A lot has happened in the last few months. Friends and family may have noticed that I do not post often to facebook anymore. I’m becoming more like my father and do not have the patience for it all the time. I look at is as more of a necessary evil. If I want to know what is going on with friends and family I need it. Sure There’s the phone, but in all honesty I’m on both all day long for work, I really don’t want to do that when I get home as well. That and the time difference. It’s funny, the more I try to push myself and not be as much of a antisocial introvert, the more I find I like being non social and just staying home. My guess is that everyone except introverts will not understand that statement.
This Summer and fall I worked a bit more on the shop. I made some more upper cabinets and restored an additional tool cabinet.
It was completely covered in grease and dirt. I cleaned the hell out of it. Repainted the outside and the scratched up areas o the inside. Flattened and straightened out the drawers as best I could, coated the drawer fronts in chalkboard paint so I can label them. I then gathered up some of the scrap alder from work and made a workbench top for it
I coated it with butchers wax and placed it on top. It gives me a little more solid of surface that I’m note concerned about getting beat up on.
So after I got that done I made a stool for Melissa at work. More scrap wood and joint practice really.
I paid a bit more attention to how I actually work in the shop for the last few things I made. The goal is to move the majority of what I do to one small section that I do the most of the work at. This meant pretty much making my bench stationary and making cabinets for my hand tools within easy reach but not buried in a drawer in the workbench like they had been. Having all my planes in the drawers made it easy to put things away in Anchorage when we needed to get the cars in, but made things a little more difficult to work with if I had something clamped in front of the drawers. Since I do not have a garage big enough for the cars and it’s really just a shop at this point it was time to rectify that situation. I made another row of cabinets that sit behind me and the workbench. The alcove that was there was nearly a perfect fit for the three tool cabinets to be used as base cabinets. This actually cleared a lot of space out from the remainder of the shop.
Doing this made me realize that I had more wall space than floor space in the shop. So, I decided to take the clamps off of the clamp rack, and move them to the wall with a french cleat system.
Somewhere in there I had two phones die and we took a trip back to Anchorage to visit family. When we got back I started what has been the most difficult piece of furniture I’ve made so far. It’s also the nicest.
It is made entirely from scrap wood. Hand planed and hand mortised with dovetail drawers and hand carved handles. It was about three months of work. I finished it right around the new year I think.
After the desk I decided it was time for me to look at the comic a bit more. More accurately all of our websites and the comic’s site in particular. So for the last month I have been going over each page and fixing errors, re-coding and generally speeding things up. Still working on it. There are over 150 comics at this point, and the first couple of years I really didn’t know what I was doing with Inkscape or the website for that matter. It’s a work in progress. when completed, I may actually start marketing it.
Things to do this year? finish the website remodel. clean the shop up after making the desk.