Week of November 18, 2024

The cold weather is here, and I am happy to have it. It snowed on Friday, but melted overnight.

Given the weather, I’m in full hearty meal mode.

I made my first lentil soup of the season, my favorite.

Beef roast with tomatoes and garlic, served over orzo.

Shepherd’s pie with the leftover beef roast.

Charlie was home sick on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. That made for a challenging work week. He was vomiting, but had full energy and was bouncing off the walls, which is a recipe for chaos.

On the project front: I’ve been trying to work on something for an hour or two each night after Charlie goes to bed.

One night this week it was finishing a lathe project I’ll post about soon.

Another night I tied a bunch of Ishigaki kebari in different colors and sizes 14 and 16 hooks.

Another night I cut a bunch of bowl blanks out of glued together pieces of 2x6s. I’ve only done spindle turning and I want to learn how to turn bowls, so I’m taking the turnawoodbowl.com course and need a bunch of blanks to practice on.

I completely rebuilt the inside of my workshop at the beginning of this year and I thought the next phase was going to be making upgrades to my old Shopsmith, but I’ve decided to get serious about sharpening instead.

The goal of the workshop upgrades was to be able to walk out to the workshop and immediately get to work on something instead of wasting 20 minutes moving things around, finding the right tools, and getting by set up. Big progress on that goal so far!

Upgrading the Shopsmith to make it safer and more capable would be very useful, but that isn’t really my bottleneck right now. It is still very functional and I did upgrade the bandsaw table already, which has been helpful.

Right now the main bottleneck is keeping my tools sharp, particularly my lathe tools. I have a couple jigs to sharpen on the Shopsmith itself with the disc sander, but changing tools to sharpen is a pain and eats into the already limited workshop time I have.

I think it is time for a semi-permanent sharpening station with some higher quality equipment so I can sharpen what I am using in a minute instead of twenty, and without frustration. This investment will save me time in sharpening and save work time, too. Sharper lathe tools cut cleaner and faster.

My current plans will allow my to sharpen other tools quickly, too. Bench chisels, hand gouges, hand planes, and maybe even my planer knives. I’m hoping to get everything set up this week.

I’m also becoming increasingly convinced that lathe work is mostly easy when tools are sharp, but they dull faster than you think and the sharpness to difficulty cliff is steep.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this 5 years ago. This planer was essentially dead space when not in use, but now I can put a router table, miter saw, or bench grinder on here.

I got Charlie outside a decent amount this weekend. We walked some of the carriage trails at Rockefeller State Park (and he climbed some big rocks) in part because I wanted to take a look at the Pocantico River, which is a potential fishing spot. It is stocked, and while some local forums say that it gets fished out every year, I simply don’t believe that. The river doesn’t show signs of being heavily fished beyond a few spots without tree cover. Most of it is narrow pocket water and it is still flowing despite the drought. I bet there are holdovers in spots that aren’t on the path and don’t suit themselves to using a standard fly line, and I bet I can fish them with my tenkara rod.

We also spent a couple hours at the playground and park on Sunday, and Charlie had a great time.

I went to the premier of a documentary about the 100 year anniversary of the Bear Mountain Bridge today, which included some interesting notes about how they maintain it.

Afterward, there was a panel discussion and someone asked why the Bear Mountain Bridge is still in good shape after 100 years while the Tappan Zee Bridge, the bridge just south of the Bear Mountain Bridge, had to be replaced after 62 years because it was in bad condition.

The panelists leaned into their mics at the same time and said, “Leadership” and pointed at one old guy off to the side, Harry Stanton. He led the NY Bridge Authority starting in the 1980s and decided to double down on maintenance of the historic bridges and do it all in-house. They still follow the philosophy he set today. By comparison, the Tappan Zee is run by the NY Thruway Authority.

I love how the subtitle of the film is “The First 100 Years.” They intend to keep maintaining and using the bridge as long as possible.