2019 Projects

I'm stuck inside, off my feet and recovering from more surgery.  Getting a bit frustrated at not being able to do anything outside or in the workshop.  Time to reflect on the year.

Well, our pine forest was logged at the end of 2018, so there was a lot of cleaning up to do.

And lots, and lots, and lots of screws to finish off the deck.

I finished the gazebo...

and repaired a couple of chairs for a friend.

I think the only thing holding them together were the borer beetles all holding hands, but hopefully they will last a few more years now.

There was the coffee unit of course, blogged about previously.

And two large bookshelves for our living room, made from roughsawn narrow oak boards joined together.

These were mounted on the living room unit / credenza that I built in 2014.  There is adjustable shelving between the main cases and glass sliding doors to four of the shelves.

And last but probably least a bird feeder.  Since our monoculture of pines have been removed we seem to have a lot more birdlife - excuse me while I chase the cat, she has just caught a phesant 😔

Stumped to find a seat

My sister found a nice seat for their entry at a local market - a simple log of wood.

The only problem was the price - $500!  Maybe I could make something similar?

Off down to the ex-forest at the back of our land.  A wattle log was located, waiting to be cut up for firewood.  It was felled last year by the forestry contractor, but it was of no value to him.  Maybe this would do?  Two very heavy lengths were cut off and rolled up into the 4WD - one for my sister and one spare.

The bulk of the bark was peeled off in the workshop using various tools at hand: crow bar, claw hammer, chisel.

Next, with the stumps on wheeled dollies a small laser was used to mark horizontal lines top and bottom, about 480mm apart.

Then the logs were cut to the lines with the chainsaw.

An MDF box was made, just bigger than the logs, allowing a router mounted on an old melamine shelf to skate over the surface of the log, machining it to a smooth flat finish (sorry, no photo of the router setup).

The two logs were then flat enough to sit on the floor without rocking, and just required final sanding and finishing.

I tried out a bowtie across a crack on one of the logs.

This worked reasonably well, but who knows whether it will be able to resist the shrinkage forces of the log as it dries out.

Three coats of Danish Oil were applied and the seats were ready to be used.  It will be interesting to see how much they crack as they age, but they will make good firewood if nothing else!  They have a certain rustic charm anyway.

More Stockholm Metro Art

Stockholm archipelago holiday homes

Gum boot marketing gobbledegook, Stockholm

Stockholm Metro Art

The great mystery of the blue front wheel

(Solved.  It's a bike leasing scheme.)

Weird bikes of Amsterdam 3

Ok, so not actually a bike - a micro car - but they are allowed on the cycle paths

Weird bikes of Amsterdam 2

Weird bikes of Amsterdam 1

Ghent by night

GHENT STAM

The city museum in Ghent, Belgium is known as STAM and is located in an old hospital. This is the abbey dining hall, complete with the tomb of Hugo II, viscount of Ghent from 1227 to 1232.

Coffee on the go

We needed somewhere to store the cups, coffee beans, tea bags etc.  I had various pieces of recycled and recovered wood, so a cabinet on wheels was the order of the day (or the previous half year - this one took a while for me to get around to finishing).

Two doors and a drawer front were made from recycled jarrah, bevelled around the edges and then with coffee bean motifs routed into them to form handles.  The jarrah is joined from multiple pieces, with splits and holes filled with epoxy.

The drawer front was attached to a drawer made from leftover macrocarpa from some Adirondack chairs.  Dovetailing macrocarpa is not recommended.  It's even softer than cheap pine and splits easily.

Two 'trolley' handles were made from a length of broom handle and then secured in place to a recycled rimu carcass with epoxy and brass pins.

Castors came from the usual suspects (Bunnings) and the cabinet back (and drawer bottom) is leftover 3mm plywood.

The completed cabinet below shows off the raised panel effect on the drawer front and cupboard doors - a bit of a modern take on traditional cabinet doors.

And here's the completed mobile cabinet tucked under the kitchen bench ready to serve barista duty either in place or on the go.

Pre-sunrise, Orewa Beach

The world is not flat, it's a tetrahedron!

Various map projections try to approximate a sphere into a flat plane - Mercator etc, with varying amounts of distortion.  But ultimately, the flat plane is a poor substitute for the real thing.

Mollweide Projection from Wikipedia by Strebe

The AuthaGraph projection, invented by Hajime Narukawa in 1999 gets around this by essentially approximating a sphere to a regular tetrahedron and then unfolding it into a rectangular plane.

AuthaGraph map from Alexcious

Other similar projections such as by Buckminster Fuller and B.J.S. Cahill have done this before but they do not produce a nice rectangular map, without holes or 'Here there be dragons' areas of imaginary sea.

Cahill butterfly projection by Strebe

My lovely wife bought me an AuthaGraph map for the wall from Geo-grafia a while back.  The temptation was too great though, and I had to turn it into a tetrahedron, so now it has to hang from the ceiling.