experimental silk media paginator

By way of India, Michael, and his collaborator Santosh a group of paintings on black saree to adorn our house before our tentative voyage to CLEVELAND last year. I wanted to create a paging mechanism for the work, kind of like a book.









Sarah and I brainstormed the idea a while back for the living room. The main challenge was how to create a light weight framing mechanism that can handle the forces involved. the beams are split lengthwise for the length of the painting. this slot then receives about 1/4" of fabric, and the two halves are pinched together with some brass screws.

Turned out to be pretty difficult to achieve when all you got is lap-n-plaster to mount the device to. We jammed a trimmed wine cork underneath the lower extremity of the mounting shoulder to help support the assembly when the "pages" are turned.



I tested the mechanism out in my garage, but without the weight of the cloth, still not sure how things would work out.



Project began with some reclaimed doug fir that I ripped with the band saw, shaped with the spokeshave and a sander



The blade mounting harness was also shaped from fir, using a hollowing plane from Lee Valley to get an interesting final texture to the surfaces



A drill press was essential in positioning the paging axes





I joined the shoulder support to the wall mounting bridge using a few 1/4" dowels. This whole shooting match will be attached to a dovetailed cleat affixed to the wall. Some very shallow dados help orient things

bookshelf prototype in reclaimed fir

First, hello to any of you visiting via the Unpluggedshop's blog aggregator! Mr. Luke Townsley who manages that site recently included this blog into his pipeline (along with a handful of other intriguing ones).

I hit Unplugged Shop's front page at least 3 times a day since so much cool stuff is happening there. While I read nearly all of the new blog entries, I always take close note of what Bob Rozaieski, Rob Porcaro, and Adam Cherubini are up to.

Start with the end here. I'm trying to set up our guest room as a library of sorts and am experimenting with various book shelving approaches:




Project started from recycled, old growth fir from my my favorite crustacean pit. Much work ensued removing rusty nails and getting the wood fairly true with my bench planes. The 2x12s forming the shelf planks were terribly cupped and twisted -- a real test of one's muscular stamina. The joinery itself was very simple once I decided on the approach. It's gappy even by my standards, but this is a prototype.









I wanted to minimize the 'thick-ankled' appearance of the material by tapering at the edges. A spokeshave and a scrub plane performed a majority of the shaping while a random orbit sander was invaluable during clean up some of the tool marks.



Glue up is always harried, but successful today. A rubber head hammer helped knock it into approximate squareness.



Now with a little tongue oil, ready for installation.



It's bolted to the wall via some tabs screwed/glued to the top shelf using toggle bolts:

propeller dojo

Todd E. showed up this morning to get a bit of a primer on how one might go about carving balsa propellers for these wonderful indoor/outdoor models he's been building from various kits recently.

We began by milling some stock, and marking, carving and sanding to lines. We started with two blanks and took turns switching off to keep the blades reasonably symmetrical.

Somewhere along the way, Takumi, Ling and their two beautiful daughters stopped by for levity.
















Todd wanted to attempt a freewheeling prop with a cleat much like what you see in the plastic props. Being the sucker that I am, figured "why not?" and so we cut a "cleat" into some aluminum tubing to act as a shaft for the wire...in this picture, an observant modeler might be able to see what I did wrong:




ANSWER: I cut the notch in the wrong directioN!!!! much cussing had occurred as we had glued the thing in with CyA. Todd, being the optimist had some add'l tubing that fit around the existing piece, so we cut a notch into that one in the correct direction, and then glued it into place. We'll see how it works, but now that Todd knows how to carve a propeller, I expect he will have all sorts of opportunities for trying new configurations.



The model looks like a really nice flier and just with a few practice winds, it flew "right off the board" in our garage (and into my sketching easel -- hope the leading edge spar repair goes well for ya, Todd!)

behemoth

arrived today via pleasant and adaptable gentleman FedEx agent, 378 Lbs of bandsaw joy. a large installation manual, six gallons of RedBull and a weekend where I'm not at the office all need to coincide before this thing is making delicate cuts into the wood I have in mind.



After first test run yesterday afternoon following a bunch of fussing around with feeler gauges and machine squares

a coffee table in reclaimed lumber

Finally got our coffee table done in the living room here. Our new cat Tux represents:



The top is a three part lamination of vertical grained doug fir that I recovered from Urban Ore:





I wanted to do breadboard ends and made some out of an old sign post of very ring dense material...i think it's redwood since it's very light weight...not the best structurally but fun to work. These ends would be attached using draw-bored pegs made of wood dowels with the outermost holes widened a bit across the grain to account for moisture expansion in the top. No glue here.










With the top structure done, it was time to work with the legs. I opted for through-tenons that would be wedged once glued up. These legs were stocky, so they would want to be shaped up





A bandsaw would have been handy:





Here's the leg glue-up. You can see the wedges I pounded into slots cutting into the tennons. You can also see a slight bumpy texture in the top. That was done using my scrub plane. Sarah and I wanted something rough hewn with some texture to it.



Now with with 2 coats of tongue oil