October 2010
Beginner
176 pages
8h 7m
English
Chinese Abacus
Sometimes it costs more to buy it than to make it from the money itself.

Photograph by Tom Parker
$17.95
Wood-frame Chinese abacus bought online.
The Chinese abacus, or counting frame, is an ancient calculator using beads on rods for both decimal and hexadecimal computation. In many parts of the world, schoolchildren still use these ingenious devices to do large-scale addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and even square-and cube-root operations at astounding speeds.
I made mine in the “Adirondack porch furniture” style, with a frame of dried chokecherry twigs. Since twigs aren’t perfectly straight, ...
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