June 18 – Killing time… For my job, every once in awhile we have work to complete that starts late Saturday night and if all goes well, ends Sunday morning. If things don’t go well, which is usually the case, we may not finish until Sunday afternoon. The hours are long, but for my part, I’m not required to be physically onsite, just available via phone and able to log into the hourly status meetings. With all that time to “hurry up and wait”, I’ve started the habit of working on some project in the shop while the hours tick away. Although this is Father’s Day weekend, we’re doing another major release tonight. There are several projects on tap for the waiting.
The first is the construction of a the wood stabilizing vacuum chamber. I was able to find a big metal pot like what is used for canning for cheap, then got the air fittings and a piece of plexiglass for the top. When I drilled the hole for the air hose, I cracked the plexiglass really bad, so I had to cut another piece and silicone it over the hole. That’s drying now, so if it finishes soon, I should be able to start hooking up the air fittings. When it’s done, I’ll post a picture.
The second project is for next month’s wood turning club meeting. The challenge for the meeting is to turn a platter. Since I haven’t done that before, I figured I’d better make some smaller practice pieces. The first one is made from cherry, but I think it’s pretty plain and just a tad ugly. So ugly, I may not even put finish on it, opting for the burn pile instead. Here’s a picture:
The second one I really like! It’s about 8″ wide, made from hard maple, and it’s just less that an inch tall. More of a plate than a platter, but still really well done. I will definitely put the finish on this one tonight and let it start to cure so I can have it buffed out by the time the next meeting comes around. I’ve also started on a HUGE (14″ wide) walnut platter at Bob’s house, which will likely be the entry for the club challenge. Here’s a picture of the maple plate:
June 19th – EPIC fail x 2. So I spent some time in the wee hours of the morning working on making a vacuum chamber to stabilize wood. Since I like making bowls, I needed something big enough to hold something at least 12″ wide and 12-15″ tall. Yesterday, my first attempt ended in failure as the vacuum created was too strong for the plexiglass and caused it to crack. I found an old piece of 3/8″ Lexan that had been cast off in the garage that was big enough to fit on top of the canning pot, so I drilled a hole in it, transferred all the hardware to it, remade the silicone seal on the top, and waited for everything to dry. This morning, I got tired of waiting and fired it up to see if it worked. The good news is that once I got the lid to form a seal, it started pulling a vacuum and you could watch the bubbles come out of the wood I had submerged in a bowl of water. EXCELLENT! This is exactly what was supposed to happen. About 15 seconds into my jubilant smiling, right about the time I was going to declare victory and start the dance, there was a loud, metallic bang. Turns out, the Lexan is more than strong enough to hold the vacuum, but the canning pot itself certainly isn’t. The sides crumpled, the water flew, and I’m not back to square 1. I think I’m at the point where I’ll have to actually buy something on the internet that’s specifically made for this kind of operation. Worst part is that I can just hear Mr. Oyer, my high school science teacher, laughing at me right now for not paying closer attention in class…
