Some Turnings from Tom Thompson

Yesterday, the GlassStacker and I met with my cousins, Pat and Peggy, and Pat's husband Ted for lunch. Pat brought these seven wood turnings that were made by our Grandfather, Tom, in 1961.

It was last night, just before sleep, that I realized what this act of sharing meant to me and to my family. These pieces were originally gifted to Jim, Grandpa's son, and had been treasured and protected in his household for the last six decades. 

A little bit about the artwork. The large, unfinished plate is turned from American Elm. The four egg cups and two smaller bowls are turned from Green Ash. It is likely the original elm and ash materials were harvested from Pine Knoll Farm in Central Minnesota. 

The workshop used to create these pieces, built by Grandpa Tom's father, NP, is still operational at Pine Knoll Farm. NP's workbench, table saw, lathe, and bandsaw still see use as do the metal lathe and drill press which were added after WWII. 

I am honored.

Keep 'em running.

As always, the GlassStacker's Assistant

 

The Summer of 2024

This is becoming an interesting summer. 

To start with, there was a memorable woodshop experience in Arizona, even before the summer began. The boss and I have been wintering in Mesa, AZ for several years. The park we visit is called The Resort and has a woodshop. The day-to-day operation of this facility is handled by resident volunteers. One day, in March, while I was monitoring the shop operation as part of my volunteer time, I was asked  by the club presideent to turn in my keys and leave the shop.

To say that I was shocked would be an understatement.

I did return to the shop for the remainder of the season and used the lathe. No more monitoring. What will happen this fall is yet to be determined. 

We got a little lost on the way home from Arizona. It was near Dodge City, Kansas. I was driving and missed a turn, Google told me to turn, but I just missed it. Now, the map program immediately reroutes so as not to lose any valuable travel time. We quickly found ourselves on a narrower road, then a road without a fog line, and to top it off, we were now driving on a dirt road. The boss quipped, "If this gets to be a 2-lane track with grass in the middle...".

The reroute finally finished with us and served up a more acceptable road. As my pal Bill would say, "No harm, no foul." At least there was no lake involved that day.

In late June, we traveled to Greer, Arizona, by car, along the same roads we had ridden north in April, to participate in a birthday party for our granddaughter. Greer is in the White Mountains on the eastern border of Arizona, at about 9,000 ft of elevation. Our son and his family maintain a small travel trailer there and we joined them for the early July birthday celebration.

Only one small problem with this plan.

I have always had some sensitivity in my upper respiratory system to environmental conditions. This situation has deteriorated to the point of my not being able to tolerate a 9000-foot altitude. 

We had to leave early.

Things were much better at a lower altitude east of Albuquerque. I hope that our granddaughter understands that future birthdays will be celebrated at the half-birthday mark, sometime in January, in Tucson.

If I back up a little, there was a bowl in the 2023 Artist Poet Collaboration at Red Wing Arts.

A seat, a driveshaft, and a carburetor. First, the seat. We purchased a used van several years ago for our trips to the southwest. The Boss complained, mildly, that the driver's seat was not straight and that it was hard to use for more than 2 minutes at a time. This summer, I fixed it. A new cushion from the dealership, a little upholstery work, hog rings were involved, and it is now repaired. Some things take a lot longer than necessary to get underway.

The driveshaft situation literally became a pain in the arse. One of our vehicles is a rear-wheel drive sedan which has a driveshaft with a center bearing. The failure of that bearing introduced a nasty vibration right into the driver's seat. Truly a royal pain. I hope it is fixed.

Our Big Healey, 1957 100-6. Posted here in Blogspot on December 20, 2011. Yes, that old crate has a carburetor. A leaking float bowl left the carburetor dry resulting in a hard start situation. A little tightening and sealing maintenance was needed to rectify the issue.

I met an author, not in person, but through e-mail. Lindsey Drager was an artist-in-residence at the Anderson Center in 2019. While she was there, defining a topic for her novel, she happened on the block for Saturn in the Tower View Model of the Solar System while jogging the Cannon Valley Trail. Now, the book, The Avian Hourglass, is published. The solar system model became part of the story. I provided background information about the model, its conception and construction.

It is a fantastic and well-written tale about relationships and human nature. I will read it again. And again.

The story of her journey to the finished book can be found at; https://lithub.com/a-marionette-in-the-milky-way-on-finding-your-way-into-the-story-you-want-to-tell/

The Tower View Model of the Solar System. Posted here in Blogspot on August 25, 2015.

A letter to the editor published in Physics Today, 12/2019, led Ms Drager to my e-mail address. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/72/2/12/825311/The-inventor-of-puffed-rice

Hearing aids became part of my life.

Drat! COVID-19 caught up to me in June.

Don fell last week while doing some landscaping in his yard and broke his femur. I know this is off-the-wall, but it just happened. He suffered a stroke as a result of the injury and remains in the stroke unit at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester. Don is part of our Friday evening and Wednesday morning informal social gatherings. The Boss and I care for him very much. We will do whatever we can to support his continued recovery.

There are 10 SpectraPly bowls in progress.

Keep 'em running

as always

The Glass Stacker's Assistant

Painting the Car

The big Healey has had a couple of issues that were bothering me, nothing mechanical, just stuff that was not right. The car is a 1957 Austin Healey 100-6 that I have owned for 16+ years. At the time of purchase, it had been sitting behind a garage in central Minnesota for about 25 years and was in pretty tough shape. Dan and I did a lot of work to bring it back to life and it has since become a pretty good road car. A most comfortable cruiser.

There were two problems with the car. When I initially painted the car, the color choice was intended to be British Racing Green. It didn't turn out that way. The paint I had chosen was more teal colored, which I felt was ok at the time, but to me, it appeared less and less like BRG as time passed. This had to be fixed. 

The second problem was a misshapen grille opening in the front shroud. This condition was the result of a choice that I made while building the car. I opted for a shroud based on the integrity of the flanges that are used to mount the piece on the car, figuring I could reshape the grille opening later. Wrong. This time I fixed the flanges on the original shroud, which already had a better grille opening.

The unfortunate initial color choice and shroud being replaced meant that a total repaint was in order. I also know that British Racing Green does not denote a single color as it seems the Brits were painting cars all shades of green and calling some BRG. So I did a little informal research and found a color on an MG forum that looked the part and had a PPG color mix code. Then it was just a simple matter of going to the auto parts store that mixes PPG paints and having the color made.

Oh if it were that simple.

Keep in mind that this is 2020 and things are not normal.

I shaved my beard, sprayed a coat of etching primer over the entire car, and fixed the dings and dents. When that was done I sprayed two coats of high build filler primer. Lots of sanding and more filler primer later I was ready to paint. 

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic led me to order the paint by phone. We, the auto parts person and I, decided that 1 quart of paint, a quart of reducer, and a half-pint of hardener would be enough material for the job at hand. When the paint arrived and I started spraying, I decided to paint the under the bonnet, under the boot lid, and the inside of the door frames since the color had significantly changed. Painting more stuff resulted in the paint running short. By the time I fully realized what was going to occur, the paint gun was sputtering, I had a partially painted car, it was late Saturday morning, and the parts store was closed, closed for the weekend.

What to do? Get out the 400 wet or dry and scour the entire outer surface over the weekend. Monday morning, order another quart of paint, and a half-pint of hardener, which all comes in on Wednesday morning. Use the leftover reducer and get the whole project going again.

So I shaved my beard again and got to painting. Unfortunately, the air temperature had changed since the reducer was purchased. It had become really hot. I was spraying dust. I put on a coat of very nice dust that hardened into a perfect non-skid surface suitable for a pool deck. Not good, not good at all.

Get out the 400 wet or dry. Smooth the whole surface. Order more paint. Two quarts this time. Order a quart of higher temperature reducer and another pint of hardener. Wait a couple days for the materials to arrive. Shave my beard, again. Paint.

The first thing, the gun clogged. All the spray, respray, and respray again had clogged a small tube in the paint feed part of the gun. Knowing that the pot life of mixed paint is in the area of a couple hours, I poured the paint back into the mixing can and disassembled the gun. I found the offending tube, determined that it was impossible to clean, discarded it, and made a replacement from some plumbing stuff I had in the drawer. Reassemble the gun.  Paint.

Color sanding and buffing are going on now. This is the stage where the spots where the paint ran or the color coat is too thin begin to show. I have since resprayed some small areas, I still have some extra paint.

Sand, sand, sand, buff, buff, buff... Reassemble the car. Vacuum. Wash. The front shroud and grille look great and the color is perfect. My beard is coming back.

What a summer! I have a put solid month of time and a barge load of moola into this little paint project. I am thankful that I am essentially in lockdown with time on my hands and have a gob of money that I saved the past 8 months on gasoline, restaurants, and the like.

Does a gob fill a barge? Can I buy experience? Would I learn anything if there was no stake in the matter?

Play.

Keep 'em running.

As always, 

The GlassStacker's Assistant

 

Social Distancing in the Age of COVID-19

Well, here we are. This place has always reminded me of the village in the BBC series "The Prisoner". There probably is a secret room here somewhere with surveillance monitors analyzing our every move. When the fictional character in the film tries to escape he is always found out and intercepted by roving blobs that herd him back to his residence. In contrast, we are not prisoners, we can leave whenever we want. What keeps us here is a variety of less well-defined circumstances, concern for our immediate family, travel uncertainties, stay-in-place orders, and other factors that are at play.

The COVID-19 pandemic is raging. So we stay.

There are some local shortages due to the pandemic. Paper towels, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and cleaning products seem the most scarce. Everything else, food, water, booze, electricity, internet, and fuel are all readily available. All one has to do is go to the store and get what is wanted. That is the rub. The goods are there but neither of us likes to take the risk and go out for them. We have been evaluating our needs carefully and go out to shop only when we must. Home delivery is looking better every day. Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and even the Schwann's truck are scurrying around here all the time.

Daily activities are things we can do within the village. Virus control tops the list, hand washing, surface cleaning, and social distancing are important to us. Since most of the usual residents of this place migrated north at their first opportunity, walking here is social distancing at its best so we walk as much as we can. We are trying to do all the home maintenance stuff that we were either too busy or too lazy to do before. Julie paints and works on her Shutterfly book every day. I read a lot, write a little and am attempting to create a program in Excel to predict what the pandemic will do next.

We are both in good health. So far, things are good.

Moonrise with Melvin and JoAnn Mueller and Julie, S Clubhouse Drive, 4/7/2020

To quote Fred Thursday, "Mind how you go."

Take care and keep em running.
As always, The GlassStacker's Assistant.

Oscar's Bowl

Here we are again, The Glass Stacker and I have been touring the country, what a great land.  We visited family in Tucson and Aurora and played tourist in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  Amid our travels, I did find some lumber at the farm that captured my interest. Well now, find is an interesting word, I knew it was there, I just hadn't considered the possibility of using it for turning. Here is my bowl insert for the resulting handiworks.

Wooden Bowl, (Oscar’s Bowl)

A Bowl with 17 White Oak staves separated by 3mm Walnut strips

About 1970, Robert and John logged the white oak used in this bowl from pastureland on Oscar and Lily's farm a few miles west of Little Falls, Minnesota. The oak trees were felled and the logs hauled to a local sawyer to be milled to 1- and 2-inch lumber. Initially, the lumber was used for the construction of grain bins and wagon repair at Pine Knoll Farm near Upsala, Minnesota. Surplus lumber was stored at the farm in a large machine shed on the property and outside in uncovered, ricked stacks. Today, after 50 years of less than optimal storage, the remaining lumber has deteriorated to a condition that makes it unfit for any structural use.

Here is where your bowl enters the story. The 2-inch lumber was resawn and shaped into staves which were selected with enough integrity to produce a bowl. A simple wooden fixture was used to assemble and glue the staves into a bowl blank and the bowl was turned using tools like those my great-grandfather used in the Pine Knoll Farm shop a century ago.

Over the past half-century, time and nature have taken the strength of the white oak and left the wood with a beautiful, honey-colored patina. When you use your bowl, enjoy its look, feel, and heft. The finish is food safe and should last a long time. This bowl will not hold soup or salad but may be used with a suitable liner for dry foods.

Tom  

Tisadayinthelife.blogspot.com

Keep 'em running.
As always, The GlassStacker's Assistant

What happened to Walter

Walter John Wolters was born in Swan River Township, Morrison County, Minnesota on December 3, 1913. His parents, George and Karin Wolters, lived on a small farm in Swan River Township, about 2 miles north of Elmdale, Minnesota. Walter was the 8th of 11 children in the Wolters family. His grandparents, Hans and Anna Catherine Wolthers Hansen and Hans and Dorthea Rasmussen, lived and farmed nearby as did numerous other extended family members.

Walter and his entire family were part of the congregation at The Danish Lutheran Church in Elmdale. The pastor often referred to Walter and his younger brothers Nels and Noah as the "Larsen Boys", in reference to Karin's remarriage to Hans Larsen following George's death in 1927. At that time, Walter, 14, and Nels, 12, were close.

Walter is wearing a black hat just behind his brother Nels in this family photograph.

At age 28 Walter married Beatrice Dickson on March 3, 1942, in the community of Vawter, Minnesota. Near Royalton, Vawter is separated from the Wolters farm by about 15 miles of farmland and the Mississippi River. The young couple lived at the home of Beatrice's parents near Vawter. They had no children.

Walter volunteered for military service in February or March of 1943. He contracted meningitis at Jefferson Barracks, St Louis, Missouri and died March 14, 1943. He is buried with a military headstone in a corner of the Dickson family plot at Riverside Cemetery in Royalton, Minnesota.

More bowls

I have been turning again.  In the past I have made a lot of stave bows. They appeal to me because the setup, once it's done, is easy to use and makes an easy to turn bowl. I can use nearly any wood as long as it is at least 3/4 inch thick. The last two of these were made for donations and were made from scrap plywood. The plywood gives rise to some very interesting grain and layer patterns.

I have also restarted turning bowls from a solid chunk of wood. While I was using staves to make bowls, I neglected this side of the sport.  Last season, I purchased a D-Way hollowing tool. It has a replaceable carbide tip and is design to reach into a deep bowl to turn the inside surface. There is still a lot of practice needed on the D-Way but I have time and motivation to do just that. The two bowls pictured below were turned from mesquite that Dan salvaged from some trees cut down over a year ago near the Coca Cola plant in Tucson, Arizona. 

The mesquite shows the result of a difficult life in the desert. Everything has cracks and whorls, without super glue and epoxy this would be difficult to turn. The larger piece above has aged a couple months longer than the smaller bowl and is redder. They will both slowly develop a red patina on exposure to air.


Keep 'em running.
As always,
The GlassStacker's Assistant