Monthly Archives: July 2007

I need soundproof walls

I can't carve it until morning because of the racket, but I have a new test box (also a very simple design) ready to send to the router. It's quite primitive in nature, but it's a double sided carving so if this works, I'll have the basics of the machine down, and will be able to start experimenting with much more intricate and invovled designs (and will feel more comfortable carving real wood — this is soft junk wood that I got from the discard bin at Home Depot).

Other than that, a couple more big updates got posted and ModBlog is up and running again…

BME jewelry boxes?

This is kind of crappy looking but mostly I'm learning how to create the 3D models required. I don't know if I'll have time to print it today but the next project will have double sided carving (so it'll have a nice fit) and a lot more depth and texture… I mostly wanted to see if I could figure out how to do an engraving on a curved surface…

Anyway… back to real work…

Carving

These are my first test carvings with the computer controlled router I got… It's not the greatest wood so it's hard for me to get real details. I've got a ton of work still tonight and tomorrow but on Thursday I'll do a few more experiments both in wood and in plastic — time to make some fun custom plugs?

This is the tool that I'm using to carve frames for all of my paintings… If I manage to make it over to the plastic supplier in the next couple days I'm thinking about making some postcards that are actually carved instead of written or drawn with marker…

Those are some of my first ones I made with limericks on them… the ones pending for the book project are a lot better I think. I got a pile of COPIC markers to add to my palette of tools, so among everything else on my very long to-do wishlist, I'm going to try and get the first few pages of my kids' book written/drawn as well.

Rainbows are a good omen

So a couple people said to me that I'm getting too old or too sick to handle the nitty gritty work of BME and that I should retire or take a break. No way! Outside of anything else, pain is what powers me! Anyway, in part because of all the time he took off to manage BMEfest, Phil had fallen a bit behind on image submissions, so I decided to help get caught up… and I processed about five thousand emails on Sunday and then a couple thousand more on Monday… So it's good to know (it really did make me feel good to know my brain still twitches fast) that I can still do it — and if Phil ever gets hit by a truck while on a crazy unicycle adventure all is not lost.

The bar on the corner is closing after 52 years! I took that rainbow photo as we had god knows how many pitchers last night (is Michael a bad influence on me, or is it the reverse?) — if my stomach is any indication, it was a lot, and the fact that I woke up at 5 AM lying in the basement, not entirely sure why I was there, backs up that binge-drinking theory. The good news is that over the last two months I've managed to pretty much totally quit drugs! Anyway, the cook has had the same job at Joe Mercurys for half of that period… I can't imagine how scary it would be looking for work after being a minimum wage cook for one's whole life. Although I guess it's less scary than looking for a job after a lifetime of being a high paid union metal stamper or something because the stakes (that is, the mortgage commitments) are higher.

There's another big update getting posted shortly, and then I'll start another one with a few thousand more, and tomorrow morning I'll do a few more hours before Phil takes over in our crazy image processing relay race — the goal is to get caught up so that images get posted within a day or two of submission, so you won't have to wait — after all, what is the internet for, if not instant gratification…?

After that I've got a mountain of great stuff for ModBlog so probably by about noon tomorrow that'll be all fired up again, and I'll try and queue enough that it'll last through my surgical downtime as well.

Beer Bottle Return Mission

This is all of the beer that I've drank (well, not just me) in the last year and a half. The beer store gave me $32.10 for the empties… I'm trying to get this house cleaned up so I can move out and get a more affordable place to live.