Shop Photos from This Week
Latest Pill Bottle Lamp in Progress
Using my new (old) drill press to make the holes in the prescription bottle lamp. This new version is looking good so far…..it is made from pallet material, features a different hole pattern, and the bottles will have a lower profile. I’m also awaiting some stylish, high quality electrical hardware that I’ll use on my lamps. Images of the finished piece coming soon…
Busy Day
I’m a little behind on posting, but I have been busy in the shop! Yesterday I took a day off to reorganize the space and to build an extension on my overhead storage loft. I’ve reached that point where I have to be as creative as possible with storage space, and to be more selective with what wood is kept in the shop for projects and scraps. I used more of the same salvaged wood to extend the loft that I used in the construction of the original loft. Now I have space to store pallet material, which I am starting to use a lot of.
Today’s agenda includes: finish assembling my neighbor’s new cat post and apply a coat of stain; drill and insert brads into the slat lamp that I am rebuilding; mill wood for the new pill bottle lamp - I am going to make that out of pallet material as well; hand plane the new shelves for the cat tree, then assemble for testing with the kitties.
Never enough hours in the day!
Setting up Shop
This is a sort of catch-up post, as I wanted to post some images and info on the work that I did over the summer to set up my studio work space downstairs in our garage. We live in a small, 1940s apartment complex, and our apartment fortunately sits directly over our garage stall below (most of our neighbors’ apartments don’t…their living spaces do not line up with their parking stalls). I’ve made a lot of progress since I initially started setting things up, and I will post updates soon.
The garage stall has one permanent wall, and is open on the other three sides (there is an access way between my work space and the back wall that I have to leave open so that people can access their storage closets). I built a storage loft to get all of our camping gear and miscellaneous storage items off of the floor. I scored this whole pile of wood for $10 at Whole House Building Supply and Salvage in San Mateo. What’s cool about this place is that you can pick through and choose each piece you want…specific lengths, types of wood, etc. And it’s good knowing that this wood is being repurposed for a good cause.
And the latest addition: I scored this old school table saw off of Craigslist. It took some work to get it up to speed, which mostly involved getting the necessary safety gear in place for making cuts so that I would not lose any fingers or get smashed from kick-backed wood flying at 130mph. Most older saws like this have long since lost their original safety accessories because people found them cumbersome to remove/install repeatedly when switching between different kinds of cuts. More on the details of how I resolved this coming soon.
Ok, that gets me closer to being caught up with the early setup progress. More details coming soon.
