Building the Aro Lineage monumental phurba
Assembly and installation – setting up the haft
Four apprentices had to carry the three octahedrons from the forge house to the construction site. Meanwhile a scaffolding was built to provide a decent platform for working on the phurba’s haft in situ.
It required nine apprentices to lift the octahedron column on top of the blades and set it up perpendicularly and exactly centred according to the phurbas central axis. With the help of three apprentices holding the octahedrons, Ngakpa Trögyal welded the basic octagon onto the blades. Now the middle part of the haft with its three octahedrons was connected to the blades by a screw bolt, 1½ inches thick (usually employed to hold heavy, load-bearing parts in road bridge construction).
