feather2pixels

After mail ordering special hinges that completely clear a door from its cavity in the open position,  I finally got around to assembling the door to my light-proof silk screen cabinet.

But apparently I suck at measuring wood and of course its turns out that there are huge gaps for light to get through.  Hopefully its not enough light to ruin unexposed screens.

Did I mention that I teach a college class called Instrumentation and Measurement?

At least the door pretty much opens and closes.

i have reinvented the door

special hinges

enormous, light accommodating gaps

Casters are definitely on my list of new favorite things.  I special-ordered these beautiful ones from the internet to roll-enable my homemade worktable.   They double lock (to disable not just rolling, but its uncouth cousin swiveling) and I was able to very securely fix them in the end grain of my 2×4’s with half inch lag bolts.  Have no idea what I am talking about?  I guess that just makes me the clearly superior carpenter.

Mm, these look good enough to eat.

My wide range of incompetence has been well chronicled in this journal^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}.  I was preparing yet another item for that list in the form of a worktable project for my screen printing studio, and that’s what this post was going to be about.  However, I finished the table last night and for the most part it’s not half bad.  Of course it took me over a week to plan (even though I was working from plans that a generous woodworker already worked out).  And over a day to build.  And I hurt myself.  For me, that’s progress.

The worktable

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The worktable

Held together with 3/4 inch dowels

You should realize that I have the best of blogging intentions. Not only am I usually thinking of great ideas for posts, but I constantly find myself toying with concepts for simple flourishes that I’m confident would accumulate to the astonishingly rich digital archive of my dreams. Man I’m telling you, in a certain imagining of my life there’s something delightful posted about every cognitive-behavioral event I experience.  You would log on every day and I would knock your socks off. Woe is me that somewhere along the way, the gap between my ambition and my lack of follow-through comes to bear.

For example, take this screen drying cabinet I just built.

While depicting no overstatement in an account of my true feelings, I can honestly tell you that I would feel so much more complete and validated if I:

• told you the story of how I very grudgingly decided to build this myself once my carpenter leads dried up.
• chronicled my 10 day evolution from shamefully bad to very bad woodworker.
• described the notably not worth it sense of accomplishment I felt upon completion.

Seriously.

I am just a closeted, self-loathing product of of my time and place.

But anyway, in practice I guess I suck at this.  Basically the main idea is that now I know how to build a wooden box on wheels.

…Kind of.

…It’ll come in handy.  (Thanks to Jake R. and Jesse B. for the invaluable advice on this.)

I have a new nemesis and it has no name.  In fact the foe that torments me does not even possess life, for it is an inanimate object. What  anonymous item with no intelligence with which to outsmart me provides me with so much grief nonetheless?

The answer is an eight foot wall.

I am in my third week of constructing this simple dividing structure, quite possibly the simplest thing one could build, and yet it is still not done.  The reasons reveal too much stupidity to get into (for example: did you know that walls don’t not fall down on their own?), but the seemingly endless struggle to erect this wall is seeing all my other concerns slowly fall by the wayside and is contributing to a mounting sense that everything is a series of ever more futile tasks.  At this point, I don’t even care if the wall is a metaphor for life or life is a metaphor for the wall–I just need a god damned 300 square foot enclosure.

The wall frame

(Thanks to Vik [pictured above]for helping me out).