IV16 SPEAKER: Maarten Meerman
Maarten Meerman has been designing high-tech satellites, space missions, and orbital trajectories around the world for over 25 years. To balance this he enjoys working with wood and refining his woodturning skills. By combining design precision with the discovery that what every new piece of wood brings, he creates custom solutions to problems you didn’t even know you had. Often using one of his lathes, but equally at ease with any other tool, he creates exact micro-miniature copies of real-life satellite designs, furniture and complete rooms, as well as larger-scale items for practical use. Much of his work can best be viewed with a magnifying glass, as his specialities include 1/144 and smaller scale reproductions. Some of his hand-nanoturned items are almost invisible to the naked eye, since they are down to only a few tens of microns in diameter. Recently he was commissioned to create a 1/288-scale model of the International Space Station for Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, to which he added a similarly-scaled hand-turned guitar.