A picture of the Fortress of Solitude right around the time I started the blog.
I forgot to mention that I hit the 2,000 milestone for blog posts last week. Not as many as many, more than many more.
My first post was on the 6th of June, 2013. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
I do wonder how long I’ll keep it up, but there are no plans to pull the plug anytime soon.
While cleaning up/out the big shed in Maryland I came across this big stout bedroom dresser (pic looks odd because it is standing up on one end). I vaguely remember someone gave it to me to empty out an old house and the piece is a beast.
Combined with the inspiration from BobR’s recent video on making himself a new workbench, my “I wonder if…” brain got to thinking. Can a massive but useless bedroom dresser be turned into a premium workbench? I guess I’ll find out.
I’ll be pursuing this project once I get some other workbench projects out of the way. In the meantime, I’ve got a Japanese planing beam and my Ultimate Portable Workbench to finish up.
Stay tuned.
One bite at a time, of course.
A couple weeks ago we ventured back into Mordor to do some yard work and house work in preparation for the return of Youngerbarndottir’s family to the region, as they might need to encamp at that house for an indeterminate time.
Unbeknownst to us there had been a microburst storm a few nights earlier and we were greeted with the sight of a large chunk of maple tree laying in the yard and on the deck. While I had brought my chainsaws, this was an unexpected, uh, pleasure.
To give you a sense of the scale, the trunk snapped off about twenty feet up the tree, and the base of the snapped off section is just under 24 inches in diameter.
I have made no bones about my fandom for the Craftsman 20V product line, owning several drills, saws, string trimmers, and chainsaws. Are they the “best” performing cordless tools? No. Are they the least expensive cordless tools? No. But I do judge them to be the best value of the type. (PS- as much as I would welcome Lowes/Ace/Craftsman to support and underwrite my tool acquisition disorder, these are all tools I bought myself.)
The 20V chainsaws are invaluable for routine yard work and even more demanding work. Just before leaving Shangri-la the little chainsaw made short work of a 12-inch locust post. With that in hand I worked many hours in cleaning up the tons of maple, one bite at a time. 75% of the cleanup was accomplished with the little 20V chainsaw, including sawing up to a foot of trunk. Admittedly it took a couple of fresh batteries, but I had them on hand, so it was no big deal. For the more routine cutting the trunk into roughly four-foot boles I used my gas-powered Stihl.
Although the silver maple is somewhat of a junk tree, I decided to salvage the best of the trunk stock for some future use. I was particularly interested in two crotches which will be turned into some sort of bowls on the lathe. But first, that will require fabricating an outboard turning plate on the ancient lathe my pal MikeM gave me eons ago. That will be its own series of posts later in the summer, I hope.
For the moment the boles are laying in the yard awaiting relocation to the old goat house where they will remain protected from weather and dry out slowly until I can cut them into whatever I need them to be.
Prior to fabricating and installing the new Coanda-style cover for my hydroelectric capturing box, every couple weeks I would notice a drop-off in the water flow to the turbine. Sometimes it stopped altogether. So, I had to turn off the water at the bottom, flip up the turbine housing and remove the nozzles. Invariably the orifice was crammed solid with a crawdad body, sometimes compressed to the point where I needed to drive it back out with a metal rod. It happened so much I kept a tool right there for the task.
With the former configuration the intake was covered with 1/4″ inch hardware cloth, even then the little crustaceans figured out how to get into the capturing box and were sucked into the pipeline. A minute or two and 1200-feet later they wound up crushed at the bottom when their carcasses were too large to fit through the turbine nozzles. Hence the need for regular clean-out.
Since I installed the new cover there have been zero crawdads in the nozzles. .
A big step forward.
After a long stretch away from the shop I often find the best way to ease into the swing of things is to clean and (re) organize my work stations. And, as a result of my habitual untidiness and in-and-out forays into the barn, there is always cleaning and organizing to do. Unlike my longtime friends MikeM and MartinO, I am not by nature, temperament, nor habit a tidy person in the shop. Their studios look like something staged for a photo shoot, but in fact that is how they are. It is only one of the many things for which I admire, respect, and resent them. ;-)
This past week I spent a few days working on the Waxerie. Unfortunately, I did not take a quick picture before I started, but the corner sorta looked like the Junk Monster had vomited in the space. After intensive cleaning and organizing, with a new plywood work surface on top of my map case full of veneers, mother of pearl, and other exotics, I am pretty pleased with myself. We’lll see how long I can hold the Law of Entropy at bay.
I’m not sure which work station I will work on next, but there are more than a dozen to go.
Your life might be governed by some kind of “X”G phone network Operating System but I’ve got you beat — for the foreseeable future my life OS will be 12G. To whit,
Greenhouse (wrapping up final details but already in use by Mrs. Barn, who is experimenting on the best way to lay out and use the space)
Garden (more of a Mrs. Barn thing)
Grandson #1
Grandson #2
Grandson #3
Grandbaby #4 (due in November)
Going here
Going there (mostly to Mordor as all four grandkids and their parents are now living within minutes of each other there)
Going back home to Shangri-la for rejuvenation
Getting the barn organized in preparation for
Gragg chair-making private tutorial this autumn
If you think this sounds like it might be Ghaotic you would be correct.
Unlike the midwit poltroons, grifters, and outright treacherous curs in gubmint elected and unelected, I yearn for “regular order” of routine days in the shop and evenings reading or watching something while massaging Mrs. Barn’s feet, knowing that regular order may never return.
And that’s a Good thing.
Although I’m not back in the shop full time or anything close, I did sneak in a couple of sessions to make and install the new cypress lid for the hydropower capturing basin. Last winter I saw that something had torn the living starch out of the previous hardware-cloth-over-frame lid, rendering that element useless in filtering out the debris. It was probably a bear, but I really have no idea why a bear would feel the need to tear up the box lid in the middle of a vigorously running stream. The box itself was uninjured, perhaps because it holds about 500 pounds of rocks.
My first step for the new lid was nailing down the side strips to the workbench, then began nailing on the slats spaced two washers apart. This will result in a roughly >1/16″ opening, large enough for the wicking of water through the lid but keeping out the debris and crawdads. I nailed it all together from both sides with copper slatters nails, driven into pre-drilled holes. Once the unit gets saturated the wood will swell and clinch the nails solidly in place.
This particular structure is known as a Coanda Screen, although they are usually manufactured from stainless steel rods and screens.
A hike up the hill to clean out the debris from the capturing basin and setting the new lid in place and the system was functional once I made the penstock re-connection that I disconnect when winterizing it. I added another 500 pounds of rocks on top to discourage any four-legged vandals. We’ll see if it works.
Over the summer I will spend a few days working on the penstock incline, building rock berms to flatten out the swales so that maybe, just maybe I can keep it running all winter long. Enclosed water lines can supposedly keep running down to -17F if there is minimal turbulence.
But for now, after a week of vigorous rain (~3″ total) it’s pounding out the power.
Back to finishing up the myriad details for the greenhouse.
Exactly ten years ago I was experiencing the most exhilarating and exhausting week of my life, the culmination of years of research, writing, and travel; it was Studley Exhibit Week.
It started with packing up of the Studley Tool Cabinet and Workbench ensemble at its home, loading it onto a dedicated truck with armed driver and escort, and unloading it at the end of a long day’s driving in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, just a few miles from the Handworks event in Amana.
A dedicated team of volunteers (and vendors; the original lighting contractor bailed on the project three weeks before the opening) made the whole thing possible as the installation came together.
That evening I hosted a special reception for all the Handworks vendors who would be otherwise unable to see the exhibit.
On top of everything else the Lost Art Press crew arrived with cases of the book, almost literally hot off the presses and straight from the bindery.
The event garnered favorable feedback except for those who were miffed that there was a ticket price for the small event. Apparently, they were unaware of budget items like the cost of dedicated, secured transport ($6k), insurance (a thousand dollars a day), facility rental, exhibit fabrication (almost $2k just for the tool cabinet exhibit case alone), and much, much more, all of which I was paying out of my own pocket. Thanks to the unbelievable generosity of a friend of the project the books all balanced in the end.
Despite the frenetic pace of those days, robbing me of many of the memorable moments, I still get warm-and-fuzzies reflecting on those moments I can remember.
Ten years! Goodness, how time flies.
As I continue working on the multitude of details getting the greenhouse ready, Mrs. Barn’s flower garden, carved out of the rocky hillside next to the cabin, has erupted in an explosion of colors as the poppies have burst onto the scene. In a couple months the daylilies will emerge, and in between will be a host of other rainbows of flowers I know nothing about beyond appreciating their beauty. To say that she revels in the beauty of nature and especially flowers would be an understatement. Today is our annual Mrs. Barn’s Birthday Safari to Millmont Gardens to load up with beautiful plants. She has free reign to get whatever she wants, the space in the back of the CRV being the limiting factor.
As for the greenhouse itself, we have begun to finalize the interior layout and some seedlings are underway. I have removed much of the construction supplies and tools, bringing a sense of order to the space. Lately we have been scouring the University of Youtube to garner the best information on building self-watering planters.
We have passed through asparagus season, having freshly-picked shoots with almost every meal for more than a fortnight. The bed is now proceeding to the “bush” phase and in short order the asparagus bushes will be 8-10 feet high. She says this is the key to an established perennial asparagus bed, and since it has worked here for two decades I rely on her judgement.
I can just now glimpse returning to the workbench on the horizon. First project is to make a new, sturdier cover for the hydro capturing trough that a bear (?) tore up last autumn.
The folks at The Babylon Bee did it again. When you contemplate the difficulty of consistently creating great satire in this clown-show world, you know these guys are the best.
© 2024 Don Williams
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