Some Pix

 

Bowl with finial

A couple of pics of a Box Elder bowl with Jatoba base & BE finial posed with a couple of black walnut candlesticks. All wood has only had walnut oil applied. 

Oops

Never mind ... it's all here.

Where'd it go?

I'm missing about an hours worth of posts ... NOT very happy making!

Nevertheless, it's roughly 2 am and I have a FULL day ahead of my tomorrow (field service, mowing the KH lawn, meeting and Bible study with a young man in our congregation.) so I gotta bail.

See ya later.
Bill

Oct 7, 2006

Took a router class at Woodcraft today. IMHO it wasn't worth the money as it primarily consisted of the instructor showing us how to use his favorite router jigs and a brief discussion of some pages xeroxed from ShopNotes in clear violation of their copyrights.

Bought (well, ordered) the Oneway Revolving live center from http://www.hartvilletool.com/product/10785 ... which is where you are redirected to if you type in the URL "http://www.packardwoodworks.com". I think that having a bull-nose tailstock center will help me make some money with my bowls which are, to be brutally honest, "vin ordinairre' -- pretty good by junior high standards, but a long way from paying my way into MOMA.

I'm going to try to ratchet my 'artsy-fartsy' factor up a notch or two by combining a couple of techniques I recently read about in the "American Woodturner" magazine and this tailstock center looks to be a mandatory part of that process.

I swapped the electric motors around and have a working lathe again. Spending the money for a Oneway, Stubby or other top-end lathe is beginning to make sense. I've already put over $500 into two crummy lathes just to keep one lathe at a time running.

I'm not making any headway on my debts because dropping money into maintaining a minimal equipment configuration and growing my inventory to segue into in-stock / online ordering is not the same as making sales and fixing equipment is not the same as making deliveries.

Okay ... enough whining. G'night.

Avis & I

Okay ... here we are. Since the blog is focused on me, I thought I'd post a pic of me & my most significant other.

First post!

I am constantly amazed at the little nooks & corners in Google.
* Search engine extraordinairre
* Picasa photo software
* maps.google.com
* online applications (spreadsheet so far)
* photo sharing software ("Hello")
* and now, this blog

Hoo boy ... dems summa smart guys, eh?

Well, in September I started:
1) a business
2) auxiliary pioneering
3) painting my house

It took all month but:
1) The business is booming along at least as well as expected, if not somewhat better than anticipated. Who am I trying to kid? ... I'm swamped!
2) I a) kept my service commitment and b) gained 3 studies
3) all the exterior painting (save for two tiny areas at the base of a porch post that I missed) is done
4) I bought a couple new suits (long overdue)

gaaaack! What a month!
Oh ... and today my second lathe died. I've got to swap motors with the other one tomorrow and then check inventory for Judys' pen. I -might- have the wood she requested but I'm so scattered that I could be holding it in my hand right now and not notice.

I've come to an interesting point in my affairs. I have a basement full of tools that run okay but my needs have gone beyond 'okay' equipment. To get orders out in a timely fashion, I need a better drill press and lathes. But my wife can see that the equipment runs and doesn't understand the effect of wobble in a drill bit ... that it means I have to cut my stock extra large and get fewer total pieces per cubic dimension. Moreover, even though an individual piece of stock costs relatively little, ruining one end of a pen means that the grain of the other end now has nothing to match with. The leaves me tryng to decide whether to make a mis-matched pen and hope no one objects or tossing both matched pieces due to an error in one of them. That means that all the labor in these pieces to this point goes down the rat hole ... never to return. The time to order it or get out and buy it. The time to cut it to length, the time to drill the first part (if it is the second part that has failed). The money for gas and materials and depreciation and electricity to this point. All gone. Nope ... I need a GOOD drill press. Now.

Or maybe I can just find a good way to hold them for drilling in the lathe.

fwoompf

That's enough for tonight ... my brain is starting to hurt under the burden of having to think so much.