Plans are only a place to start!

            The plan today was to rough out a new bowl blank (I owe someone a salad bowl) and then rough out a double stacked bowl idea I have had in the back of my mind for a few months now… but that plan went out the window when my phone rang.

            A friend had been waiting for some lag time in his painting business to work on his bandsaw and I had volunteered to help him. Could I come over and help him this morning? Well sure, and if he didn’t mind I had some rough cut walnut slabs/ boards that I wanted to re-saw that wouldn’t fit though my smaller bandsaw.

            Along with that we had our order of tool steel in and he had made arrangments to meet with our machinist friend to have flutes put in so we could start the process of making tools for the lathe.

            With just a few more toy airplanes to cut out for his local community school craft fair we got to work. Those finished in 20 minutes or so, we set about changing the blade to a bigger one for doing the re-saw work. This was a new-to-him saw and we knew it needed some TLC. With the new blade in place, some adjustments needed to be made on the blade guides. That led to some adjustments to the table and to the idler wheel, and the fence… well you get the picture. A short quick job soon turned into a long, drawn out job. But, WOW, the walnut boards are going to be Fantastic!

            Ok, so on to the machine shop, that’s beside the guy’s house about 10 miles away… in the 3” of slushy snow, on the windy road… Well it IS, but it was not really that big a deal, just sound more dramatic! J

            Our machinist does not get to town much, runs a one man shop and likes to “talk shop” when I show up. What could have been a 10 min, drop and run, process took almost two hours as he showed us all his latest projects and we discussed and re-designed some other projects we were thinking about. (a jig to make spheres of uniform diameter on the lathe).

            Back home in time to get started drawing toy car patterns on to hard board to use up the scraps left over from the Toys For Tots campaign, putting me ahead of the game for next year. That barely done and Lynn is home from work, meaning it’s time to think about dinner and start working on my blog, twitter, and facebook acounts to keep everyone up to speed on what’s happening!

            Where has the day gone?

            Thanks for stopping by and look for photos of walnut boards and bowl roughouts soon!

Richard