Series

Wheel — the series

6 essays on one idea, from the one that introduces it to the one that assumes the rest.
  1. 5e-14°2.65°0.59°correct from 16 cm, at 160 mm wideaxle solid, minor axis dashed · 2.65° at the edge

    The minor axis is not the axle

    A wheel's perspective ellipse is supposed to have its short axis along the axle, and it does — on the principal ray, to 5e-14 degrees, and nowhere else. Off it the two part by 5.95 degrees on an ordinary frame while the drawn curves stay 0.98 px apart. A sphere obeys a rule of exactly the same shape and obeys it everywhere, which is why nobody caught the difference.

    part 4 · wrong
  2. correct from 16 cm, at 160 mm wide35 px from the major axis

    A cylinder has two different ends

    The two end circles of a cylinder image as two different ellipses — 14.4° apart in the direction of their major axes and 0.918 against 0.839 in aspect — and the outline's straight sides touch neither of them where its major axis ends, missing by 28° round the ellipse and 35 pixels. Walking the cylinder away removes the difference between the ends and does not remove the offset of the touch, which settles at 7.3° off the principal ray and at nothing on it.

    part 5 · wrong
  3. the axis's vanishing pointthe photographtaper 1° per side · drawn at 0.72×4.2 px missed by the habit

    A tapered part meets at its apex

    The sides of a turned part that narrows by one degree meet 54 pixels from the vanishing point of its axis, at the image of its apex, and a quarter of a degree already moves them 15. Drawn toward the vanishing point instead, a two-degree part loses nine tenths of its own taper. Flare it the other way by 5.9 degrees and a correct photograph prints its sides parallel; flare it further and they spread with depth.

    part 6 · wrong
  4. the axis, from the rimsthe photographdown the axis: the rims' truesizes, near solid, far dashedtaper 1° per side · board at 0.46×read 1.000°

    The rims carry a part's taper, as finely as they are drawn

    A turned part's two rim ellipses are enough to read its taper: the one axis that makes both of them circles lands on the true vanishing point, and looked at down that axis the rims give a one-degree taper back to the sixth decimal. Drawn by hand to half a pixel they give it to ±0.4°, a part pointing away from the eye to ±0.15° and one lying across the view to ±3°. The rims' sizes alone cannot do it, since a turn shrinks the far rim exactly as a taper does. And rims drawn with ellipse guides carry no taper at all — the guide's step reads as one.

    part 7 · wrong
  5. 1° a side, axis 80° from the sight, 0.5 pxtogether ±0.032° · rims ±3.13°

    A turned part drawn from the side keeps its taper in its sides

    A turned part's two rims read its taper well when the part points away from the eye and lose it as the part turns across the view: drawn to half a pixel, a one-degree taper lying across the view reads ±3.1°. Its two sides do the opposite. Fitted together with the rims as one tapered part, the same drawing reads the taper to ±0.03° — a hundred times better — and a part seen from the side, the view it is usually drawn in, shows a taper of six hundredths of a degree.

    part 8 · wrong
  6. a 15% swelling at two fifths, 1° of taper, 0.5 pxswelling read 0.150 ± 0.002

    A turned part's outline reads its swelling from every side, and a straight taper hides it

    A turned part that swells by 15% of its radius two fifths of the way along, drawn to half a pixel, gives up the swelling's height to ±0.0024 of its radius and its crest's place to ±0.003 of its length from one side-view drawing — and to about the same from every other view, square to the picture or lying across it. A swelling of one hundredth of the radius, under a pixel on the page, is read as 0.0098 ± 0.0022. Read as a straight taper, the earlier essays' reading, the same drawings put the swelling into the taper and read a 1° part as 2.2°.

    part 9 · wrong

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