Thursday, June 29, 2006

Summer is here, send ice.

Some of the latest cute pictures.

Max enjoys his hummus.

Henry relaxing and reading a Thomas catalog.

Max contemplates the plastic friend chicken drumstick

Henry paints his 1st model airplane. I put it together (superglue and 3 year olds don't mix) but he was very patient and watched carefully. He painted it blue.

Henry works! He helped Felice put earrings on cards so she could take them to a local gallery. He did an incredible job, pushing the ear wire end through a tiny hole in the card.

What can I say, the kids are good, it is very hot (it was 100+ on Monday) and summer is here...

Links:
Crosley Icyball

Horn & Whistle Magazine

Machine Shop Instructional Videos

"An American Cruiser in the East" from this site:
Korean Traditional Archery

DraftIt free CAD software

Peter and Victoria's Waiting for the baby blog

Wipe your hard drive

Friday, June 23, 2006

Push Me, Pull You.

Well another week or so has passed....

Henry and Max play together well now.

Judging by the drool stain on Max's shirt, I would hazard a guess that he may not...
The shirts were a gift from an old high school chum of Felice's, who sells children's wear.

Every child should have at least one emotional scar from a teddy bear.

Max offers a green apple to Shel Silverstein.

A few weeks ago Henry rode a horse.

My little equestrian.

Not much to report, Henry is taking swimming lessons and enjoying them. Max can now walk. I guess that's something to report.

I was feeling a bit vague last week, one of the joys of self employment, but had an old lathe customer hire me to do some Rhino modelling work for him. This is my first paying job as a draftsman (or the 21st century equivalent) so it swelled my ego up into a right bit of puffery. It is the sort of thing I hope to do for money more often. Unfortunately the work is top secret so I can't divulge anything here.

I did pick up a terrible virus/trojan/spyware somehow (I am very careful, but Norton, etc did not save me from it) which was killing my computer, but this piece of software completely destroyed it.

Some links:

An Introduction to Buffing and Polishing

I Love My Chapman Screwdrivers

A French Metalworking Forum

The Gauge Block Handbook (pdf)
(I use the "Gage" myself...)

TECHNICAL TIP #47; THREADING: H LIMITS vs. D LIMITS
This is becoming more and more important.

INSULTINGLY STUPID MOVIE PHYSICS

Why the Future is in South Korea

Aimee's Blog

Puritan Quote of the Week

This to That

Friday, June 09, 2006

A couple of small projects

Well the forklift car from Henry's "Culdee's Apple Train" set snapped in two.

A lovely clean break.

A 1/8" thick aluminum plate that screws into and is screwed into to repair the two halves.

You hardly notice the repair from on top...just those two countersunk screw heads.

A Williams peep sight I picked up cheap at the local gun shop, held in the vise on the Taig mill.

One of the mounting holes elongated into a slot so I could mount it to a Sheridan air rifle. I bought the rifle 2nd hand and the sight was missing.

The peep sight in place. Now I can hit the cans I'm aiming at.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Joys of Parenthood

Well, this week has been filled with vomiting, itching, crying and a smattering of fun... Felice, Henry and Max all came down with some sort of unpleasant virus, Max is still suffering while Felice and Henry have recovered. We took Max to the doctor today about his seemingly itchy rash and as we predicted the doctor suggested time, benadryl and calamine... Otherwise the kids are fine...

This will be Henry's future, making jewelry (if he majors in liberal arts as Felice and I did...). Every child needs a small anvil and hammer.

Max still has not learned that throwing sand, in this case wet sand, is not a good idea.

Henry drives a load of grass clippings.

We just keep Henry working, his wheelbarrow filled.

Max hanging out and having a snack.

Still not clear about the proper use of a toy telephone, but getting closer.

On Saturday, after I had woken at an extremely early hour to console Max, Henry suggested we got to Goodwill. I love going to thrift stores so we went. I proved that I am not insane by not buying the 4' high scale model trebuchet. I probably should have bought it, it haunts me now. Instead we bought a Thomas domino game, some chinese jigsaw puzzles (words in english and chinese) and a Microsoft EasyBall. Henry loves computer peripherals, last night he had two mice, the Easyball and a webcam plugged into his PC. Henry loves his jigsaw puzzles as well, although he often asks for help, just as often he does them alone.

Felice sold one of her hanging bottles on Etsy and is feeling validated.

I picked up a old copy of Literary Digest at the local thrift store, quite an interesting story about the magazine...

Harprit Singh Sandhu's Model Engineering website.

Illustrations and Definitions of Tap Terms

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Some of Steve the Locksmith's Shop Tools.

I went over to my neighbor Steve's shop last Sunday to look at some motion control components he had for sale. While I was there I snapped some pics of his modified/salvaged tools.

He welded up a number of these hammer racks to hold the vaiety of hammers, garden tools, etc. that he has.

He mounted a portable band saw on a salvaged chop saw frame.

A drill press made from a scavenged head, a non matching column and a bunch of scrap.

Notice the auto jack for raising and lowering the table of the drill press. He tends to use clamps while he ruminates on how best to finally finish an item...

He made his own micro adjustable table saw fence.
The white knob locks the frame, the red lever in the middle locks the fence and the red knob on the right fine adjusts the fence position relative to the frame of the fence.