About

A personal notebook, published mostly so that I stop losing it.

I started building things out of matchsticks a few years ago, for the ordinary reason that it is quiet work that does not need a workshop, a machine or much money. A bag of craft matchsticks, a blade, a bottle of PVA and a flat board is the entire outlay. What it does need is patience, and a willingness to redo things.

The notes here are the ones I kept re-deriving. I would work out a way to cut two hundred identical diagonals, not write it down, and six months later work it out again slightly worse. Putting them on a page fixed that. If they are useful to anyone else, good, but that is not really why the site exists.

What this site is not

There are no plans here, and no kit reviews. I do not build to prototype and my dimensions come from what looks right at the scale I am working, which would make any plan I published misleading. There is also no shop, no newsletter and no comments — the The Matchstick Project is a notebook, not a project with ambitions.

Corrections

Some of what is written here is certainly wrong, in the way that self-taught technique usually is. The glue comparison in the build log is the only thing on the site I tested properly rather than absorbed by repetition.

Colophon

Hand-written HTML and one stylesheet. No trackers, no analytics, no cookies, no JavaScript. The diagrams are drawn as inline SVG. It renders in whatever you are using, including a text browser, which felt like the right constraint for a site about matchsticks.