Win Assakul was told on his first visit to Benchmark that there would be an insoluble problem with differential movement of the brass and timber, but he found a solution! This was a tremendous learning process for Win Assakul, and one where he triumphed. The shape was complex. ‘We had designed it with as little flat surface as possible on the underside, to reveal as much of the grain as we could’, he said. 

He took a number of sections from the computer drawings of the dish, and used those as templates. But in fact every piece is subtly different because of the hand carving. Assakul used dovetail joints to join the pieces after considering more sophisticated but less elegant solutions. Creating these was a delicate balancing act – they had to be tight enough to fit, but not so tight that a mallet would be needed to separate them. He created grooves around the edges of the pieces, and the brass simply slots into those. The storage box has six cut-outs at the end, stacked vertically, into which the pieces go for storage, held on runners.