Nonetheless, I was relatively satisfied with the piece and cut the other.

I painted in the Tower with walnut and mahogany stain to give it a darker contrast. I left the window unstained, but unfortunately the shadow within keeps it from standing out. The sun was left raw as well, to keep it brighter than the rest of the block, which was given a coat of tung oil.

I’m pretty happy with the final results. I think I’ll make them into bookends for the series on my shelf after this. Perhaps another day, I’ll be able to take on the Tree of Life and make something nice to hang on a wall. For now, there’s other matters to attend to (chess piece coming soon!).

There are projects other than these, gunslinger…