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.

Outdoor Projects

The long hot days of summer are drawing to a close, but things have been far from quiet outside.  Our small stand of 200 plantation Pinus radiata trees were logged by a very competent Ted Martin, who managed to preserve as much of the native undergrowth as possible.  The trees were starting to shade the house in winter as they got taller and taller.

Then we laid about 1200m of FSC Kwila decking around the house, using around 7000 pre-drilled screws.  This will bleed its tannins and weather to a silver colour before I stain it in a year or so.

When I say 'we' I mean I was 'junior apprentice' to John Funnell from JF Building and his guys.  I've known John for quite a few years now and have enjoyed working with him on a couple of much larger (and more challenging) projects, so this one was pretty straightforward.

Next, I laid a hexagon of decking and assembled a kitset gazebo that we bought nearly a year ago from Cameo Gazebos, with some help from John and Hamish again to get the roof onto the frame.

The end result looks pretty good I think, and now benefits from the views created by the removal of the pines.

Of course, we now have some planting to do to help the native bush regenerate, but this time nothing too tall!