New Workbench

Well, I moved to Texas recently, and I finally have a garage!  It's a great work area, but it sorely needed a bench.  So while my Dad was down visiting and helping me get moved in, we spent a couple hours whipping one up.  It came together great, and I'm thrilled with it already.

It was based loosely on this design:

This is how it came out:

Sorry for the washed out pics, I hung some overhead florescent lights, and combined with the reflective white pegboard they make for awesome task lighting.  Not so great for photos though.

Hockey!

I know it doesn't really fit the theme of the blog, but my winter hockey team won the NESHL D league metro-boston championship over the winter, which was awesome. Great group of guys!

and just in case nobody believes I was actually there, here's the line from my game-winning overtime playoff goal (yes, it was my only goal of the playoffs, but it was a big one!):


D league hero right there :P

time lapse smoker brain building

here's a little time-lapse I made of me building 4 smoker brains for family members (it's added to the original smoker post as well)

Mandarin Juice!

Weird how being unemployed I seem to have all this time for low-cost projects... We have a big mandarin orange tree behind our house. I can't tell if the oranges are under ripe, or are just going to stay tart and green forever. So I picked about 40 of them (maybe 1/4 of what is on the tree) and juiced em! It's real tasty, but tart. Not bitter like grapefruits, but not as sweet as I would expect from ripe mandarins. I guess they aren't quite ready yet...

Polishing Rocks

Got a bit behind on the blog... Here are a couple of updates! Polishing rocks! These are some septarian nodules (50-70 million year old cracked mud balls with calcite crystals grown into the cracks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concretion#Septarian_concretions) that I found in canada in college on a trip with the geology club. I had them cut on site, but never got around to polishing them to make them really look nice. before: after: side-by-side: surface prep disk, rubbing compound, and polishing compound, all applied with a little air powered die grinder. Finished with 3 coats nice polymer car "wax and shine" stuff. I'm quite happy with how they came out. They're not perfect, but for a couple hours of work with stuff I had on hand, I think they look great.