I was discussing the use of the Wixey Digital Angle Gauge for setting (compound miter stave) saw blade angles at our woodturners meeting the other night.  At the end of the discussion several members pulled me aside for more information and one person asked if there was a similar tool for very accurately setting miter gauges, which are not upright like a saw blade. My answer was, "You can use the Wixey to do that too."  If you have a sliding bevel gauge and an engineer's square (not a carpenter's square), it's easy.  Use the engineer's square to square up the sliding bevel, take care not to tighten it only to the point where it will hold square while you move it.  Then put the thin edge of the sliding bevel into a vise, attach the Wixey to the upright thick edge of the sliding bevel, turn on the Wixey, set to zero and then carefully move the thick edge of the sliding bevel to where you get the angle you want.  When there, tighten up the sliding bevel and use it to adjust the angle on just about anything.  Simple!

After working for almost 7 days straight, the re-write of the site's basic structure is virtually done and most of the site's pages are fully operational under that new structure.  Fortunately much of the site's code was sufficiently modular as to preclude much rewriting of individual site pages.  What I did was to remove all of the framesets so that each page stands on its own and implement a new "menu bar" navigation that sites in the header, instead of on the left hand side of the page.  This will provide more page "real estate" and reduce some of the visual clutter.

The new structure is; however, currently only running on a test server and has not handed over to the ISP for production.  We expect to make that move in about another week, following a testing period.  We also expect there will be some initial bugs, so bear with us if you can.

01/07/2007 UPDATE:  The tests went better than expected so we moved the code over to production early this morning.  We expect to be making some additional changes, mostly cosmetic, and add more content in the coming months.

Although this site isn't quite 5 years old, much of the code structure for it is older. Being more than 5 years old, the basic structure for this web site is getting long of tooth.  In terms of technology and the internet, 5 years is nearly prehistoric so we are about to do a major redesign of the structure and make some appearance changes to keep up with the time.  If all goes according to plan, most of the work should be transparent. 

Our local woodturning club/chapter was fortunate enough to have Malcolm Tibbetts as a guest several weeks back.  Malcolm gave a lecture on and demonstrations of segmented woodturning techniques.  I generally do not care to watch "celebrity" woodturner demos but Malcolm is the exception.  Being quite the gentleman and down-to-earth guy, his demo, as well as his book, is worth the price of admission. 

About a week ago,  the last of our bandsaw blades gave up the ghost.  It had had all of its life sharpened out of it so we ordered some new ones (Woodslicers from Highland Hardware).  While unfolding one the new ones, two thoughts came to mind.  The first was how to fold up the old ones, which was something I haven't done in decades (the old ones were just hanging around on the thought they could perhaps be sharpened just one more time).  The second thought was of how a friend got his face cut when a blade he was folding in front of him cut his finger and sprang loose.  With these two thoughts in mind, we dug through the file cabinet and found a quick note on how an old pro (Shop Ghost James Oliver) used to do it.  This method is very safe and simple.  The steps are as follows.

1. Put on a glove and hold the bandsaw blade teeth out in your hand with your palm up.
2. Put your foot inside the blade loop, push it down to the floor and firmly hold it to the floor.
3. Rotate the hand holding the blade while simultaneously lowering it to the floor. By the time your hand makes nearly a full turn and reaches the floor, the blade will be safely folded into three loops.

The son-in-law called me yesterday around noon and said, "Lets go for a ride."  So, we hopped on the motorcycles and set out into the country to find a bass pond I had fished decades ago.  Not being able to find it, we stopped in a small town square to rest, look at the maps and swig some iced tea we brought along in the saddlebags.  As we were sitting there I noticed an old (1917, to be exact) Pierce Arrow touring car coming down the street. When we waved and gave it the thumbs up, the driver turned around and stopped to chat.  I asked him if he knew about the pond, he said he did and told us to hop in and he'd drive us there in Pierce Arrow.  We did, he did and we found the pond.  The driver turned out to be a kindly older (than I) gentleman who is in the AMA Hall of Fame, has a number of motorcycle-related patents and has an extensive workshop.  We didn't have a camera with us but will when we take him up on his invitation to visit the shop at length.   More to follow.

Some lowlifes (or worse) have been trying to spam and dirty this site's guestbook and order form of late and we had to spend valuable time trying to fortify the code against these attempts.

We apologize to anyone who happened across this crud and will be more vigilant going forward.

I told Lynne, I can't wait to retire so I can get more time in the shop.  That was before the first retirement, which neither lasted long nor resulted in much additional shop time.  Some years later during the second retirement, I told Lynne, This time I am really going to get some woodturning done.  Well, this second retirement lasted for several years and I did get some serious time in the shop; however, shop time is now fading fast and I am contemplating retiring from the second retirement.

We've gotten quite busy again over the last year, being a partner in a startup corporation and the developer/administrator of a whole bunch of web sites.  These days, producing only one turned piece per month is about the norm so we're trying to ratchet up the quality and variety by branching into more carving and coloration, which results in an increasing need for shop time in the face of decreasing supply of the same. 

Maybe the third (retirement) time will be a charm.  Maybe not.

I had been intending to get a Sioux close-quarters/tight-access sanding drill for some time but held off, hearing that some didn't hold up under heavy use.  A spate of recent turned item sales coupled with decreased available shop time led us to think more seriously about acquiring a drill for power sanding.  Current constraints on our shop time, coupled with decreasing margins on items sold demanded I do something to cut down on the time spent on any piece.  By chance, I noticed that the Craftsman Mini-T 3/8-inch close quarters drill appeared identical to the Sioux 8800ES in every way except the badge and price.  The Craftsman was $60 less with in-store replacement for a period of time if anything went wrong with it so we bought it.  We'll be using it mostly as a power sander and occasionally as a close quarters drill.  Initial use suggests the drill has good balance and sufficient power for what we want to do.  The unknown is its reliability with use over time.  We will report on this later.

My family is very good at getting good deals and winning sweepstakes.  My wife and one daughter are  deal and budget experts who can run a food budget at less than ten cents on the the dollar (Note: When you are retired, this is very helpful.).  They often find deals that get them a lot of free food and supplies that is donated to various charities and people in need.  Also, my twin daughters are sweepstakes gurus who've won numerous international trips, motorcycles, snowmobiles, digital cameras, computers, televisions, DVD players and other items too numerous to mention. 

There have been numerous articles and discussions about turnings versus carvings and the subject recently came up regarding one of my works (i.e., The Turning Time clock), shown on the right.  The question was asked of me, Is that really a turned piece or is it simply a carving? The answer I gave this person pretty well spells out my position on the subject. I told him the percent of time/work spent turning versus carving was over 50% and that, as a result, I considered the piece to be primarily a turned object.  Anything less than 50% would make it primarily a carved object and as the amount of turning work decreases to some arbitrary amount, the piece becomes a carving.   For me, that arbitrary limit is around 25%.  For someone else it may be different.  It's in the eye of the beholder. Were I to turn a bowl and then carve, say,  short veins around the rim, few woodcarvers are likely to consider the bowl a carving.  The converse is also likely, which leads back to the idea of the "eye of the beholder."

A number of factors have kept me out of the shop for the summer thus far.  These include long put-off yard work, building a new internet application, new motorcycles in the family and making administrative changes to this web site.

Like shopwork and woodturning, motorcycles are a serious matter in this family. Susan's husband, Kevin, bought an 1800 cc cruiser  and I had to go pick it up and ride back here for him. Nancy's husband, Noah, traded his BMW (motorcycle) for a new Royal Star and a more leisure cruising style. New motorcycles are always the catalyst for time-consuming garage gatherings where there is a lot of talk, much polishing of chrome, a little wrenching and the downing of some cold ones. 

On one of our recent biking sojourns, we discovered an old friend - one that was the love of my father's (and my young) life.  It was a 1938 Boeing PT17 Stearman in mint condition.  The owner was gracious enough to let us pull it out of the hanger to take the photo shown below.

This plane is special because the first memories of my father are being with him in this (type of) plane after he came home from the Pacific theatre in WWII.  Nicknamed The Yellow Peril becuase of its less-than-stellar ground handling characteristics,  the PT17 was a primary army and navy trainer in the years leading up to WWII.  Despite its name, the plane is relatively easy to fly and quite forgiving as long as you don't get into an inverted spin.

We'll probably be going back to visit the Stearman several more times and then head south to meet up with and see the other son-in-law  Noah and his new ride.  We've only seen a picture of it, shown below, and are anxious to check it out.

One of the major craft events of the summer is the Lowell (MA) Arts and Crafts Festival that ran the weekend of Aug. 27.  We motored up there on the bike to participate and help out in the C.N.E.W. booth, shown below being guarded by Joe Harbey.

Yesterday was no ordinary Father's day for this old dad. There was none of the usual stuff - silly ties, stinky aftershaves, goofy gifts or the likes. Nope. Daughter Susan lured Lynne and I over for dinner Saturday night and surprised us by having all the kids there. As I was settling in with a cold one, Susan said I had better go out to the garage to see Kevin's motorcycle, stating he had "tricked it out" and done something awful to it.

We all went out to the garage and sitting in the middle of floor was a new lawn tractor with a ribbon. The kids had chipped in and bought me a new Honda lawn and garden tractor.  The kids, knowing my preference for Honda power products, had found a new Honda tractor even though Honda had stopped making them several years ago.  Note:  We have a Honda Generator, snowblower and push mower, all of which start on the first pull.  The push mower, which is 23 years old has never been touched except to change the oil once. For the first time in memory, I am looking forward to mowing the yard - a far cry from the childhood days of pushing an Eclipse reel-type mower.

• Delta 14" Bandsaw (American made model)
• Powermatic 1200HD Drill Press (American made model)
• Oneway 2036 Lathe
• DeWalt 788 Scroll Saw
• Legacy Ornamental Mill
• Wilton 4002 Small Belt/Disc Sander
• Makita LS1013 SCMS
• Tormek Super Grind Sharpener

• Glue: Wood glue, various thicknesses of CA and debonders, epoxy, etc.
• Coloring Agents: Dyes, tints, stain, markers, paints, etc.
• Finishing Materials: Varnish, mineral spirits, mineral oil, tung oil, BLO, waxes, etc.
• Sandpaper: Sheets, strips, discs, pads, sponges, etc.
• Other Abrasives: Pumice, rottenstone, sharpening stones, tripoli and diamond compounds, steel wool, etc.
• Saw Blades: Bandsaw, scroll saw and the occasional table saw.
• Other Misc.: Masking tape, knife blades, inlay material, etc.
• Lubricants: Oil, dry spray, etc.
• Power: Electricity, batteries (e.g., rechargable for cordless tools).
• Wood: Domestic and exotic hardwoods.

• Material cost, if any.
• Overhead factors associated with a piece.
• Time spent making and finishing the piece.
• Complexity of the piece, in terms of segments, inlays, etc.
• Experiences with what the market will bear for those pieces that I am more inclined to sell.
• The opinions of gallery owners who display my work.
• The opinion of my wife, Lynne.
• The extent to which I want to keep the piece myself (drives the price up)

We dug out an old, 1/2 hp Montgomery Wards motor that had been stashed away for 40 years, got it running and and mounted the buffing wheel hub. Being short of bench space, the motor was mounted on the grinder board, which can be turned around for using the grinder.

• Put a wad of fine, preferably 0000, unoiled steel wool in a jar for 24 hours or so. I've found a baby food jar to be ideal since a little solution goes a long way.
• Pour enough white vinegar over the steel wool to entirely cover it.
• Put something that doesn't interact with the solution, like a piece of plastic, over the steel wool to keep it submerged in the vinegar. Bubbles will form in the steel wool, causing it to float to the top, rust and make a muddy mess of the solution.
• Put a lid over the jar to keep the steel wool submerged but don't tighten it or the gas will force some of the solution out onto your workbench.
• When you eventually pull the steel wool out of the solution, don't do it with your bare hands unless you want purple fingers.
• The solution will initially be clear but can turn the color of a dark beer. Don't worry about this.
• When using the solution by brushing or wiping on, you may want to pour small amounts into another container.