After the drawers are glued up I am anxious to do my first zinc countertop. We have all the materials now; the zinc, solder, flux, contact cement. sponge rollers (for spreading adhesive) and a good quality soldering iron that I use for stained glass. My trial top will be an office table for the radical left newsletter and website CounterPunch. I have done a bit of research on the internet and am ready to give it a go. I feel like pulling a late nighter.... maybe another night. The drawers need to move on first, after glue up they get the edges chamfered, then the first coat of shellac. The front edges need to be trimmed flush too.
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| Kitchen counter to cover with Zinc |
A project I wrapped up recently was the pair of French doors for the Cockburn residence. The original doors were made of Pine and faced the South-East direction with no overhanging roof protection so they saw a lot of direct sun as well as the pounding rain. The bottom rail was toast on one of the doors and the other was not far behind. I used old growth redwood that was salvaged from a wharf on Humboldt Bay by Jim Groeling and Associates. The glass on the original doors had been painted on with gold leaf by ceramic artist Jim Danisch. I was asked to preserve these eight panes of insulated glass into the new doors. This was another project where I had an opening dimension, and the glass dimension, and I had to make the wood fit between the two. I think I am getting good at this because the glass fit perfectly, every single one.
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| Cockburn's Doors |
The Pinewood Derby came and went and with it was an evening of track maintenance. We built the track four years ago, we being local Petrolia volunteers most with kids in the elementary school but some without. From the very beginning there was a flaw in the plywood in one of the track seems, this year I cut about four inches out of the track to remove the flaw. This meant disassembling about four feet of track to get to the bolts to move the pieces around. It was fairly simple and I am really happy with the track design. It is a combination of plans that I found online combined to make this particular track design. We are still combing out the computerized finish gate, we had technical difficulties this year. Possibly because kids were playing around the track earlier that day and a witness had seen one of the young boys pulling on the wires that go to the switch at the starting gate. Something was amiss with lane three so we had to figure out the results by hand, thank you Becky.
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| 11th Annual Mattole Pinewood Derby |
