October Activities

Crimmeney it’s October already! Have successfully survived Burning Man and Steamboat Regatta since last writing here. Have been tweeting up a storm, hence truncated text style that I must try to suppress, to be somewhat more coherent.
I’ve taken a slew of photos and they’re mostly on flickr at my usual hangout. Didn’t take as many as I would have liked at either event but them’s the breaks.
Last project: took a couple of weeks working part time and I’ve cleared off ALL of my workbenches, woohoo! The biggest headache was putting away all of the little fiddly bits that had occupied nearly two dozen Cool Whip tubs (!!). Managed to find something like ten pounds of nuts and bolts and have now sorted and filed all of ’em from #8 up. Decided to take all of the #0 thru #6 (except taps) and chucked ’em in the circular file as they’re just too damned hard to tell apart.
Once the clutter was dealt with I set about fixing all the tools that needed maintenance. Despite the clean-up a couple of things remain lost, including the two 17.5mm wrenches I need to attach/remove sanding drums from my Jet spindle sander. I’ve got one 11/16″ combination wrench, but two just don’t fit in the space provided: they’re too thick! Rather than grind one of my wrenches down I (somewhat hastily) bandsawed a replacement wrench out of 3/16″ steel plate and it worked a treat. Next time, tho, I’ll use a plasma cutter. Sooo with the spindle sander’s set to rights and with missing router hardware found after the Great Cleanup, I made a couple of quick-release hold-down clamps for the sliding track on my router fence; they work a treat and I’m glad that’s done.
Current Project: Traditionally (well, since ’04 anyway…) I’ve spent the winter months doing woodworking jobs and this yr is no exception. Now that there’s room to maneuver I’ve begun to lay out the parts I’ll need to complete the long-malingering small batch of wooden hand-crank steam engine toys. Looks like I’ve got bazillions of some parts and as few as zero of some others, so I’ll spend today making a list of how many of what I’ll have to make to have complete parts sets to finish half a dozen of the beasties. That’ll clear off a huge chunk of workbench that I plan to reoccupy with similar, but simpler woodworking mechanisms; hopefully fun but compact enough to fit into a pocket.
(This goddamned blogging tool WordPress is giving me fits as usual: it likes to keep hiding the bottom most row of text which means I’m now typing most of this with the line continually jumping in and out of sight; who’s the lame-ass code twiddler who wrote this Piece Of Shit anyway??)
After the wooden steam engines are a little closer to completion I’m going to have to get crackin’ on the calliope which, although it works, is now so totally incomprehensible to me that I can no longer program it!! Hackers loometh and I want to have it in good working order in the Demo Room.
More later; I really hate using this jumping-up-and-down text editor!!!