5.13.2009

Wands



So, my good bud Ryan at work has made it a Tuesday tradition to make wooden wands using a lathe at his brother's house. he brings them in, and they're pretty freaking cool looking. He invited me to go with him a couple of times, and I've been eager to try it out. I finally was able to make it yesterday. Dude.. So fun... I've never been much of a handy-man, and never really worked with power tools, especially things like table saws and band saws, etc. It was really fun.
We stopped by Woodcraft Supply to try out some different types of wood. I ended up with a really dense heavy (wet) wood with a strange name that had the word negro in it. The other one was called purpleheart, which is a BRIGHT purple wood. It's pretty cool.

I made 2 wands and polished them up nicely. The two wands I made are shown. The Purpleish (bottom) one is the purpleheart wood, the brown one is cherry. I like the cherry one better, just because the design worked out better. The purpleheart is a MUCH harder wood, so it's hard to get rounded edges.

I'm stoked to go do this again. Makes me wonder why I've never tried anything like this before.

5.09.2009

Mile Markers

So, another thing that I was just thinking about my trip to Philly that I found super strange is the exit reminder markers. In Utah, the markers will show 3 miles, or 3 1/2 miles, or 3/4 miles or 1/4 mile, etc. When driving around in Philly, I was surprised to see the markers showed things like... 4/10 mile. WTF?

Anyone have any clues why they do that?

Weird.