Photos 2-6 show an actual CNC-milled tooling board foam using a 1/32" drill bit. It was 2/3 the size of the original. For download here, this is the same STL file that was used.

Inspired by Cosmo Wenman, who recently wrote the following on Medium:

"It’s an inversion of the goal of creating access to a physical space. It’s taking a collection and projecting it outward so that people outside the museum can access the designs directly, wherever they happen to be.

What I’m advocating is not anticipating particular installations, particular uses, or particular audiences. It’s dumping the data online so that the users outside the museum can use it in ways that we could never anticipate or plan for."

This object satisfies a broad range of interests: 16th century calligraphic ornaments, stone-etching, black-letter typography, elaborate ligatures, the history and use of almanacs, fine art as domestic and portable objects, and German culture from the Late Baroque era.

It is closely related to manuscript scribes who wrote with ink on vellum. This technique seems to have been developed 500 years ago to write beautifully in stone! As far as I know, everything on the stone was hand-written with a special medium, and then an acid bath brought the negative space down just a few millimeters, creating a subtle relief with some lines as thin as a hair. In German the technique is called Steinätzung, or stone-etching.

Creator: Johannes Helsspect Ratisponensis F. (John Helsspect of Regensburg created this)
Date: 1599
Dimensions: 11.5 x 17.5 x 0.75 inches
Weight: ~ 24 lbs
Material: Solnhofen limestone
Date Acquired: 2014-09-06
From Where?: Bobingen, Germany (180 miles west of Regensburg)

A damaged pocket-size version can be found in the British Museum. His famous contemporary is Andreas Pleninger [1555-1607].

A very special thanks to Sean O'Reilly and 3D Printsmith LLC for making this all possible. He used a calibrated structured light scanner and mapped numerous close-up shots to a macro view of the stone.

Thank you all for downloading! I hope you enjoy it and look at it closely, it really rewards you with a wealth of detail the more you study it!

Stephen Chow
chowcollection.culturalspot.org

P.S. Let me know if you print this! I'd love to see the results. My e-mail is: [email protected]