Watcha doing?

[IMINXTC]

Beach goers and surfers look like a million penguins today. Can't say I blames them at near 80° & humid. Early morning walk on the beach is more to my liking. Then get out of there!


The pelicans are back!!!

[tango]

I found a large number of wooden eggs in my slippers.

Yes, really. There is a reason for this situation. My daughter visited with our two youngest granddaughters and they took great delight in the collection of wooden eggs, much as we expected. They decided to hide the wooden eggs for each other, and before they left they decided to hide a load of them in my slippers. I had told my daughter she could take the eggs for the girls to play with, as I plan to turn some more as I practise the technique. She forgot to take them.

Now I need to figure out where the last few of the wooden eggs ended up. I'm sure the girls hid them somewhere, but right now I have no idea where they might be.

Sounds like you're ready for Easter. 

My wife bought something like 48 plastic eggs we can fill with candy and hide for the girls. Last year we bought pre-filled eggs and hid 50 of them around the yard. Today my wife found two that had not only survived the searching eyes of two little girls a year ago but also apparently didn't get spotted during any of their other forays around the yard, which included multiple rounds of hide and seek despite their only being one or two viable places to actually hide.

Five wooden eggs are still at large.

My lathe is loaded with a bowl under construction, so I'll be taking a short break from turning out things that are somewhere between eggs and acorns. Once the bowl is ready to come out of the chuck I can put the smaller jaws back on and turn some more eggs. I don't know how many I'll have by Easter, and I'm undecided whether to lacquer them or see if the girls want to paint them. So far the way the girls have most enjoyed playing with them is rolling them down the stairs. I'm not sure why they found that so intriguing but it kept them amused for nearly half an hour.

[Cloudwalker]

Lately I've been watching a series of dad's on C S Lewis on Christianity. A very good series of lectures out out by Hillsdale College.  Hillsdale College is a small Christian college that also has a number of lectures that you can watch free.  At the end, if you pass the quizzes at the end they'll issue a certificate.  The lectures are very worth watching.  I finished the set today.  If any of.you wish to watch these lectures I'll be glad to send them to you.

[tango]

I've turned a couple more bowls. I finished the one I was working on, to the extent I can given I turned wet wood that now needs to dry. I turned the other half of the log into another bowl, then took a whole log and turned it into a deeper bowl.

A neighbor had a sycamore tree taken down, and said I could help myself to the downed wood. So now I have some chunks of sycamore sitting in my garage waiting their turn on the lathe. The lathe is currently loaded with a slab that's now about 9" in diameter and 5" thick. It started out a bit bigger across but having cut away the bark and the skanky bit right under the bark it's a bit smaller. The thickness is uneven - I cut slabs off a huge chunk with a chainsaw so as long as it was kinda sorta consistent in thickness that was all I was after. Now it's nice and round but the thickness is still wobbly, so that's the next thing to cut. Then I can figure out cutting something suitable for mounting it in my chuck so I can hollow out the top side. I haven't yet decided whether to turn this one as a large gently curving plate, or something more like a bowl with a harder corner. Maybe the wood will guide me as I cut more away.

So far I'm really enjoying turning these things. Egg production will probably resume when I've finished the current workpiece.

[IMINXTC]

Prepping for record heat spell in a few days West Coast amid spiking fuel prices, which might forestall trip to Ut and Mt to attend board meeting and finish moving. Hmm...!


(As if things will change reasonably soon!)


God knows!

[tango]

The large platter is turned into something kinda like a wide but fairly shallow bowl. It's turned with a thick base and thick walls because the wood was wet, so it needs chance to dry out before I finish it off with another turning. It looks pretty good.

Then I mounted half a log and tried to turn a bowl with a live edge. I got so far and then figured I couldn't see an obvious way forward, so I took it off the lathe so I could give some more thought to what to do with it. So I mounted the other half of the log and planned to turn it the other way. It's now turned into a thick-walled bowl with more or less straight sides. I have it in a box packed with shavings to help slow the drying process, in the hope I won't get cracks and warping.

Along the way I figured out how to sharpen my gouge properly using my grinder. It makes a huge difference. Before I'd get chippings flying off the wood as I turned it but now I get ribbons of wood flying everywhere. I've been trying to figure out how to get ribbons pretty much since I brought the lathe home, and was never sure whether it was an issue of technique or tool sharpness or both. Now I've managed to sharpen the tool I can see it was mostly because of that.

Now the lathe is cleaned up, I'm cleaned up, the floor is cleaned up. I made about 15 gallons of shavings today. I've taken to keeping a large garbage bag in my woodshop so I can throw the surplus shavings into the bag right away so they don't build up.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all the bowls. My wife claimed #3, the first two are drying nicely and looking pretty good. The large plate is #4, and the straight sided thing is #5. I suspect we'll keep some, my daughter will probably take some. I want to give a bowl made from the sycamore to the friend whose tree it came from, but don't yet know whether to make that one of the existing pieces or to make something out of the numerous chunks of wood I have stacked in my garage.

[Cloudwalker]

I'VE BEEN DRAFTED!  Once you've caught your breath continue on.  (Couldn't resist that.)  I've been drafted to play Peter in our Drama Ministry's latest production.  I already had a small part as a storyteller at the end.  When we started rehearsal our Peter was out of town so I filled in during  rehearsals.  But, unfortunately, due to family emergency, our Peter has to bow out so I was asked to step in.

[RabbiKnife]

Headline:  cloudwalker plans to deny Jesus 3 times

[tango]

I cranked out a couple more bowls today. One of them is kinda narrow at the base and flanges outwards. Not as strikingly as I'd hoped, I only had so much wood to work with so did the best I could with it.

The friends with the downed sycamore tree are hopefully getting hold of a big chainsaw tomorrow. There's a honking great lump of it that's way too big for my battery powered chainsaw to attack, so I'm hoping a big gas powered chainsaw will be able to cut through it, even if it has to be cut from one side and then the other. If I can get some slabs of it, I'm hoping I can cut them into four like a pie and turn plates out of the pieces. The tree is easily three feet across, and my lathe can turn things up to 15" in diameter. So if I can get pieces 13-14" across once I've trimmed the bark and stuff off, maybe I can make a set of plates. It would be nice to have some plates to give to the friends whose tree made them possible too.

[IMINXTC]

Heat wave - 80° - which is hot & humid central coast, continues.


Unusual; record breaking, actually.


We call it "earthquake weather," from past events.

[tango]

No sign of being able to cut the huge tree into slices as yet, so I turned another couple of bowls with the logs I could cut with my own chainsaw. Now they are sitting in bags and boxes of wet shavings, in the hope they will dry evenly and not crack.

[IMINXTC]

Seeming anachronism, man offers me an "Our Lady Of Perpetual Help" statue. Kind gesture, but a blast out of the past sort of thing, as my Mom passed over a decade ago.


(Nobel Peace Prize would seem more appropriate).

Life never fails to surprise me.

[IMINXTC]

Couldn't help myself. Lilly explosion.


"Cala" lillies.

[tango]

Someone cut up the big tree and took it away for firewood. I spoke nicely to them and they gave me a couple of chunks they cut to the approximate size I wanted. So I'm kinda disappointed I didn't get to take more of it, but thankful for some good size pieces that I could get.

I tried to cut a chunk off with my battery powered chainsaw but it was way out of its league. I eventually managed to cut a piece approximately 12" on each side but it was an ordeal so I quit after I cut one piece off. I've got some impressive pieces of wood to play with, and I think if figure out an outlet to move bowls on I'm going to want a bigger chainsaw, and probably a bandsaw so I can cut bowl blanks more easily.

So if anyone is stuck for ideas what to get me for Easter, just saying.....

[RabbiKnife]

I’ll put in a good word with the Easter Bunny…