Why Wood ? Check this out.

   It has been a couple of pretty rough weeks and I finally broke down and made a trip to the Doctor.  The Doctor's best guess is I have Piriformis Syndrome  sort of sciatica with a slightly different cause.  Whatever it turns out to be he prescribed some serious drugs and now I am not driving or working around whirling blades for a few days.  That doesn't make much difference since I have been so miserable the last five days that I've not really wanted to do much.

   Anyway, the prohibition against machines and the idea of not getting my fingers removed from my hands made me think for a bit this afternoon about some past woodworking projects and so I went looking,

   I found this:

    This is a trivet/hot-pad that I made for Eva years ago, it clearly has gathered lots of real life experience. It was one of the Christmas gifts the year that I went crazy and did the 12 days of Christmas.  My best guess is that this woodworking project is 8 or 9 years old.  You can see the patina (!) that has developed with age.  Actually patina is in this case a grand way of saying, it is looking pretty tired and just a little gross.

   This is the hot-pad after a short trip to my workshop.  It is clean enough to see that I wasn't a very good craftsman when I made it, the palm tree's board is not that square, but that is OK,  the hole that it sits in isn't all that square either. 

     This was an early scroll saw  project, and it has lasted because we don't have a fire place.  There are at least a couple more trips to the shop for a cleaning before it has been sanded away to nothing.  Try doing that with plastic....

   A while ago I was writing blogs talking about the basic tools that a person/home owner should have. This is a good time to remind folks that a 5 inch random orbital sander with a selection of disks ( 80, 120, 220, 320) had lots of uses in a homework shop.  Here is a whole page of sanders, everything from a Chevy to a Lincoln.  Buy the best that you can afford, that way the tool is an aid, not an obstacle.