Just Showing Off

Hi all, I just wanted to display some pics to brighten things up...oh OK fine, I just wanted to show off a little and put my belly out there for all to see ;)

This is me and Casey with one of the end sides of the crib.


Here's me with the entire crib...I think this is the biggest belly shot that you are going to see!

Here are pics of my masterpiece...the finished baby room!





When in the crib, this is what the back of the baby's head will see (OMG, look at the monkey. He's so cute!) -


...and this is what the front will see-


Yeah, we kinda went for the eyeball themed room, huh?

My Video Game Says I'm Fat

So for our anniversary in October, I bought Nisha Wii Fit. Yes, she really wanted this. No, it wasn't a veiled suggestion. If anyone could benefit from several hours of Wii Fit, its this dashing (portly) dad-to-be.

Wii Fit is a game/activity for the Nintendo Wii video game system that purportedly gets pasty little chubby kids off the couch and doing something that sort of resembles exercise. The neat thing about Wii Fit is the "balance board" peripheral it comes with. It's basically plastic rectangle about 12" x 24" in size that sits on 4 corner posts, which I believe to be simple load cells (a sensor that measures force and converts to an electric signal). In addition to summing the loads measured by each sensor to measure one's weight, the board takes the differing signals from each corner post/load cell and applies some sort of processing wizardry to yield a resultant calculation of where it thinks your center of gravity is. You interact in all sorts of games/activities by leaning in different directions on the board, jumping, etc. Its really pretty slick.

When you first fire up the game, you assign your "Mii" (the cute little avatar you create for yourself on the Wii) to a Wii Fit profile. It asks for your height and takes weight measurements to calculate your BMI. The game uses this calculated BMI to alter the appearance of your "Mii"; the higher your BMI, the more spherical your Mii character gets. Every subsequent time you play, you weigh in and it updates and tracks your weight/BMI and alters the appearance of your Mii accordingly.

Anyway, as our anniversary is in early October, Nisha thought it would be fun to use the game's ability to track your weight/BMI to track her weight during pregnancy. Nisha, being her gorgeous slender self, first weighed in 6 months pregnant and her BMI was in the middle of the "Normal" range. Bravo. Her "Mii" character didn't really change from its initial state. Not the case for poor Justin. After Nisha had weighed in, I hopped on the "balance board" (which let out a whimper as I stepped on) and was promptly declared "Obese". Nice. My Mii character now closely resembles a basketball wearing a red shirt. Self-confidence: destroyed.

As the weeks ticked by, the game observed Nisha's weight/BMI increasing and asked her why she thought it was going up. It gives you 8-10 choices like "I ate too much" or "Not enough exercise". I thought this was funny. A video game making the user explain the reason behind their failure. People pay for this privilege. Well, Nisha was finally declared "Overweight" this week with a BMI of a whopping 25.2. It will be neat to see the difference once the baby is born. She'll be congratulated in being "Normal" once again, while I'll continue being lambasted as being "Obese".

Anyway, Nisha's doing great and we're rapidly approaching baby-day. I just hope she can make it through Saturday night as we've got prime tickets to watch "A Prairie Home Companion" live at Cincinnati's Music Hall! I'm really excited to see the show, but I don't think many of them sandal-wearin' Subaru-drivin' tofu-eatin' whine-a-lots that typically attend NPR shows in person will be of much assistance if she goes into labor. I'm not a huge proponent of h(ippie)olistic medicine. :)

Justin

Spare time?!

Ahhh! Did I mention its nice to have the crib done? I was finally able to clean the 8" blanket of shavings in the shop generated from the hours spent with the smoothing plane.

With a decent chunk of time left in the weekend (I had thought wrapping up the crib would eat the whole weekend), I decided to try my hand at sharpening and making a new handle for the Disston rip saw I bought at a flea market.

Before the Woodworking in America conference, I really hadn't experienced what a sharp saw feels like. A quick stop at Mike Wenzloff's booth fixed that. Holy cow. That was eye-opening. The old handle wasn't terrible in terms of function, but had been broken/repaired with a few ugly wood screws that drove me crazy.

Here's the fruit of my labor. Its made of cherry with blonde shellac rubbed out with 0000 steel wool. I think it turned out nice. It was really nice to be able to make a sort-of free form object. Unlike the scads of rectangular parts of crib, I got to bust out the rasps and files for this guy. Good times.

C'est Fini!

After 3 magical beard-and-flannel-shirt filled days last weekend at Popular Woodworking's Woodworking in America conference I finally got to spend some much needed time in the basement (shop) wrapping up the crib for our soon-to-be daughter. It was good to get this one done.

You can see part of the baby's room that Nisha has spent so many hours on. She's really busted her butt painting all sorts of fun little critters on the walls. I'll try to rustle up some pics of the room.

I struggled with the design of the crib and am not quite happy with how it turned out.
I went on an Amazon.com book buying glut over the summer and during the madness picked up Robert Lang's book of shop drawings of Greene and Greene furniture. After marveling at the fantastic contents of the book, I decided that I'd just steal design cues from some various pieces in the book and impress my friends and family by calling my crib a "Greene and Greene" styled work. I doodled on paper and Google Sketchup for many hours until I finally arrived/conceded with what I thought was a workable design. It looked adequate to my not-very-developed eye for design in Sketchup; with Nisha's due date swiftly approaching I decided to start applying steel to wood.

The finished product is made of cherry with a hand-rubbed blonde shellac finish. The crib knocks down to four sides and four legs, which is quite handy when one would like to remove the crib from the workshop and install in a nursery. The whole thing is held together with 8 1/4-20 socket head cap screws, which thread through the tenons on the short rails into threaded inserts installed into the tenons of the long rails. I'm in the process of making some ebony plugs to hide those ugly screw heads. It's rock solid when assembled.

"That looks to be a lot of mortise and tenon joints.", one might observe.

"Yes, it is", I would reply. "108 of them. But who's counting?"

I nearly went crazy cutting mortises and tenons. Lots and lots of chisel work, though I did cheat a bit with a router on the 92 mortises in the top and bottom rails.

I had a grand vision of not using sandpaper on the crib and was almost able to pull it off. Every surface of every piece was finished with a smoothing plane or a chisel, but decided to touch up with 320 sandpaper (the devil) to tame a few instaces of tearout and bring everything to a uniform luster. I need to convince Nisha I need an infill smoothing plane or contemporary plane with a high bedding angle to help fight tearout. Or get off my duff and make one with that 3x3x12 cocobolo turning blank I bought at Rockler a couple months back.

I buffed the shellac finish with 0000 steel wool to get things nice and uniform. Normally I'd use paste wax to finish buffing, but with the near certainty of voracious little gums and teeth being applied to the slats and rails I decided against it. I'm not sure if paste wax is baby-compatible.

Feel free to offer a critique of what would make help to make it more 'purdy. I would welcome the advice.

Welcome to 2002

Blogging, huh?

After much jealousy of the nifty blog authored by my Bro and Sis-in-law (and 7 year old niece), I thought I'd give it a shot. Here goes..