Sharp

I'm back at it again....finally. After a BUSY term in my PhD and the Christmas rush I'm finally going to get back to doing some woodworking. Before you can do any woodworking though you have to first do your sharpening. I'm still developing my sharpening skills, but the back of my hand is missing some hair right now, so my blades are getting razor sharp at least.

The Boom

I'd say it's pretty fair to say that Waterloo is in the middle of a construction boom with a number of large building projects related to the universities and the development of more vertical density in the downtown (uptown) core. Everywhere you turn it seems there is a crane and a construction site overrun with pickup trucks, construction waste, and men in hardhats. Sometimes I just feel like going to live in the woods...

I think Hollerado offers a good thought in the line "Do you do the doot da doot do?". My taoist inclinations make me think about doot da doot doing a bit more these days.

I leica my panasonic...

I just got a new digital camera, a Panasonic LX-3 which has a lovely Leica lens in it. This camera is supposed to bring the best of SLR to the compact digital world and so far I'm pretty impressed. It has full manual control and some pretty advanced features. A good lens also makes big difference and this Leica seems pretty good. I used to be happy with little Canon, but after seeing the images it brings me closer to my SLR film camera. This camera also shoots in a 16:9 ratio which I like so far. Anyways here are some pics from a grey October afternoon:

Revisited

I had built this coffee table about a year ago, and it was neat to see it again.

It's sort of nice to see your work still vibrantly existing in the universe. It was a special piece of wood and a nice thing to see it still looking great.

Stability and Accuracy

I had just finished reading a book about Japanese carpentry and roof construction when I took a closer look at a new building being built in Waterloo. The book is called "The Genius of Japanese Carpentry", and details the reconstruction of a Japanese shrine from the ground up. It focuses on one building and shows the detail and extreme accuracy involved in building a roof structure that will last for centuries.

The curve of the above roof is approximated by 5 pieces of lumber, they look like 2x10's from the ground, that for some reason shocks me. The 5 pieces aren't even evenly spaced, there are three 12' pieces followed by a short 4' piece then another 12'er...I'm pretty sure that wouldn't fly with the master carpenter in Japan...

..and in other exciting news...dimensional instability in wood is a BIG deal! A lovely exaggeration of this was found in my garage, where two identical pieces of wood do a nice job of showing what happens when one is saturated with water and the other isn't. Just another reminder to pay attention to grain direction and dimensional change!

Sprints

Cyclists know what a town sign signifies, a time to throw it into your big ring and hammer to the line in the hopes of winning the sprint finish into a sprawling metropolis like Wellesley, Crosshill, or Lisbon. I'm thinking of doing a series of these town signs, rural Ontario sort of has a hold on me it seems...

I also found this nicely balanced farm on a dirt road I usually use to avoid the highway. There's a nice little gravel climb at the end, and at the top there's this farm.

Sketching

Here are a couple of sketches I did in and around Galt for the sketching course I'm taking. Everything is done with ballpoint pen, something I didn't really like at first, but is now growing on me.