Build Complete; Painting ...

 Last week, as expected, I finished building the last of the pieces of the giant Soma cube. (I'd predicted a Thursday finish, but it turned out to be Friday. Not too bad, though.)

Piece Y was fun to build because, in spite of being made of square shapes, it has rotational symmetry of order three around a diagonal axis. For the same reason, it has a good strong corner shape from which to reckon right-angles. I took a little longer over it than I had planned because I wanted to do it justice, and it did come out very nice and square.

So this is what all the sides of all the pieces look like. There are ... quite a lot of them!

On Sunday I bought a handful of paints to experiment with colours and textures. I confirmed that undercoat/primer is definitely going to be worthwhile, as is a quick sanding once that's applied.

Yesterday I sorted the convex sides into the ten cube faces to which they belong, ready for painting. I also bought enough undercoat for the entire job. Mike very kindly did the first layer of undercoat, and took only 90 minutes, which was encouraging.

The last thing I did on Monday was to cobble together a crude frame for holding a projector vertically at ceiling height. The shelves have holes in them, that were originally going to accommodate rods supporting the lowest shelves. Those rods turned out not to be necessary, but the holes have found a new purpose: the frame is held on by just two dowel pins that fit into those holes.

With the projector pointing downwards from a height of over 2.5 metres, I can lay out each cube face on the floor and project its design onto it, which should make it easy to produce large-scale imagery. The frame took under an hour to build, and should save many times that. 

Today all the convex faces got a gentle sanding and then their second undercoat. Here they are, drying. I realised that if I put a screw part-way into a carefully chosen screw-hole on each face then that could be used to prop the faces a good distance apart.

Also I finished rigging the projector with power and signal. Amazingly, from ceiling height it produces an image on the floor that's 1.22m tall – exactly the size it needs to be. So that's one advantage of living in a place with high ceilings.