The earth filled stage of Russian drama – We need a T-34 for the play, wonder how much just the turret weights and can a couple of us horse it in the back door to the stage?  By the time I get to the theatre, most of the set has been created, and it’s impressive: about two acres of raw dirt ramping up from upstage to downstage with about 20 meters of performance space before it for the pre-battle scenes.  It’s the opening of rehearsal and I’m still sketchy about my lines, but with a director who can heap this much dirt into the place, he can properly guide me ….uh-oh, there’s the orchestra, gotta go.

Waterways and pre-teens – I’m in a sinuous flow like you’d see in a waterpark with a small electric motor on the Barbie doll sized raft when I’m joined by two 11-year-old girls.  Before I have to time to wrestle with my conscious, the stream ends in the Men’s Room of a Vegas casino.  We go upstairs and the two Lolita’s get a beer each, which they can’t finish or pay for, then vanish.  I hate Vegas.

Zooming over the west with a pink cat – I can fly.  Really fast.  Over Lake Powell and to Missouri faster then you can read this where I meet up with Harvey and Georgia – disguised as Moe Howard and Groucho Marx, at an ATM.  They don’t like pink cats.

With dreams like these, who needs real life, if you call this Real Life …

I need point out that here on the coast, this time of year, we enjoy 24 hour a day gull screeching.  The new crop of repellant scum are two months out of the egg and are beginning to take flight.  Exciting for them, horrible for us.  The proud parents circle their disgusting progeny, ooggling, cackling, yodeling, screaming, horking, yattering day and night in an effort to cause all humans to emigrate to Uzbekistan and/or encourage their loathsome brood to take wing.  I am surrounded by five covens, each with multiple new to the earth flying scum.  Witness my joy.

Hither, in spite of the flatbed blocking lower 8^th Street.  A week ago a similar flatbed delivered 16 VW bus sized sacks of what I assumed to be new sand to replace all the cat-soiled (I guess) old sand in the play areas of St. Angela’s Pre-School.  Today, all those giant sacks are being loaded back ON to the flatbed.  Wha?

We don’t get many flat-bed trucks on 8th Street, thankfully.

Taking the Tundra-Trak through hedgerow, down dale and up yonder where I only grease seven endangered white rhinos and harry six snow leopards getting off the estate.

Stop One is, of course, Bwana Joe’s for the mid-week not-emergency but just in case O’boom rations.

Stop Two is Smart & Final for civet-shat beans and the world’s third worst ripe olives.

Stop Three, well, Stop Three was a new one lo these many months: The Dump.  Yes, That Dump.  I’m gleeful to report that stockpiles of crap have returned to their 2010 levels, which is to say that The Lot is crammed with cast-off office chairs, Cal State Monterey Bay desk discards, ruptured house renovation timbers and even an instant photo booth.  Even The Toxic Table Delivereth methyl alcohol, turpentine, two cans of urethane, a crate of mistakenly surplused Los Alamos cesium 137 and some 3-In-One oil.

Grocery Cheaplet, the Marina store, was worth the trek.  Stocked up on another gallon of Heifetz pickles, they had the frozen stir-fry veggies I fancy and on sale was a case of powdered gopher horn (“Authentic Golden Lucky Garden Seven!”).

Lucky me getting south – What IS all this traffic?  This is Wednesday.

No matter, no little adrenaline squirted into the gut, to Ka-nob Hill for absurdly priced on-the-vine tomatoes, which for here, in spite of living in the center of the salad industry, are the only red fruits which have almost some actual tomato flavor, and they’re $3.49/lb.  Oy.

Piloting the Tundra-Trak back to the Castle requires manly daring-do as the customary approach route is shut down due to the removal from the St. Angela’s Pre-school the giant sacks of …. charcoal? that was to form landing pad under the playground equipment.

Ravenscroft craftily shoots off some flares which divert the local gamekeepers toward the east fen and so I’m able to slash through the sea turtle breeding sands and get in through the West Portico.  Home at last.

After an atypical carbo-heavy luncheon of boar gnocchi, down the mercury slide to The Shop and the Whirling Dervish.

Wildman advises me to Slow Down, and so I do.  Frenetic to get something, Anything done to show progress, I take his advice and simply glue up another level of the 30 degree offset shelves.  What will be the final top-to-bottom height?  I can estimate it to about 62 cm, but can this be accommodated inside the tripod?  Is it too much, is it too short?

DNA does this automatically, and in a double helix.

Best get on the tripod.

Best Getting: form the ends of the lower connectors that join, in the center of the tripod, the lower ends of the three-barrel staves.

Saturslack’s effort was FAIL.  Today, I inscribe each of the three alder bottom connectors with the inside profile of the barrel stave top(bottom?) kerf.  Take the alder to the bandsaw and cut the silhouette.  These come out almost fitting well.

Next – how to cut the center ends?  Solution: dry fit the tripod (again), level it, drop a plumb bob down from the top cap and then estimate, and we use that word loosely, estimate the length of the connectors.

Ferk it.  Make than all the same: 49 cm from tip of kerf insert to tip of 60 angled back inner end.  Waugh!

Figure I’ve at LEAST a centimeter of loosey goosey to pull in the three tripod legs, so let it be.  And it was.

Yet all is not ripe.  As the barrel stave kerfs are some …. Something above the floor, so too are the alder connectors.  When eventually glued and screwed to the barrel staves, they’ll be 3.5 cm above the deck and this necessitates …. Something.  The ‘something’ are legs, or in this case dowels inset in holes drilled into the underside of the connectors near the center of the tripod.

If this narrative seems like its dragging on, it is.  It’s been hours just trying to get a coherent dry fit of the tripod.  I’ve left out the hole drilling, the pre-sanding, the dowel tenon forming and the inquiry down the street at to just what is going on with the charcoal?

I had thought those giant sacks from the flatbed last week were filled with fresh, clean, God-approved, Catholic sanctioned white sand.

No.

They were filled with charcoal.

Or what looked like charcoal from 400 meters up here on the battlements through the telescope.

Charcoal under the Jungle Jym?

I send Ravenscroft to accost the truck driver, ask him why and what.  He speaks almost as good English as me I do.  But it turns out that that ‘charcoal’ is shredded tyres.  The sand is being replaced by shredded rubber.

Also turns out that some metal fragments were discovered in the shred and the whole lot is being removed.

Back to the Whirling Dervish – after inserting the dowels into the under supports, cutting them to 3.5 cm height, I’m gormed to dry fit the entire assemblage.

It came together like a stage play where the full dress rehearsal was a fricking disaster, but opening night flowed like syrup on butter-smoothed hot cakes.

The tripod is rock solid stable, nearly level (near as I can tell) and there’s sufficient clearance, both radially and vertically for the shelves.  With success like this, who needs failure?

I look around and Marlon Perkins ducks out of view down the alligator pit, pushing Jim ahead of him while he shakes, not stirs the pitcher of martinis.

DAY –

Fourth rike this week, in total 140 minutes.  A new record.  No glick, squeek, errrk, ferk, crack, sproing or gidge in the major moving parts.  Odin Be Praised.

Had Ravenscroft summon the myrmidons to carry me in the sedan car (the royal purple job with the foot massager and mini-bar) down to The Shop.

Come To Baal Day on the Whirling Dervish Project.

Will the assembled dry-fit set of all seven shelves fit into the tripod with sufficient clearance for whirl?  It does.

Can some sort of interstitials span the approximately 10 cm between the top of the upper shelf and the top cap.  It can.

Attention thus turns to that ‘something’ about 10 cm in length.  I’ve already prepped a length of pine closet rod.  Pre-drilled through and through for the lag screw, reduced the diameter to fit into the countersink in the top cap and so proceed to form the nether end to the diameter which will seat in a countersink just drilled into the top of the top shelf.

And here I am confuted by the nature of pine dowels.  Even though I had drilled out for the lag screw which will form the structural

Even though I pre-drilled out for the lag screw, the bloody pine split anyway.

element between the top cap and the Whirls, the pine shatters when I test out the lag screw penetration.

Fak.

What I need is some hardwood dowel about an inch and a half in diameter.  I have this not.  What I have is an octagonal cross section length of something that will serve, but how to form the ends into circular cross sections?

Here’s where a Real Guy would simply turn to his lathe, chuck the chunk in and make circular from octagonal.  Lathe Not Shown Here.  It’s the one basic piece of woodworking equipment I lack.  And I sorely feel the lack this day.

What to do?  I’ve already drilled through the octo piece for the lag screw, could I not bolt through, chuck the bolt into the drill press and then use the spinning thing almost like a lathe.

Maybe.

Another idea emerges: push a steel rod through the octo, like a grill spit through lamb shank, register the rod on the top of the table saw fence set to the depth I want the shoulder and have at.  The idea

Harvey said there’s always a way….

is bold, it’s audacious, it’s dangerous, and it just might work.  Send lathe.

It does.  The ‘pole’ seated into the countersink in the top of the top shelf and riding in the indent in the bottom of the top cap is the final element to connect the Whirl to the Tripod.

Top cap with connector pole fashioned beneficially.

There remains only, in anticipation for the full-up assembly glue the top shelf to the lower 6, this top shelf including the center pole, glued and screwed into that shelf from the underside.

And now the Undernews.  The St. Angela’s playground renovation has taken an ugly turn, less ugly than some tot impaling herself on radial tire cord.  It’s not the delivery this morning of the mound of tree shred, which I assume will be the under-equipment bedding since last week’s ground up tyres seems not to have past muster.  No.  It’s the removal of two healthy trees in the forecourt.

It sickens me to see healthy trees cut down.  Like a fond memory ruined.  Like finding out your favored Third Grade teacher was actually a cannibal, or worse, voted Democratic.

There’s even more worse, the crew of healthy lads charged with moving the tree chips from pile to under monkey bars obviously hasn’t much experience in the role.

They Needed Harvey.

“Judas Priest!  You don’t climb up on the pile, you start shoveling from the bottom!”
“Criminitaly, that’s a shovel, not a rake!”

“I donnn’t knooow, why are you shoveling the bark three times?”

All this when 30 feet away is an idle backhoe with front end loader.  Maybe the driver wasn’t available today.

I doooonnnn’t Knooow.

GOODDAY –

But it didn’t commence that way and I won’t even recount the nature of the disturbing brain theatre.  You’re not old enough.  Brrrrrr.

As the week’s rike quotient was already fulfilled, I was a luxury to lay about the studio flinging spaghetti sauce and crayons at soiled diapers forging some Basquiat copies.

Noise.  Not just the hellish gulls, but PA.  PA from Lover’s Point.  Fuck.  It’s Feast of Lantern’s Weekend.  If it were just a feckless dress-up small town pageant I wouldn’t care.  But the irony is too profound.  The plot for today’s Feast of Lantern’s – the white WASP dress-up play date – derives from the lanterns the Chinese fishermen suspended over their boats 110 years ago fishing for squid out in the bay, and a completely fabricious marketing campaign of about the same time to sell china – plates, cups, saucers and the like.  The irony is that there once was a robust Chinese presence in Pacific Grove – their village sat between today’s Hopkin’s Marine Station and The Monterey Bay Aquarium – but it was torched at the behest of Pacific Grove and Monterey nabobs May 16, 1906 and the inhabitants prohibited from returning.

But back to the Basquiat yet in contemplating this was distracted from my turd flinging and ran out of colostomy bag effluent in mid-creative thrust.  Nothing for it but to take Lucy, my favorite polo pachyderm over to The Shop.

Today – final sand on the Whirling Dervish, tung oil and get cracking on that Box Joint Table.

Only the dowels and the bamboo flooring edges needed tung oil, but all the surfaces of the tripod required it.  Fun!  And I used to HATE putting on finish.  Strange.

Can’t summarize the project just yet, and won’t until the entire thing is assembled, but my sense is that while original, and interesting to form, I have not yet found the barrel stave mojo which clearly they emanate.

Avanti.

To the Box Joint Table.  It’s a Make-Work project, but one that may yield interesting results.  The genesis is this: I’ve repurposed the Wooden Cash Register Table (the first table ever created here at Basquiat-Could-Be-UsArts) to hold the tabletop Columbia phonograph.  It isn’t the best fit for the space it’s in, just under the stuffed head of Alfredo Garcia.  A longer, higher platform, perhaps with the shelf beneath would display the Columbia and maybe an Edison and if high enough would allow the pseudo-deco Union Station waiting room chair to be pushed back another few inches allowing room for my inter-chamber Segway to pass without catching air each go.

It’s called the Box Joint Table because each corner of the table skirt will be box joined, but the box joints won’t lead to the entire skirt, or rather, the corners made from box joints will be truncated.  Connecting each will be spans of cherry.  The legs will be … something.  The top will be scavenged ply edge banded to hide the laminations.

Or so the nascent plan seems.  Send Suggestions.

I re-saw some free alder in a two-step process:

1. Set the table saw fence to cut about amidships in the alder plank, and then incrementally up the blade until my fear of the Whizzing Apparatus of Amputation tops critical.

2.  Clamp the almost-all-the-way-sliced-through planks into the bench and hand-saw the thing down the middle until separated.

From here it’s plane the parts, square the ends, then cut to length, in this case four 12 cm and four 24 cm, all about 4” in width.  The cherry will span the corners making the table skirt about 90 x 50 cm.

Ever optimistic, I ready the router table to cut the box joints using the Rockler jig.  Having a brass set-up bar to set the jig to ½” is almost an impediment because in doing so, the tolerance, I mean ability for the joints to be tight, but not too tight IS too tight.  Need to slack off (Slack!) off the tight tolerance mandated by the set-up bar just a hair to allow the joints to fit together.  And they’re hellish looking.  Can my ½” upcut router bit be dull?  Certainly seems that way, particularly when the sawdust nearly catches fire.

Even though this entire lot was a FAIL, at least I still had all my fingers intact, including the essential signal digit.

Probably none of the joints are satisfactory.  Probably I’ll have to do the lot over again.  And so I let the set up be.

Can I work some dowels to fit into all the screw holes in the tripod?  Maybe.

Then, suddenly, Lagunitas Arrives in the person of The Professor.

He’s been in Germany researching  material for his next book, didn’t expect him back until tomorrow.  Bonus: Gnuuggies and concomitant doggie scratchins.

I missed him and I’m glad he’s back.

CANDAY –

As in the Whirling Dervish is in a.

But it didn’t start out that way.  Yesterslack’s embarrassing alder box joint failure was today’s remedial topic.

Out to the Slack Deck to cut more blanks: 4 each of 24 and 12 cm, about 4” wide.  But today, due to wanting a thinner, and hence easier to cut the box joints on, set of blanks and needing to plane out some irregularities, I took the thickness down to about 2 cm as compared with yesterslack’s 3 cm disaster.  AND snuck up on the cuts.

Sneaking up on the second cut.

The router table was set for side to side, the only adjustment was the bit height, and taking Tony Cardoso’s advise, reduced the bit height about half the distance to the goal line for the first of two passes.

Take Two on the Box Joint Table corners. You get lucky sometimes.

This was MUCH better, easier, evinced no chipping, spauling, chatter, spindling, mutilating or excess freight charges, even though it meant handling each set of cuts twice.  It was worth it.  Thanks, Tony.

Now, for the interstitials of cherry.  Here’s the perfect plank,

Exploded layout of the alder box joint corners and the cherry connectors of the table skirt.

rendered unfit for larger tasks as the 14” width was cracked just about down the center.  Cut a straight line down one edge, then to the table saw to render the billet 4” wide.  Two of them as I need, for the table, 2 lengths each of 56 and 30 cm.  Success!

To the Whirling Dervish.  An alarming disruption in the Space-Time Continuum was necessary to screw up from below through the lazy susan and into the bottom of Shelf #7.  Space-Time restored, screwed in the top cap and through it the lag screw down into the pole, top of Shelf #1.  All that remains is to craft small wood buttons that will fill the exposed screw holes in the barrel staves.  Success.

Slacking commences in earnest.  As usual.

The Dervish. It needs a home.