Sunday, December 28, 2008

27, 28


Missed one again. The picture for the 26th is really relevant to yesterday. I put one side of all the pieces of timber through the jointer part of the planer to get it flat. Then sammy helped out by passing the timber back and forth as we fed the whole lot through the thickesser a number of times to get all to a given thickness. Then in the afternoon we moved on to the larger timbers for the work, but by then the blades on the planer were showing signs of blunting down. After the breaker tripped a couple of times I called a halt and after a brief go at sharpening we retired to the warm of the upstairs rooms.
So, today began with an extended session of sharpening planer blades and then finishing up the job of thickessing the larger timbers.
The relatively mindless tasks seem to be having the prescribed effect and I am not yet under the harrow. Unfortunately the work of yesterday or playing soccer late in the evening seems to have had the opposite effect on sammy and he is in bed suffering today.
In the afternoon I moved on to cutting up a length of I beam with the acetylene torch. That will form some corner braces on our construction. Tomorrow should see me grinding and welding those cut out parts I hope. If you are not a regular user of these cutting torches, there are three knobs. Two control the flow of oxygen and acetylene to give a nice hot flame that heats the work to give a little spot of melted metal. When you see that you turn the third knob and that shoots a jet of oxygen down a central nozzle, which causes the steel to enter into some kind of chemical imbalance and river down through itself to form a chasm of gleeful molteness. I like the bit where one twiddles that third knob to start the river.