|
|
Saturday, January 24th, 2004
Follow-on to the candlesticks pictures: This evening I turned another candlestick and it is way better than any of those. More interesting shape, better technique, and an actual finish! (By "better technique", I mean essentially that the surface of the turning is smooth almost everywhere, and that the cup for the candle is the right shape, tapering instead of straight.) The finish is shellac, which I mixed myself from Lee Valley's shellac flakes. I made sort of half-hearted efforts toward polishing it, that did not really work, but it is quite lovely anyway. I will post a picture of it when the roll is developed.
posted evening of January 24th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Woodturning
|  |
Thursday, January 22nd, 2004
Some new woodworking graphics in the photo album: Some candlesticks and The lathe I used to turn them.
posted evening of January 22nd, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Woodworking
|  |
Tuesday, January 13th, 2004
The sounds my house makes during the winter time are many. This was really brought home to me over the last week or so when we have been fighting a losing battle to keep our boiler from calling it quits. I would stand quiet, tense, listening to the peeps and gurgles of our pipes and trying to divine from them how much longer we had. Lately -- yesterday morning -- the plumber (Tom O'Neill of West Orange, whom I recommend highly) put a sealer compound into the boiler's tank which seems to be holding up, and victory may yet be ours; though I think in any case, we will need to buy a boiler in the spring time. Now I sit quiet, relaxed, listening to the peeps and gurgles of our pipes and to the house's frame creaking, and marvel at the degree of personality which I hear -- I believe I have come to know the house's voice a lot better in this interval. One thing about steam pipes and radiators -- the verb "hiss" is used generically to describe the sound they make. But I think of the several sounds I hear the steam making, "hiss" accurately describes only two, both of which are sounds indicative of a problem -- these are the hiss of steam escaping from a broken air vent, and the distinct hiss of steam escaping from a cracked pipe. When steam remains inside the pipes where it belongs, it does not hiss. It sighs, pants, whooshes... and a couple of others that I have not yet come up with words to describe.
posted evening of January 13th, 2004: Respond
➳ More posts about Steam heat
|  |
Thursday, December 25th, 2003
Well actually here I am at home this morning, might as well write a post I've been thinking of for a few days. It concerns translation so I will ask LanguageHat to link to it. First topic: I found a book on my shelf the other day while looking for train reading, called The Following Story (Het Volgende Verhaal) by Cees Nooteboom (what a wonderful name! I wonder how it is pronounced.) I have a vague memory of coming into possession of this book, and it is dog-eared at p. 76, so I must have started reading it -- I took another go at it Tuesday. And a couple of subtle grammatical errors got me wondering -- is the translator (Ina Rilke) not fluent in English? Or is Nooteboom playing some kind of linguistic game that Rilke is rendering faithfully? For example: the first sentence of the second paragraph of the story begins, "I had waked up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead..." "Waked" can be baby talk in the usage "I waked up" but it does not sound like baby talk here, just like nonsense. I do not know any Dutch so I will put my question forth and hope someone reads this who is familiar with Nooteboom in the original. If you have answers, mail me. By the way, here is a very nice couple of sentences: I'm ashamed to say that after all those years on earth I still do not know the exact makeup of the human eye. Cornea, retina, iris and pupil, which double as flowers and students in crossword puzzles, that much I knew, but the actual substance, that vitreous mass of coagulated jelly or gelatine, has always struck fear into me. Whenever I use the word "jelly," everyone invariably laughs, but all the same Cornwall in King Lear had cried: "Out, vile jelly!" as he put out Gloucester's eyes, and that is precisely what I had in mind when I squeezed those sightless spheres which either were or were not my eyes. A lovely passage -- but note "those" in the first sentence. Seems to me like it should be "these". Again -- is this from the original or from the translator? (Note -- very cool that the crossword puzzle joke works in both Dutch and English. I am assuming it worked without too much fiddling about on Rilke's part; if I am wrong and she did have to take liberties to get it to work, well, she did a very good job of it.)We visited Ellen's friend Alice the other day and gave her son Steven Demian as a Hanukkah present. Ellen had asked what I thought would be a good book for him -- he is studying German and is reading Camus -- so I thought Demian was a good idea. It is the first book I ever read in German, anyway the first one I was ever able to actually finish. We gave him my copy, plus a translation. I had a look at the beginning of it and found it fascinating as ever, and indeed highly legible. But here's what's interesting -- the German sounds great and a bit profound to my ears -- but when I try rendering it in English it seems a lot less profound, nearly banal. I don't think this is because I am a lousy translator, though I am; when I looked at the translation which we bought for Steven, its phrasing was pretty close to my own. So could the profundity which I am seeing in the original be something I am reading into it, inspired by the rush of being able to understand a foreign language? -- this is a pretty unusual experience for me. A number of people whom I respect have dismissed Hesse as not worthwhile for someone who is not a teenager. (Which either way, Steven is, so I'm covered there.) Any thoughts? Update: LanguageHat advises me that I am mistaken here: "waked" is a standard past participle of "wake", used more commonly in Britain than in the U.S. And he thinks "those" is acceptable in the longer exerpt. I'd still be interested to know more about the original text that was translated as "after all those years".
posted morning of December 25th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Demian
| |
Saturday, December 20th, 2003
My short time in the shop this evening included a number of "firsts". I used my new panel jig (completed after way too long a time, and a poor excuse for what I had originally planned to build) for the first time, gluing up the base for a sharpening station I am building -- it seems to do basically what I was hoping it would, which is to hold boards aligned while I get the clamps on and keep them flat. I cut into the wood I bought for Ellen's bookcase, which marks the first time I have ever worked with rough-sawn lumber. I like it! (Actually this "first" is a bit of an exaggeration but I am going to let it stand.) It is also the first time I have worked with maple since I built Sylvia's high chair (back in the early days of my woodworking career, before I had a proper bench); it is as nice to work with as I remembered it. My scrub plane eats it up. Now I just need to get some better bench dogs, so I can clamp wood that I am scrubbing properly in place -- this would be a major step up for me. I think I will order some new dogs in a few weeks, when I put in my order to Lee Valley for a couple of things I have been meaning to get. Update: I managed significantly to improve the performance of my bench dogs. All I did was, I relieved the lower half of the dog's face; so that instead of coming up from the bench at a 90° angle, it comes up slightly acute. So the contact with the workpiece is all at the top of the dog and the force from the vise is pushing the workpiece down into the bench. It works a lot better now.
posted evening of December 20th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Bookcase
| |
Monday, December 15th, 2003
It occurs to me that it might be nice to have links (to outside web sites) that knew when a reader clicked on them, in order to update statistics -- my idea is to sort my blogroll by how frequently each of the links is used. Here is an idea for how to do it: Currently the link is <a href="http://someurl">Link Text</a> -- but if the link were <a href="http://www.readin.com/blog/blog.asp?redirect='someurl'">Link Text</a>, then I could update my statistics and redirect. This might confuse some browsers' site history, causing the back button not to work properly; I'm pretty sure Explorer and Mozilla know what to do when confronted with such a situation but am not sure about earlier versions of Netscape. And I would want to have some Java code for mouseover, so that the browser's status bar would just display someurl when you hovered over the link. Update: Weird, now (Tuesday) I see someone has browsed to my blog following a link of the type I am describing: my referrals log shows a visit from http://www.popdex.com/redir/?u=http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/000634.html. (The "u" redirect URL is the address of the Koufax Awards thread on Wampum.) Apparently someone followed a self-conscious link to the Koufax Awards, then followed the link on that page to my blog. And for some reason their browser remembered the self-conscious link as the referrer instead of the redirect.
posted afternoon of December 15th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Programming
| |
Thursday, November 6th, 2003
Hey, did I mention I've been working on organizing my shop space in the basement, for a couple of weeks now? It's going really well -- I'm just about in shape to start working on the bookcase. What I have done: I built a lumber rack, and stacked most of my lumber on it; built a shelf with separate compartments for my carving tools; built a fixture for hanging my clamps; cleaned off most counter surfaces; and went a bit of the way towards organizing the big closet where I keep hardware. The last thing is going to be building a rack for clamping up panels and holding them even while the glue dries, which is necessary for the bookcase project. I have a pretty simple design in mind and will be building it next week.
posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
| |
Thursday, October 23rd, 2003
Developed pictures of the two projects I have finished recently:
posted evening of October 23rd, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Window seat
|  |
Wednesday, October 15th, 2003
I want to write about the type of beauty which I think is essential to -- look, here is the problem: I have this idea to which I am trying to give voice; but I can't get sentence 1 out of my mouth, out of my keyboard -- "I want to write about", this is good, this is what I am trying to say; "the type of beauty", well, that's vague, I'm talking about an æsthetic judgement, so I say "beauty", and I say "type" because there are other possible judgements -- I want to denigrate them but I can't start right off as claiming the point I want to prove, and anyway what point is there in making earnest argument over æsthetic judgement? But ok, let's keep "the type of beauty" -- "which I think is essential" -- "essential"? "Essential to"? To what is this beauty essential? I want to say this judgement, this beauty, is at the root of my essence, it is an important aspect of my psyche, and I want to universalize my experience and say that such beauty is or should be an integral part of a person. But to say as my first sentence that this beauty is essential to my sanity, that does not seem meaningful; and to say that it is essential to our continuance as a psychic community, that sounds pretentious and in the end meaningless too; so what do I say? What do I mean? Look, I want down the road somewhere to be saying "the problem with modern consumerist society is..." and then finish that statement with a clause describing how my special form of beauty is not sufficiently appreciated hereabouts; at least that is where I see this essay going, the one that is that I sat down to write before I realized I could not write even one sentence of it. But is that really an idea I want to spend my time developing? This question is rhetorical, so I realize as I ask it; the answer to it is "no"; I am sitting down to write the essay with the wrong goal in mind. The proper goal, and one which would bear having me spend some time and effort in attaining it, is to describe the judgement I have in mind and to point to admirable examples of such beauty, without complaining about the times it is not sufficiently in evidence. In this way I may be able to get my point across.
posted evening of October 15th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Æsthetics
| |
Tuesday, October 14th, 2003
Researching lumber sources for the past few days I came up with this idea: I want to make a page devoted to lumberyards and sawmills in the area. There are already a number of online resources (including the very useful Woodfinder) which I am not really trying to duplicate; what I want to make is a list of personal picks from ww'ers I know and trust -- i.e. the WoodCentral crowd, as well as CJWA members. I have posted requests for recommendations in a couple of places and will see what comes of it. I will be using this post as a holding area for candidates as I work on the list. Candidates so far: - Hutt Lumber, Newark
I found this in the phone book while looking for soft maple for my upcoming bookcase project; I have not found anyone who has bought lumber there, but I think I will use it because they have the right price and are nearby. No weekend hours. - Monteath Lumber, South Amboy
Recommended by several people incl. Lee Alexander, Phil Vitale, Bob Sheppard. They offer a 10% discount to CJWA members. - Rosenzweig Lumber, Bronx
My primary source when I was in NY and they are still close enough by. No weekend hours. - NJ Hardwoods, Plainfield
Recommended by Joe Hurst and by Bob Sheppard. - Wolbach Sawmill, Easton
- Agincourt, Belle Mead
- Bay Ridge Lumber, Bayonne
- Northeastern Lumber, Jamesburg
- US Mahogany, Matawan
Recommended by Lee Alexander, Jack Feinstein, Philip Berman. 10% discount for CJWA members. - Medford Cedar Products, Bordentown
Recommended by Jack Feinstein. - East Coast Log, Bloomsbury
Recommended by Steve Antonucci. Wow â?? I just spoke to the owner of East Coast Log and he confirmed all lumber is $2/bf. He is around on Saturdays from 10-4. He has a lot of turnover so not all species will be in stock all the time.
East Coast Log
50 CR 639
Bloomsbury, NJ 08804
(908) 995-2902 - Casterline, Morristown
Recommended by Mike R. -- the man who works there gave him a lot of help though he did not end up buying the lumber. Also by Philip Berman who says they are a bit expensive. - Center Lumber, Paterson
Recommended by Philip Berman. - Jay Samuels, and Rich O'Connor of WoodFinder, both write to recommend a number of smallish sawmills in NJ and PA.
- John Aniano writes to recommend the unfortunately named Rippoff sawmill in Allentown, NJ; Mike Obertlick's sawmill in Howell, NJ; Willard Bros. in Trenton; and Josh Cavet's mill in NJ.
- Congden Lumber in West Orange: very close to me and they have hours on Saturday morning.
posted afternoon of October 14th, 2003: Respond
➳ More posts about Lumber
| Previous posts about Projects
Archives  | |
|
Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
•
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.
| |
