Summer Barn

I recently bought a new precision vice for my desktop milling machine.

To mount it on the mill I made some blocks which fit the slots on each side of the vice.

So a bit of brass was cut up and I milled some T-nuts and clamps. Brass is relatively soft, so shouldn’t marr the vice or the table.

This evening’s creation is a Bluetooth speaker remade from an old shelf, a 12v power supply from a broken monitor, some old speakers and the cheapest Bluetooth head unit I could find on eBay!

It is an homage to Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.

Well it finally happened, on the 18th December 2017. the removal men arrived early in the morning. and as we had both been ill for the week prior to the move, we left them to pack everything. this was a mistake, as since moving in I have no idea where anything is! It is going to take a while to get straight, but having got christmas out the way I am sure we will be able to buckle down and start ticking things off the ‘to do ‘ list.

The Barn is awesome, however it took us a couple of days to sort out the heating! and when its cold here its really cold! The darkness is another thing that we are needing to get used to, a big change from living in a city, there are no street lights nearby giving off any glow, so when it gets dark we need torches…..

The cats both appear to have settled in well, although we haven’t allowed them to go out yet. They sit looking out the window at the rabbits in the garden or curl up in front of the woodburning stove. such a hard life…

I won an item on eBay last week, (in fact we have had lots of items recently) and this package arrived today in a grey postal bag, then wrapped in bubble wrap. Inside was this beautifully wrapped item. Some tissue paper and a ribbon tied in a bow with a little card attached. I have used eBay for many years and this is the first time the thoughtfulness of the seller has really moved me.

I carefully opened it to find these lovely cake forks.  Felt like an early Christmas present

There wasnt enough space to leave the feedback I wanted to leave so sent them a personal message. Saying how much I appreciated the thoughtful wrapping.

Usually I just manage to turn good wood into firewood on the lathe.

This time round I thought i’d try and do the opposite. So I bought one of those bags of firewood that you see in the supermarket.

It is silver birch, and as long as you keep it dry it does turn rather nicely.

One of the larger quarter logs was chucked up between centres and roughed out to a cylinder with a roughing gouge.

Then I used a small spindle gouge to put a shape to it – I was after a finger groove effect.

Then I parted them off with a diamond parting tool.

They were manually drilled with a forstner bit after being sanded through the grits and polished with beeswax.

I was quite surprised at how nice the beech came out as for firewood my hopes were not too high. It just goes to show that care and attention brings out beauty in most things.

 

 

This is my first ever blog post.

Currently we, that is him and myself are packing up our home in Bristol to move to Summer Barn.

It feels that it has taken forever to get to this point, including having this property appear on Location Location Location!  (Series 23, Episode 3) when our fluffiest member of the family took centre stage. We thought that we would have been long gone before it appeared on channel 4.  That was not to be and two months later we are still here, surrounded by boxes and more boxes.

Considering we have filled a storage unit earlier this year, I am somewhat amazed at how much we have in this tiny terrace house!

Thank god that we are moving to somewhere that has more space, which is what it is all about.