SATS wrote:
Thanks for the compliment Waegwan. It makes me wonder about these carvings. Similar designs look pretty much identical and they all retail for 10 - 20 bucks. The stall holder is making a cut so I was musing and working backwards to guess how much the carver gets and how long each one takes to make. I guess everyone in the chain makes a deal selling to people in the west who can throw out $20 on a whim.
There's a reason why the pieces look pretty much identical--they are. What they probably do is use a device--a master unit with a flexible stylus that can trace around a carving in all three dimensions. This master unit is connected to 10, 20, however many, "slave" units that follow the tracking of the master unit, and that consist of a router-like blade that carves into a blank piece of wood. So all you need is one man carving one statue, and the rest are mass-produced. Modernization at work.