2009-12-06 Holidays and workshop time

   

On Friday night we went up to Leigha's place, and on the way back down stopped at Lowe's to get a sheet of plywood to build a loop for the train. We ended up getting a tree, too, which we chopped down to fit on the stand in the living room:

Note the train behind the tree. This was my Dad's American Flyer S Gauge train when he was a kid, I got to play with it when I was a kid, and now I've got it. We bring it out once a year, put it up in a loop, but now that we've got the house I've wanted to make a permanent installation. We've talked about running it around the top of the living room, but after much deliberation have decided that what we'd really like is a loop that folds down from the wall.

We think we've got a design that we want to build, but it's a tough plan to implement, so we got a sheet of birch veneer ply and I'm going to try to build a prototype, just to get something up there for this holiday season (and hopefully work out all the bugs for when we try to implement this sucker for real.

Spent most of today doing stuff in the shop, trying to get ahead of the rain so that I could work on stuff inside. Project #1: A rolling clamp rack for organization:

 

Since many of my glue-ups happen in the back yard, this should let me cleanly roll everything around back.

Projects #2 and #3 were to get further on Charlene's organizer, the drawer fronts currently have a finish drying on them, and to start on the train loop, for which I've glued up 2 8' long i-beam structures that are going to get cut into segments that are about the size of a single curved piece of track, and then glued together into the curves.

Category: Dan Lyke life Category: Woodworking