(Adan) Yesterday afternoon saw Ian and me hoisting his new lathe up onto a brand new stand we had just fabricated for it.  Check it out, it's quite glam:

As glam, that is, as a stand can be when it is constructed out of a sawhorse and a 2x12!  It was pretty wobbly after those initial two elements were joined, so we added the sheet of plywood you see at the bottom.  That stiffened it up considerably.  After a couple of sticks braced the baseplate down to the feet of the horse, it was like a rock.  Sort of.  Close enough, we said, and we started making some chips.

This is a "bowl" of sorts, I guess?  We took turns reducing a large chunk of holly down to this size.  We also tried gouging out its interior just a bit:

Pretty cool, huh?  It will probably never be a completed bowl, unfortunately, but you never know.  It was great fun as a practice piece.

This was my first piece.  What can I say, Jennifer and I just saw Inception... what else was I going to make??  We don't have a chuck or faceplate that fits this lathe yet (on order, coming soon, don't worry), so getting this down to a point was a bit tricky.

It was a lot of fun.  We don't, as a company, have a lot of need for turned parts quite yet... but we got so much entertainment out of making these little guys, we may need to invent some axisymmetric parts, post haste.  Now we just need to make sure we don't get used to that "stand" and leave it there forever. Temporary, it's only meant to be temporary.

Well, the client who hired us to do some grain-contrasted inlay using that beautiful piece of sycamore has given us permission to show some of the resulting inlay right here on our Toylog.  Without further ado...

It's really turned out so beautifully, I love to look at it.  Every single one of those circles is as close to perfect as my eye can distinguish, with no visible glueline... and that's 430 circles!  Getting the tone to match was a struggle, so I made extras in order to be certain he would have enough to work with.

All the circles are quartersawn, and all the substrate is plainsawn.  These will be part of the decorative trim on a pair of desks that are a part of a very fancy railcar restoration project.

[Adan]  It's times like these that I am grateful for the Toylog's extremely broad scope.  Sure, pictures of a lotus may not fall squarely in the middle of typical topic ranges, but they're enriching nonetheless.

Fran called me this morning, and I just happened to be finishing some errands that had taken me near her place.  The light was perfect, and I went by to help her document this marvel.  My little Nikon is hardly an adequate tool for this task, but I did what I could.  She had her Canon on hand, so fear not: there are better pictures than these available.

Apparently it's been like this for several days, and another bloom already came and went before this one.  The seedpod on a lower stalk (visible in the first two images) is all that remains.

That cone in the middle of this blossom will morph into a similar object all too soon, I'm told.  Note also the little antennaed black spot amidst the pollen.  That's a tiny bee, the kind I've always called a "sweat bee" though surely there's a better name.  This flower was very popular with those of his ilk.

Well.  It was really something.  I was enthralled by the sight, and I hope some of the excitement is internets-communicable.

[Adan]  Last week's Wednesday Whatzit was maybe not completely fair, or in line with typical quiz subjects.  Regardless, here's what it was:

My grandfather (father's father) carved this from a single piece of cherry.  He and my grandmother were both very serious woodcarvers.  They really liked carving animals, and especially birds, and thankfully many of those figurines were saved and passed on to my father when his parents died.  They were also legendary for carving in the living room, in front of the TV, and leaving gorgeous piles of shavings and sawdust on the floor.  How cool is that?!

This, clearly, is neither bird nor beast: it's a chain, with a little ball carved into one end of it.  I've seen other examples of people carving captive inclusions such as the ball, or carving chain links, but what I like most about this is the story it tells.  It's very poignant, the way in which the project has been planned out, the governing pencil lines drawn...  and then he worked in from the ends: maybe he started with the ball first, and actually put a dab of finish on it, just to see what it was going to look like:

Going to the chain end, the links seem to start out a little uneven and get more and more symmetric.  Again, he's touched a couple of them with finish.

But to have made so much progress, and not complete it?  Was it really that he was interrupted by the end of his days, or did he instead come to appreciate it in its current state as a much more interesting story than the finished product might be, and deliberately stop?

Maybe he got tired of the monotony of chain links and went back to carving the darling little bear cubs that are collected in his descendants' homes.  Who can say?  I think it's a lovely artifact.

[Adan]  Okay, who's up for a game of "what is the larger object represented by these tightly cropped photos?"

Okay, have at it!

Okay, this is just a quick example to show why we at Akertoys LLC prefer to work on relatively small things:

All of downtown (we presume) was awakened by this giant helicopter this morning, as it hoisted four separate signs up to the top of this building.  You know, it's "The Tallest Building In East Tennessee."  Seriously, it is.  No, seriously!  Check out the mockingbird for scale, you'll see.

It was pretty cool, no doubt, but it definitely made me appreciate working on things I can lift myself.  Jennifer and I were debating the process as we watched, and we both came to the conclusion that the helicopter must be holding the sign until it's exactly in place, because those guys on the roof won't be budging it once the helicopter stops helping.  Each of those faces of the sign weighs 2600 lbs.  Even the heaviest of our raw materials is still manageable, if inconveniently so, by one person.  Thank goodness!

Long ago there was a post regarding my camera and its handy memory card. Well, that camera finally filled itself with so much sawdust that it was no longer able to take a recognizable picture.  I didn't want to be wasteful and just chuck it, so I sent it back to Nikon and asked them to please repair it.  Unfortunately, the economics made no sense: when the quote came, it was for 50% more than a factory refurbished model.  Alas. 

So I asked that they send it back to me (still en route).  Now that I know that it's economically irreparable, I'll be a little braver about trying my own lens disassembly/cleaning/reassembly.  In the meantime I bought one of those factory refurbs.  It just arrived!  However, as is sometimes the case with refurbs, the quality isn't max-tops.  There are some little scratches on the housing, which is no big deal, totally understandable.  Also, though, when I went to insert the battery, the little battery restraint tab broke and flew across the room!  Noooooooooooo!  The associated spring is seemingly unfindable.

Nevertheless, the camera is still usable, and the pictures are much clearer than those taken with the the old one.  So this is progress.

That's the new camera, reflected in the screen of the phone that has served as my camera since the other one went terminally blurry.  The bits in the foreground are the broken battery restraint.

So here's what I like about this camera: it's cheap, small, light, did I mention cheap?  Yet it still can take a decent close-up, which is what I usually get excited about when documenting our handiwork.

[Adan] This was a quick project for a family member's storefront window: the previous sign had met with an untimely end, and this was an opportunity to do a rapid design-build blitz to make a new one.  Here's what we came up with:

Pretty slick, huh?  You'll never guess what it says on the other side:

Well, okay, I concede you may have guessed that one.  We at Akertoys like to boast of having an above-average viewership.  Small, but above-average!

The two faces were V-carved to 0.075" (approx. 2mm) deep, then the entire board was painted and left to dry.  Then everything inside a 1/4" perimeter was pocketed down by 0.020" (approx 0.5mm).  That left a nice border, and a stark contrast between the letters and the bare beech around them.

The base plate is identical in size and shape to the sign plate.  It serves as a mount for the two side braces, which are dowel-aligned and held on with two screws each.  By the way, have I mentioned how much I love McFeely's square-drive screws?  If you've never tried them, get their sampler pack - it's magnificent.  The square drive is so superior to phillips, and the screws are high quality and have a nice deep thread, perfect for strip-out resistance in wood.  But anyway... I digress!

On the inside of the right side brace is a pocket into which is adhered a 0.5"x0.1" rare earth magnet.  Two more of those wicked strong magnets are glued into the sides of the sign board (visible in the previous picture, not quite obscured by the paint).  Believe me, I double- and triple-checked the polarity before sticking them in permanently.

That nice hovering effect is caused by the four non-slip rubber feet on which it's resting.  These were provided by my dad, who came to the rescue after I made a panicked last-minute phone call: "Help, do you have any rubber feet??"  Oh, and that hole in the middle of the underside?  That was where the magnet was going to go, before I decided I'd prefer to have it off to the side.  That change made the magnets on the sign board slightly less prominent.  Mid-course design change, very exciting.

And finally, here's a video of it doing its thing.  Enjoy!

[Adan] We've just been hired by a local custom furniture builder to do an interesting inlay project.  We're just doing the strips of inlay (two different patterns, multiple strips of each), which he'll then incorporate into the furniture he's building.

Yesterday he visited his friends at Jeffries Wood Works, and they sold him this lovely piece of quartersawn sycamore.  He dropped it by Akertoys, and I just fell in love with the thing.  This photo doesn't do it justice... it's just a beautiful piece of wood.  Not super-flashy, no tiger-striped craziness here, just some wood showing its ray structure at its finest.

The other cool thing is the way we'll be doing the inlay: this isn't one of those jobs where you inlay Wood A into a substrate of Wood B (cherry into maple, say).  No, here we'll be celebrating that nice quartersawn grain by using it as Wood A, and inlaying it into the exact same wood on a plain sawn orientation.  Pretty slick.  It'll be subtle, but totally visible.  I can't wait to see it.

We've got a LOT of non-rattle projects going on right now.  However, when people need a rattle, they tend to really need it.  Babies have their own schedule, and the timing of the rattle gift can be very important. 

So, in the past week we got word from a friend in Denmark and a friend right here in Knoxville that rattle time was nigh... and thus we found ourselves finish-sanding these three rattles on Saturday.
The two on the right are maple, with a fascinating flecked-grain.  The one on the left is cherry, but a slightly lighter colored cherry than we sometimes use.  It has amazing contrast, really striking, and the straight grain forms a perfect contour map of the rattle's shape.  Nifty!

Regarding the photo:  my camera has so much fine saw dust inside its lens assembly that it really can't gather much light anymore.  Thus, the lower light photos turned out very soft.  I chose this one, which used the flash (bleh), and then I tweaked the photo within an inch of its life.  It may not very closely resemble the colors of reality, but it's certainly dramatic.