New Gurudeva Photo Display in Kadavul

Happy Chitra Nakshatra! After 22 years, we have replaced the trusty, conventional lightbox that has displayed Gurudeva's photos at his shrine in Kadavul Temple. The technology was old school. Each month a monk stepped up on the shrine, opened the box, pulled out the plexiglass sandwich and inserted a new transparency. The new box houses a high grade digital screen that will rotate through many high quality images every three hours, while drawing a similar amount of power as the old unit. Kumarnathaswami and Kanda Alahan teamed up on the project. It was Kanda and his sons who had built the original version in their California cabinet shop.

Here is the finished product, after five days, with the screen inside, before we installed the unit in Kadavul.

A glimpse of the old unit, beautifully crafted from African Mahogany. The new unit replicates the same design.

At the monastery, we started by going out to a lumber pile of rainbow eucalyptus from a particularly dense log that we received from a local tree man about 12 years ago. It doesn\

t look like much here, right? '

It is superbly fitting that the Gurudeva display was the first formal project on the newly arrived SCM saw\/shaper.

the piece here is clamped to the slider to wiz through the 12\" blade creating a perfectly straight edge.

Dimensioned lumber.

We used the shaper to cut flutes and a thumbnail profile on the edges of the face frame.

Here we are cutting the rosettes with a drill press, very carefully, with lots of clamps, at 400 rpm.

Trimming the rosettes from the row on a plank using a fritz and franz jig, manufactured by David Bedrosian in Canada.

Using the jig also the rip short pieces for the side frame.

Hand-sawing with a magnetic block to maintain 90 degrees was the key to make the outer circle of the rosettes proud of the surface, as Kanda did two decades ago.

Sanding and chiseling (and more find sanding on the lathe), took out all the tool marks.

The finished products. and one extra as a keepsake for the Alahan family.

Very carefully, at low speed, sanding the corner spaces with a rosette locked in a chuck.

The pieces, all sanded to perfection, start to come together. Yay!

Here Kanda is marking for loose tenons, 5mm Festool Dominos to be precise. Then comes the glue-up.

The glue-up begins.

Here we are assembling the back frame that houses the TV.

Now the two frames are united.

More Dominos and glue, and now it is one structure.

Yoginathaswami joined in to help improve the wiring situation above the shrine where we plugged in a UPS box. We snaked the cord from the TV along the left hand chain and reattached the cord end.

Everything is back in place.

Akash, who guided the TV side of things, tests out his system of uploading a selection of photos on tiny a Raspberry Pi computer that we velcro\

d to the back of the TV the frame.'

Upgrade complete. With the program that Akash implemented, the image changes every three hours around the clock. Jai Gurudeva!

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