The guillotine was a deadly machine. Most guillotines were made out of hard wood. The vertical posts were 3.7 to 4.5 meters tall and were made of oak. The boards for locking the head in place were also made out of oak. The grooves of the blade and the lunette tracks were carved into the wood. The bascule was shorter than on the modern guillotine but it was tilted and slid forward like the new one. The blade was large and very sharp. It would be held by a rope and then travel up and down through the grooves that are carved in the wood. With a very high post the blade would travel at a much faster rate because of gravity. This would make beheading easier and painless. For a more cleaner cut on human corpses the post was raised higher and the blade was changed from a convex shape to a more sloped triangular shape.