Red Oak is Tough Stuff...

Over the holidays, I made my first piece of wooden furniture: A red oak corner desk for my room. I learned quite a few things along the way, destroyed a few drill bits, and now have polyurethane drops on my junker shoes.

A few lessons I can share:

• Smoking drill bits are bad
• Red Oak is hard!
• Measuring twice sometimes doesn't work
• Eyeballing sometimes does
• Everyone should own a miter box.

Here is the beasty, somewhat from start to finish.






A few problems did crop up - one of the legs is not straight by 5-10 degrees, and the mitered joints on the runners are not all flush. But all in all, I am satisfied considering this is my first real woodworking project.

The Siege of TPS Report Holdfast

While waiting on a few people to get back to me at work, I found myself with about 20 minutes of downtime. So I used the remnants of a late night coffee run to construct a catapault of stir sticks, straws, tape and a spoon.


The range is about 3-4 feet with a Hersey's Kiss, and the arm has a tendency to fly off as you launch anything. But now I can threaten my coworkers from behind the dubious safety of rickety siege weaponry!

Binding Fun

Over the holidays I decided to learn how to bind books. It turns out to be great fun, and rather relaxing. And you can drink while doing it! I started with some open stitched (coptic) bindings. After deciding that I do not have the sewing skill to actually bind those tight enough to be useful, I moved on to a simple covered binding. This has given much better results!

I have bound about 10 or so books so far, to various degrees of success. As gifts, hand made books work really well, and since you can put one together in a night after some practice, I highly recommend it.

Here are some examples of what I have put together. (These are gifts, no copyrighted materials have been sold to anyone, if any lawyers come read this!)




Look closely, and you can exactly what I was drinking while making this book.

Oliver has loaded!

This begins my attempt to restore my father's 1968 Honda CL 350. Oliver was loaded onto the back of a truck today, and should be arriving here in (not currently so sunny) Los Angeles next week.

This is the end of one project, and the start of a new one. Over the last decade or so I have tried to convince pops to fix the bike, let me fix the bike, fix it together, etc. Last summer I delivered a challenge: get the bike running in 6 months, or hand it over to me! He failed on his end, and now I get a crack at it.

Here is the bike (named Oliver, courtesy of Richard Hammond and the Botswana Special):




We put the parts together, and now it looks like a functioning motorcycle. Dad even polished it up a bit after I got some of the parts back on.




Oliver has been in parts and on blocks for fifteen years. Time to see if he can clean up!