Evening sky

(Click to enlarge)

I spent the day breaking down large slabs of white oak and black walnut that I had stacked in my shop 7 years ago when I moved here. It is time, I am not getting any younger. One large slab of white oak was so heavy I had to ask my neighbor's son to come help me with it - he's 75 and a tough old bird and between the two of us we got it out onto the saw horses and I was able to saw it into manageable sized pieces. I cut the slabs lengthwise to remove the sap wood and the pith, plus any checking that had occurred in the middle of the pieces, then cut them to 18-24" lengths so that I could resaw them and then plane them. Ended up with a nice selection of pieces which I can now use for smaller projects - there doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for furniture made out of giant pieces of lumber.

I cleaned up the shop and the yard and ended up with a big ol' pile of chips and scrap - soon I will have a nice fire to keep me warm out there. It's getting cold. I know, it's all relative, but it didn't get out of the 40s today, so I was happy to be doing heavy physical labor to keep warm.

Right at the end of the day my Border Collie mix took off running after something - usually it is some animal wandering around in the neighbors' yard but in this case a hawk had flown in and roosted on a branch of my catalpa tree. This particular dog has always been more attentive to avian life than any other dog I have ever had - she always pays attention to buzzards and hawks, crows, not so much. So when a hawk landed within 25 feet of her she took off after it. The hawk wanted no part of that and took off too, only in the hawk's case, it actually took off and flew away. Fascinating stuff...

Bobby Manuel, my cousin's coworker.

Edit:

 Let the chips fall where they may.

Today at Rancho Deluxe

An illustrated story.

There were mushrooms.

There was monkey grass, AKA Liriope:

My flowering cherry tree has produced inedible fruit:

Crabapples - there are tons of crabapples:

My catalpa tree has somewhat recovered from its partial denuding by Sphinx moth caterpillars:

There were flars:

My grape crop is coming in nicely:

My walnut trees are producing walnuts:

And since I planted the walnuts that those trees grew from these are, in some regard, my grand walnuts. 

Then the sun set:

The end.

Ah! Mes Amis - La Fille du Régiment

Numbers

As I have written, I am reading Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I have no idea whether or not the author understands the concepts he is writing about, but that doesn't matter - he is good at conveying concepts like the "Knapsack problem" and other math/algorithm problems. Reading these stories got me to thinking about simple problems I face, such as making non-round bowls on my CNC. I have been using a so-called bowl and tray bit that leaves a rounded fillet between the two planes of the sidewalls and the bottom of the vessel. The depth of these items has been limited by the length of the bit shank. A customer asked for a deep box for her wedding anniversary and I thought I might not be able to make the box as deep as she wanted. While I was selecting a bit in my tool path software I noticed that the diameter of the bowl and tray bit was 1-1/4". That struck me as an odd number. Why not an inch or a inch and a half? Then the lightbulb went off - that is the smallest size bit that will allow the collet nut on the router to clear the sides of a cut out shape without interfering. I broke out my dial caliper and checked - sure enough the nut that holds the bit in the router is just under 1-1/4" when measured at its greatest width. Jackpot! So now I can mill right up to the point where the router body itself hits the work. Hurray for math!

That discovery led me to figure out a way to engrave an inscription in the bottom of the box - make the text small enough to fit in a rectangle that left clearance for the nose of the router and buda bing etc.

That was a test - I have not done any v-carving in years so I wanted to make sure I hadn't lost my mojo. That quote required 13,500 lines of code - glad there is an algorithm for that.

Speaking of "slice of life" I was looking for a chunk of wood in one of my many sheds and found a nondescript lump - it was covered with the dust of ages and as soon as I made the first cut on the bandsaw I realized it was black walnut. I sliced and diced and ran the pieces through the planer - ta da:

But as always, I am really here to talk about the weather. We haven't had rain for a while but there were some distant thunder storms tonight. 

There was some cloud-to-cloud lightning off to the north and I managed to get a picture of it.

Which reminded me of my favorite classical themed cartoon, Fantasia, specifically the segment that features the forth movement of Beethoven's 6th symphony, the Pastoral.

Viddy me some Ludwig van.

From Flitch to Bowl, You Can Too!

This is a picture essay with way too many pictures, but for those of you keeping score at home, this is what I did starting yesterday morning.

Drag a block of walnut out of the shed - this tree was knocked down in an ice storm and I have been drying it for a few years now. Normally I rough turn bowls from green wood within a few days of procuring it - in this case I stacked it in block form and so far it has been drying without any problems:

This is the block I selected:

I used giant calipers to scribe a circle on the largest face. Then I sawed out the round on my bandsaw: 

The bandsaw was running when I took that picture - if you listen closely you can hear it. Next I drilled a 3/8" diameter hole using the center point of the scribed circle as a guide. Then I held the block up to the running lathe and the drive screw embedded itself into the blank:

You can see the growth rings and the curve of the log. Mounting it that way saves work - if you follow the natural shape of the tree you don't have to turn away quite so much wood.