Year 21, Week 16, Day One (week 1110)
(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
05-08-21 Saturday
73 was the coldest, 80 when I got outside, the day mostly fair with a few clouds. 82 as the high. A steady light breeze helped take the heat out of the air. This weather report is brought to you by The City Of Pompano Beach Department Of Tourism.
I cleaned up the five cannons I made last week. I used the sanding drum to remove excess glue and knobs formed by the pegs I added to hold everything in place. There were a few other touch-ups I had to do.
Then I hit them with white paint. That will allow whatever colors I add to them to stand out, not fade out as they sometimes do against the brown wood. I then made the hollows in the carriages for five more cannons. I only have four cannon barrels made, though, and wheels for two. It dawned on me that I can speed my work by using the cutting disk on the dremel for slicing the end where it is low. I can cut into the end of the carrage since that wood has to be removed, I can cut the angle at the end of the supports for the cannon. Just a tiny bit of work and that wood is gone. After measuring what I wanted the thickness of the wood to be, I cut down with the disk down both sides, and on the front end (there is wood across that end of the carriage) that gives a stop cut for my knife to cut and pry out wood. Once I get it to where I want it to be, I run the dremmel grinding bit, and later, the sanding drum into that area to level and smooth it out.
It makes a big difference on the speed. Most of the hollowing work was with the knife as it reaches a lot of the area at once and is good at splitting off wood. Grinders and sanders remove tiny bits of wood. The knife can cut deep and split off wood easily
I worked on the tea pot I made a few weeks ago. I cleaned up the glue that spilled out around the handle. I used glue to fill gaps and it spread out beyond what I was working on. I got rid of the visible glue, had to fix a few tiny holes. Once I had it like I wanted, I lightly sanded it, then gave it another coat of varnish. It will need a bit more work such more varnish and light sanding between coats. It is looking good.
I had several bags of yarn that I kept in the truck. I added more yarn at one time or another. I gathered ALL the bags of yarn and emptied them out onto my table. Wow, that was a lot of yarn. I separated them out as some ends had gotten wild and tangled up with each other. I then sorted the yarn as to type, first. Then I put together a bag that would stay in the truck in case I needed it. It has cotton and acrylic of many colors, plus a few projects that were in process. It is sometimes fun to grab a project and work on it, other times it is fun to start fresh. The other two were going back home.
There is one thing you run into with yarn, and it tends to happen with every craft or hobby. You never have the color, or item, or type of item, you really want to work with. You end up with materials galore, and then you never have time to make use of any of it...There was no reason to have three full bags of yarn in the truck. I tell people I have a life-time worth of yarn. I am not joking. What makes it worse, is when I go past yarn in the store, I hesitate. One of the dollar stores in our area now have yarn. Their cotton yarn was not twisted as well as it should. It splits easily. That does not mean I don’t start reaching for it...
This morning, I decided to cook a dish for a family meal. I cooked some of my mixed grain (I accumulated some 20 different kinds of grain such as oats, wheat, Quinoa, barley, millet, four kinds of rice, etc) then some noodles, and some frozen veggies, and mixed them up. We were going to have some of it for lunch today, but decided to have it for lunch tomorrow with the whole family. I had some hamburger patties and we decided to have them tomorrow too. I told mom she could add tomatoes, celery, cheese, and such to the pasta grain salad. I have not been cooking much so it was sort of a treat.
Year 21, Week 16, Day two (week 1110)
(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
05-09-21 Sunday
73 as the absolute coldest. 83 when I got onto the road. 84 as the high. Humidity bounced around 65%. light breezes felt good. This weather report is brought to you by The City Of Pompano Beach Department Of Tourism.
We had the pasta-grain salad today for lunch with hamburger patties. Mom added tomatoes and celery. We each used our own salad dressing. They liked it. It won’t be soon, but I will do that again.
When I went out back of Mom’s house to work, I made some more barrels and also some cannon carriages. I later added the barrels to the carriages. I still have to add the wheels. My brother likes the cannons. These will be the last of these I will make at this time, as I will have a dozen cannons. I am surprised at how fast it took to get this part done.
The blade has been coming off on the band saw. My brother had a look at it, and figured out how to adjust the angle of the upper wheel. There is a screw in the center. You turn that screw to tip the top of the blade in or out. We made a few adjustments and it looks like it is doing all right. Now that I know about it, I can make finer adjustments as they are needed.
I had assumed I would have to take the wheel off to make adjustments, as I saw an apparatus that looked like it was able to change the angle. My brother had worked on this bandsaw before and he just had to remember what he did. The whole thing needs adjustments done. I will have to do it when I am bored and want a real project.
On making the cannons, I had to taper the barrel so the muzzle, other than a flair at the end, it was smaller than the back. The explosion itself starts at the back and that is where most of the mass is needed to keep it from flying apart. The muzzle does not need as much mass as the force is going out the end, not out the encasing barrel.
A trick for making easy tapers is to start at the end that will be the smallest. Remove a little material. Then go back a little more and remove some more material. As you work back, you keep removing material all the way down to the end. What happens is that the material you are removing last has already been removed from, and it forms an angle as you work.
To taper the cannons barrels, I spun them in the little lathe, and used the dremel with an aggressive grinding bit to remove the wood. I started near the end of the muzzle and held it there while the two motions were working against each other. The dremel bit cutting down the length of the barrel which was spinning under it. I found that going from the low to the high with the bit worked better because once into the wood, it was ripping out the ends of the fiber as you worked to the higher levels, making wood removal easier. I would sand them by holding sand paper against them as they spun.
A couple of cannon barrels had hard and soft spots and the bit started bouncing on the wood so the taper was not even all the way around. This happens some times when wood turning and it becomes a challenge to correct. One cannon looked a bit twisted when I was done. There are ways of correcting it but I decided it was not worth fixing it. I decided I could hide the worst of it by how rotated it when I mounted it.
Once I worked as far as the jaws of the lathe would let me. I turned it around and machined the end. A few times I worked backwards and because I put a knob on the end of the barrel, it left less for the chuck to hang onto. The tail stock can only reach so far and It made it tougher to work with. If you applied too much force toward the chuck, the piece would slide as the chuck was holding to the end of the barrel by the edge of the end curve.
Before I left, Mom asked me to help her move a plant. It is a nice flowering plant, but a palm tree was blocking her view of it. She wanted to place it where it would be seen. She will later put something low where it was since something just above the 30 inch diameter 18 inch high pot can be seen.
There were some metal hooks (bent re-bar) holding it down and a couple posts next to the pot the plant is wired to, to keep it from falling over in the winds. I was able to pull the hooks out easily. She got the wood pole. The metal stake was tough. The ends are flat and there is a curve in the middle and it hooks sticking up, with holes where they came from. It would not pull up at all. I ended up pulling it in all four directions, then it nudged up a little. I had to do it about six or seven times to get it out. The metal hooks were too hard for her to pull out. She would never gotten that metal stake out as it was hard for me.
We then pounded in the hooks and the posts in at the plant’s new location (mom’s shoulder won’t let her hammer that high, so I did it for her). I just forgot what she called it this plant, but it is in blossom and she could not see it where it was.
Next weekend, I plan to do trucks and cars, and maybe another pitcher, if I find a better branched piece than I have right now (the spout is the big diameter part of it). I will see what other trouble I can get into....
1867
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