I recieved the Lie Nielsen spoke shave in the mail the other day, and no sooner I did, I was out to the firewood stack and grabbed a piece, took it to the shop, and split it with my froe. I went right to work on the thin piece I had extracted from the firewood with the spoke shave, and eventually added in my pocket knife, then a little bit of sand paper. I must have spent two hours on it, and I let the wood guide me to make what it wanted to be.
What came out was this spatula, which is about the limit for me with the cutting tools available. So, I had a look again at spoon carving knives, and settled on Deepwoods carving tools, which are hand made by a fellow at his home shop. That reflects the modern Main Street USA model that I would like to wedge into with any sales of my own, so I paid it forward to him and bought his tools. They are not even made yet as of this writing, and I look forward to recieving them when he gets a chance to work out in his shop and make up my order.
When I get the tools, I look forward to trying spoon carving for the first legitimate time. I also plan on doing some finishing work on the spatula pictured here. I’d like to cut down the length, and get it down from the 16 inches the piece of firewood was when I cleaved it out.
In addition to woodcarving, I have had a few other spring projects on my plate, such as making the back pasture accessible by vehicle. The canal is at the top of that field, and the canal company has dumped tailings from their annual cleanup along their road access, making the side too steep to get down in our truck. I had them clean up after themselves, but they still never restored any of the slope so I could actually get into the field with the truck. If one of my animals were to die in that field, it would be inaccessible, and I would end up having to let it decay there, which I am not happy about. So We got out the shovels and got to work leveling down the slope.
By “we,” I mean my eight year old and me. She is not a lot of help, but good for moral support!
‘We’ also repaired a broken slat in the bridge across the canal, which the horse fell into a couple of years back. The horse has been petrified of the bridge since, so I hope that by repairing it, she will now find her own way over it.
We put the board back as it was still long enough to span the I-beams and then put redwood pieces over it to add strength. The redwood came from an old feeder that was lay in the other end of the same field.
Of course the week has also been filled with the usual things, such as home schooling the little ones, and keeping the garbage out and taking an old chair to the dunp, and things like that.
Another big project has been working on trying to figure out everything wrong with the new webhost, and the malfunctions there. I finally called tech support today and spent well over an hour on with an agent there, before she managed to sort everything out for me. This is the test post to see if it is working properly now. Regrettably it was such a long call that by the time it was done, we had both forgot to get her to tell me what sha had changed to fix the damn thing. But if is working, and the pictures upload properly, then all the sited should work as well as this one. But there is only one way to find that out for sure. Wish me luck.
There is still plenty to do for the week to come, and I have a lot of content to produce for the websites based on the new strategy. This post is also a part of that. Looking at keeping some of the more personal stuff here, and then making the posts for the farm site and the old-time economy site relevant and not quite as personal with droning on at end about things that have been beaten to death.