Recent

 Woodturning class- making bowls now! super super fun!

 first, the outer shape of the bowl is shaped from a square block of wood. we trimmed the corners off the block of wood first, to give it a rough circular shape, then threw it on the lathe. here it is shaped and sanded on the outside, ready to gouge out the inside

 thats the bowl gouge, with the tool rest up close to the bowl, shavings everywhere!

 once it gets deeper, the tool rest gets moved inside the bowl, carefully not hitting the edge when the bowl starts spinning again

 inside done!

 then we put this contraption, which has padding on the end of this big wood cylinder, adn tighten it down

 then you slowly carve away that button on the bottom of the bowl as it spins, until it is barely there. then we took it off the lathe and used a chisel and sanding block to get it flat on the bottom

finished product! my first bowl! this is ash wood by the way

oh yea, my friend took some photos for his portfolio the other day and sent me this one

this plastic handle was coming loose cuz it was a cheap tool. but i'm taking woodturning now! so in some spare time one class i turned a handle with the intent of it going onto this tool. came out great!

finished product! might stain the handle still...

Been working on this mallet also. The head is three pieces of wood glued together and held together with four internal dowels. Forgot to take a picture of that going together, but it's three pieces so that it can be assembled around the handle of the mallet, which is tapered and slips into the head.

like this

The handle is very slightly tapered so that the head naturally can't come off the end of the handle. We then secured it with a couple of dowels and oiled it up!

here's some other finished ones. mine is the second to last one, with the dark handle

I had a ton of scrap walnut from work, so I milled a lot of it to thinner strips and glued them together with the next school project in mind. Today we put it through a large sander multiple times to get it all nice and clean and flat/parallel on both sides. pumped on how this may look....

here's some shots from work lately. This is where i've been spending a few days a week! looks messy huh?

Looking from teh back of the shop to out front (still looks messy huh? there is an order to the shop actually)

small showroom with some of the products

assembly area, with some smaller scale prototypes of some new stuff

These were a special project actually. some artist did these and wanted work to make lights for them and attach them so that light shines up into them and they look cool. these were cool, and were a pain in the ass to clean the inside of them...

There were five total, pretty cool looking once they were finished and we turned on the lights inside of them.

Last Saturday, I worked on this guy. He's pretty awesome looking. I was psyched they just gave me the engineering drawings of this product and then I got to start from picking the wood, to cutting and sanding, to assembling it (the wood part of the fixture at least). This is as far as I got in one day. Lots of parts on this fixture so it was time consuming

Here's what the final product of that looks like (taken from the website)

Other times, I'm assembling lots of parts of some fixtures, like here. These are the middle stand of a floor lamp. (next picture)

a couple of weeks ago, we cut and glued up and stained the wooden legs of these lamps. We had an order of 20 or so lamps (3 legs per lamp), so we cut enough to have spares also, and ended up cutting over 100 legs - long process...

 Here's one i've been working on also. this is again taken from the website, but this one is pretty awesome. The corner joints are pretty unique i think, and this one is pretty cool. I've been pumped to be working on this one

 another photo from the website of this fixture

in other news, I have started on another wooden surfboard! super super pumped! I'll have to throw up a photo of the modeled surfboard soon. I modeled it all in solidworks and then was able to just print out cross sections where I needed to cut the ribs and spine! already a much better design and plan of attack than the last one, and drawing everything by hand (long curves are hard....). anyways, this will be a single fin board, with two side fins (optional), it's 5'11" long, and kinda hull-ish and egg-ish. pumped to find out how this thing actually rides, but super pumped to see how the process of this goes now that I know a bit more on woodworking and have some other tools

cross sections cut and sanded smooth

 then I drilled some holes! these take some weight away, but are mostly to let air through to each "compartment" of the board - in between each rib section.

 I got the first bottom plank glued on tonight! Feel very good to get going on this guy again. just wish I had a bit more time maybe to work on it more....

front view 

I just cant't get enough of TED talks

http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes.html


This put me in the best of moods.

makin things again

 Found a lamp and having some inspiration from Cerno, I figured I'd redo this thing to something we would like! Forgot to take pics of it before destroyign it, but it was a gawdy white deco big ol lamp.

 Basically, I saved this part of the lamp, and made a simple cube with some pieces of scrap wood.

 Hole down the middle and slot out the back on the middle piece =

 This, open still.

 closed

 Then I had to make the new shade, because the shade below is from the old lamp: huge and awful

 I got some scrap material from Cerno, which is like posterboard, with one side that peels off and is sticky. Basically, I cut out the shape of the shade, and then peeled the sticky side off:

 

any oil or dirt on your hands immediately shows up on this stuff, which i learned by ruining some big shades at Cerno...

Mel had some linen, so we used that to stick to the sticky side of the poster board, slowly peeling away the sticky cover, and pressing the linen to the sticky posterboard.

All stuck in place! Next I just trimmed the linen to about half inch around the posterboard material, and then formed the cone of the lamp shade. Slowly, I hot-glued the linen up around the metal ring of the lamp shade. I am not overly good at doing this nicely, but most lamp shades actually look pretty bad I've noticed since a coworker pointed it out to me. Anyways, that was it and the product was this:

On the new nightstand

I also made Mel a tray, which she'd been wanting for a while! Again, from scrap wood, almost as always with me.

I didn't take pictures along the way, but here's the finished product. I made the four sides and the flat panel all seperate, and routed out channels for them all to fit together. I'd never done these kind of joints really, and they turned out nicely! Psyched. This thing can carry a load!

 Channels routed out show on the ends though, but oh well.

 I also made this branding iron using a bolt head. I used a dremel to carve away the material, and came up with this! It works, but it's not the best. But I'm pumped on it!

 When I went to brand the tray though, I didn't practice on anytime else, and I held it on there to long. It burned it too much. Rookie mistake. Oh well, learning.

 Umm, it was bottling day a couple weeks ago! Tried the first few this week and they are good!

 This is not really a fun day though, just lots of cleaning....

We went car camping a couple weeks ago also, up near Topanga Canyon. After some pancakes off the camp stove in the back of the car, we hiked around for a while, in search of a waterfall.

It was pretty cold though! Mel bundled up and charging away

Here she is, warming up :)

Maybe

Vest couple that day

Neato flowers

We came across this big old structure, but never found the waterfall, oh well

lost the trail

Nature is pretty cool

Vest couple, again

It was weird, at the top of the stairs here, it was easily 15 degrees warmer. it seriously hit you like you just opened an oven as you walked up the stairs. pretty awesome, ha

I took home a bunch of scrap wood from Cerno, and scrap wood from Cerno is walnut, which is freaking awesome! We have a weekly tradition going for Pizza Tuesdays right now, and the pizza stone is awesome, but it's hard to get the pizza onto the stone after we prep it, so I started making this pizza peel

After gluing it all up, I routed out an X in the underside to add in thinner strips for looks and for some support. The pizza peel is roughly a half inch thick, and sturdy.

Cut thin strips from the scraps I had to glue into the routed out X

And then sanded it all up, and oiled it with Butcher Block oil (basically mineral oil)

The X didn't come out too well. There were lots of gaps on the edges, which I filled, but it still looks cool. Never had done an inlay like that. Learning!