The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey January 24, 2016

24 Jan 2016

"Snowzilla" - that's the name some of the local weather liars gave to this storm, and it was a doozy! The closest local airport to us, BWI, had record snowfall of 29+". I'd say that here, we got a total of 22", probably a bit more. Hard to tell more precisely than that because of drifts and wind. Here's the view out our garage door Saturday morning around 0900 EST: I measured 14" accumulated in the middle of the driveway. That drift next to the door was about 3' high. I cleared the driveway and the sidewalks once on Saturday.

Brian Bilbrey January 17, 2016

17 Jan 2016

The hickory gel stain was curing on the yet-to-be-assembled pieces of Marcia's new quilt ladder at the end of last week's cliff hanger episode. (Vendor and product names property of their respective owners, duh!) Here's the rest of the story, in pictures: The glue-up was straighforward. A dollop of glue (Titebond III) in each dowel socket, a bit of assembly, and a bunch of clamps. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to back up the glue with a #6 x 1-5/8" finish trim screw through the rail into the end of each dowel. Some fastening is good,…

Brian Bilbrey January 10, 2016

10 Jan 2016

A full work week to start the new year, and things are going well. I've lots on my plate, which is a good thing. Interesting new projects combine with ongoing operations to make my working days exactly as I like them. * * * On the home front, I've been working on building Marcia a quilt ladder, which she's been wanting for years now. I'm fabricating it out of shop scraps and 1-1/8" dowels. Here's the fit assembly, before I started on the finishing: All of the material is pine, so after the fit assembly looked fine, I took it…

Brian Bilbrey January 3, 2016

3 Jan 2016

Happy New Year, y'all! I've spent the last two weeks holidaying, eating, reading, relaxing, doing chores, and fixing things around the house. Tomorrow, I go back to work. Grumble. Not really grumble. I enjoy my work. I appreciate and respect the team of people I work with. Especially, I love to stay busy. I have specific goals for the next two weeks - a lot of stuff to accomplish and document in a relatively short amount of time, so I'll be very busy indeed. That makes me happy. In the woodshop over the last few days, I've been working on…

Brian Bilbrey December 27, 2015

27 Dec 2015

Another busy weekend gone by. I was doing some clean up in the shop, and came across a stack of 2x2 acoustic tile matching the small section of drop ceiling in the basement kitchen. Wonderful - I have a few of those that need replacing. A couple of them had holes in them, not hard to replace. Another one, though, was severely bowed by the HVAC vent attached to a floating, insulated feeder. The additional weight had bent the tile nearly an inch out of true. Were I to just replace it, the tile would be good for a year…