Worst. Winter. Ever.

A few practice dovetails, surrounded by proud chisels and a wheel marking gauge.
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I guess Winter is going to mostly pass us by this year. Yes, we've had a little snow and some ice occasionally. But nothing like I'm used to. It's OK, though - I'm sure the snowstorm of the century is right around the corner.

Family Updates
M had his sixth grade band concert last week. I was impressed - I wasn't expecting the depth and difficulty of the pieces they played. The auditorium at the middle school is so small, they have the band parents listen to the band, then everyone has to leave to make room for the choir. Then everyone has to leave to make room for the orchestra. When I was in middle school, we took over the gym for these things, and everyone had to sit through everything whether they liked it or not.

Science Olympiad practices have started, and this year we have 95 students and over 30 coaches and assistant coaches guiding our children through their enrichment activities. The competition is April 21 at Pioneer High School.

Woodworking
I've been doing some woodworking lately, including some practice for dovetails and box joints. I thought it would be a good idea to look around on the web again for advice and techniques for better sawing and chiseling, and I found some good ideas out there. There is a lot of junk on YouTube, but every once in a while, a gem can be found.

Sawing the tails. You can see the lines I drew, and how close I got with the saw. After doing many of these, it's still a little hit or miss, but I'm consistent.

The tails are clean - I removed the wood where the pins will eventually fit with chisels and a knife.

A Few Links
Turning a toolbox into a boombox. If that guy doesn't want that nice toolbox, I'll take it!

I'm considering buying some Red Wing boots and wrecking them just so I can have the factory do this. I love it! (More Red Wing repair here.)

A homemade guitar effects box. From the comments, it appears this design has some drawbacks. I'll wait to build it until they work them out.

And last, but not least, the gift for the man, woman, child, or small gorilla who has everything: the bullet-proof polo shirt. When you need to play tennis in a dangerous neighborhood.

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The Air Hockey Table Electrification Initiative

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For Christmas, J gave the family a small air hockey game. It runs on batteries. M and I decided that batteries were not an acceptable power source and set out to update it.

Here is a picture of the underside of the game. The round part is the fan that blows the air up through holes in the playing surface. The rectangular part is the battery compartment.

Our goal was to add a power jack for a 9V power supply, and a switch to turn it on and off. (Thanks to Grandpa B for the spare switch!)

Our first task was to add some wires to the fan. These wires will be attached to the switch and power jack.

Next, we drilled holes for the power jack and the switch. We soldered the wires to the connections after testing the fan to make sure we had the right polarity. The fan needs to run in the right direction to blow air out the top of the game, as the puck floats on this air. If the fan ran backwards, the game wouldn't work at all.

Then, we used a heat gun to shrink the plastic tubing around the soldered connections. Here is the bottom in its finished state.

This is what the game looks like now, with the power jack and switch.

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Happy New Year!

Two sides and two ends of a box for a magic wand.

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Happy New Year
It's now 2012, and some people believe the world will end this year. Evidence is thin, but someone on TV said it, and there are some websites that support it. What more do you need? If someone on TV says it, it must be true. TV also tells me that Taco Bell is open very late at night in case I need a taco. Isn't TV great?

Resolutions
I don't normally make New Year resolutions, but I've decided on a few this time around.
* I resolve to strike while the iron is hot. Striking while it's cold just makes dents and hurts my hands.
* I resolve to remove the songs from my iPod that I haven't listened to in more than a year.
* I resolve to clean the basement workshop area a few weeks ago and keep it clean through today. (Done!)
* I resolve to continue avoiding using the word "so" as the first word in a sentence when that sentence is not a direct continuation of a previous thought.
* I resolve to answer the door when UPS, the neighbor kids, or opportunity knock.
* I resolve to nag my kids more. They're going to want someone to blame for their problems when they get older, and I am determined to be there for them when the time comes.
* I resolve to choose the winning PowerBall numbers for the March 23, 2012 drawing.
* I resolve to actually buy a PowerBall ticket, which, despite the overwhelming odds of losing, one is required to purchase if one expects to win.
* I resolve to finish the semi-secret electronics project I started in 2011. Let's just say it is off the ground floor.


A Few Links
Open letter to watch manufacturers: The greatest watch ever has been designed and built. It's over. Your industry has peaked and will soon be in decline. Sell your tiny tweezers on eBay, hang up your magnifying eyepieces, and take early retirement. Behold this masterpiece of timekeeping.

Look at these rayguns. Just look at them.

Robots! I might have posted this before, but it's been a while, so go back and take another look.

Plans for a Stirling engine. A fun little weekend project.

Low Tech Magazine, ironically hosted on a web page. But you have to do what you have to do.

Smithy is an Ann Arbor company that makes machine shop tools. If I could POSSIBLY think of something to make with this combination lathe/mill, I would take out a loan and buy one. This place is not far from my house, so I could avoid the $329 shipping charge. With savings like that, how can I afford NOT to buy one? And it's so pretty, you could just pull up a chair and stare at it for hours.

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Have a Belated Merry Christmas and an Early Happy New Year!

For Christmas, K got a Fushigi, and M got a Chia Obama. Remember Chia Pets? This is the same, but with a Barack Obama head. (Yes, it's a real thing.)

A Frasier fir - no word on Niles or Lilith.

Christmas
Christmas Day is past, although we haven't had all of our family gatherings yet. We've had a fun vacation so far. We saw the new Muppet movie yesterday, met Laurie's new cats (Granger and Tonks), and are regularly visiting the front window looking for signs of snow. We've had a little, but not enough for sledding, skiing, snowboarding, or anything-ing. The closest we've come to snow is the ice we got a few nights ago, but ice is no fun.

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Science Olympiad 2012
This year I agreed to help play a bigger role for Lawton's Science Olympiad team, and the other Head Coaches and I are working our way through the signups (over 90 students) and trying to sort out who will be starting out on what team. It's challenging but fun.

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Air Hockey: Battery Hog
In the tree picture above, you can see a table-top air hockey game. It was a present from J to the rest of us, although she's pretty good at it herself. We were not thrilled to find it takes six AA batteries, so M and I are plotting to add an AC adapter and plug to the internals, and mount a switch where it's accessible from the outside. (The current switch is underneath the top, and you have to turn it over to reach it.) We have the adapter and 2.1mm connector to hook up to the motor, we just need a switch. I'm sure I have one somewhere downstairs we can use...

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Happy New Year!

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Pre-Christmas Status Report

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Brief Update
Not a whole lot of news here, but sometimes no news is good news.

M is playing saxophone at school when he's not waiting out sore gums from having his braces adjusted. He's still doing a great job in his classes. We can see all his grades online at a website called PowerSchool. We can see as much detail as the teacher wants to add - every homework assignment, quiz, class project, etc. has a score.

K isn't going to be playing an instrument at school until next year, but he's making progress on piano and his own schoolwork. M modified a blinking LED "warning" light that he used at last year's Science Fair for a project K is working on. K wanted something that would draw attention to his project over the other projects in the room. One of his project teammates is bringing in something else to draw attention: mints.

The Christmas tree is up, and we're on course to have our shopping done before it's necessary to panic. J does most of it for the family, but I've gone out on a few present-buying runs for J and the kids.

Oh, and I finished "The Hunger Games" which I have to admit was quite difficult to put down. I know that's cliche, but it was, in fact, hard to put down. I could have done without the part where the the dinosaurs visited District 12 in the spaceship, but other than that, it was a great book. I'm going to start on the second in the series, "Catching Fire", sometime soon.

Metalworking Links
A man built a small-scale compressed air-driven v-12 engine. Check it out.


Plans for this small, two-stroke engine can be downloaded by registering with the website.

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December So Far

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Lots of little things going on in December.


Mark's Mouth
The biggest news is probably M's oral surgery yesterday. I don't want to tell his story (because it's his) but it went well and his recovery is coming along just fine.

Family Stuff
We bought and decorated our Christmas tree today. K disagreed with our choice of a corkbark fir like last year's and he was right for a change. We got a frasier fir (no relation to Frasier Crane) and after decking it out with lights and ornaments, it is gracing our dining room in its usual spot.

Science Olympiad
Last week was the official kickoff meeting of Science Olympiad at the elementary school. I'm playing a bigger role this year than I have in past years, and am part of the parent committee to organize all the students, coaches, and practices for the school. Last year there were almost 100 students who participated, so it's not a simple job to manage it. I'm working with three other parents this year, two of whom did all the work themselves last year.

Snow and Trees
We got our first real snow of the year early this week. As the snow came down and the wind blew hard, our phone rang. It was my next-door neighbor letting me know that one of my spruce trees was leaning over his driveway at a 45-degree angle. We pulled it back up with some rope and staked it. I couldn't feel my fingers when it was over. I'm grateful my neighbor is such a good guy - he didn't want the tree to block his driveway, but he didn't have to spend his evening getting wet and slopping through my yard, holding a rope while I tied it to a stake. Thanks, Jim!

The tree is still staked up. I'm not expecting it to stay up for long after it's unstaked. Remember this tree? I have a feeling my staked tree has the same root-poor condition. We'll see.

Go State!
I spent the first quarter of the Big 10 Championship game (MSU vs Wisconsin) on the treadmill. I'm spending the fourth quarter on the computer typing, watching the teams beat the heck out of each other. A great game so far...

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Current Family Book Selections

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I just finished Tinkers by Paul Harding. A story about a dying man and his memories of growing up, it won a Pulitzer Prize. The book got off to a slow start, and started to intermingle the present day and flashbacks, and I wasn't following it too closely. The man was a clock repairman by trade, and there were some interesting comments about his profession, but the skipping around, which I believe was supposed to be a reflection of his mind's erratic focus, was hard to follow. Occasionally, some of the characters hallucinate, which is always a difficult literary maneuver. In one hallucination, a character sees an Indian next to a pond, and a fish jumps into his mouth. It is hard to make the transition from the occasional straight-line storytelling to a hallucination/daydream/flashback to the eventual return to reality.

I wasn't sure how much farther I was going to go with it when the story shifted to a long reminiscence about his childhood, and for about one hundred pages I had a hard time putting it down, as they say. The father of the aforementioned dying man, a traveling salesman of brushes and soap, had difficulty being a great father, and had epilepsy before they knew what that was. The man and his wife managed to keep the seizures a secret from their children, until one day at dinner the father had a seizure in front of the family. The portion of the book that narrated the father's story was very well-done, and I really felt what was happening in the book - the reaction of the family members, the fear and panic of those who had not yet witnessed a seizure, and the believable calm of the wife.

After the story of the father winds down, the book returned to the present day, and almost immediately, the flow of the book (and my understanding of which time period was being covered) became choppy again.

I give it four out of five stars, with a solid five stars for the middle 100 pages.

I've read several non-fiction books lately, mostly having to do with computer languages like JavaScript and Python. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that information, but JavaScript has been on the minds of quite a few people at my work lately as a language that some of us may be getting more familiar with in the weeks and months to come.

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K is reading Middleworld, about a boy whose archeologist parents go to Central America. He is invited to join them there, but finds they've disappeared.

M is reading The Twenty-One Balloons, a Newberry Medal-winning book he read last year and wanted to read again. I think I might like to read this one.

J is finishing up the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, a series we've all read and enjoyed. The writing is a mix of comics and words, and is the diary (although he doesn't like to call it that) of a boy who is struggling with his identity in a world of wierd friends, bullying brothers, and icky (but somehow fascinating) girls. And, of course, his experiences with The Cheese Touch. I'm not sure what other books she's read lately, but she always has one in progress.

Everyone here except me has read The Hunger Games, and after hearing what it's about, I'm not sure I can stomach it. We'll see.

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We finally bought a new camera to replace our aging Canon A510. We bought a Panasonic Lumix, partly because it was recommended by my dad, and partly because we were having a hard time finding a different, smaller camera with similar features. We're happy with our choice, and we've already taken quite a few pictures.

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Thanksgiving is near! We're going to see almost all of our family, most of whom are conveniently located in the state of Michigan. We're looking forward to the fun and food, and the opportunity to see some relatives we usually only see this time of year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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