As I mentioned before, Lydia and I have bought our first house! It’s in good shape, but I can’t leave well enough alone so I’ve started building cabinets and furniture and making holes in the wall. One of the first projects was to build some shelving and a work space around our washer and dryer.
I should have taken more “before” pictures. The original storage wasn’t built very well and didn’t use the available space efficiently. I started the build by measuring carefully and then using Google Sketchup (a free cad program) to design the new cabinets.
My final design includes a large work table with an attached shelf. Two floating shelves allow future height adjustments. The tall cabinet houses shelving up top, and split shelving and broom storage below. Finally an integrated cat box cubby and drawer to hold cat stuff.
I printed out designs for the various parts and got to work with the table saw. Since it was my first attempt at cabinet building I stuck with relatively cheap materials. Pine boards, two-by-fours and plywood. Luckily I didn’t screw up as much as I expected. Some slight redesigning was done along the way, mostly to accommodate the old walls not being perfectly straight. Here it is, I still need to stain and seal the wood and we are planing on tiling the floor at some point:
Sorry for the long break between posts. Lydia and I have been in the process of buying a house and moving. We are getting settled in now and I have some time to work on art projects again. Lydia has been making some really cool sculptural lamps. I stole some of her materials and made a cat!
I’m using a new image browser to show my pictures. Let me know if anyone has any problems with it.
Still making bread. I’ve been making almost all the bread we eat. Its fun to experiment with different ingredients and techniques.
This morning's loaf
My daily bread is a mix of white and whole wheats with a little rye and some other stuff mixed in for variety. This one has rolled oats and some beer in it!
Made bread today. I’ve been trying this off and on for a while now and I’ve never really nailed it. This one isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I actually want to eat the whole thing!
The Halloween special that I worked on will be airing soon. A lot of work went in to this one and we are pretty proud of it. Ill post more definite info when I get it.
Its been a while since the last post. I haven’t had time to do much new work in the way of sculpture lately as my storyboarding job is keeping me quite busy. The season is winding down so hopefully I will have more time to spend on my personal work soon.
Season 2 of The Mighty B! (the show I work on) is premiering today ! Tune in to Nickelodeon at 5:30 for new episodes everyday this week. I storyboarded the episodes “Hairy Situation” and part one of the halloween special “Catatonic”
A local cigar shop hooked me up with a bunch of cool cigar boxes. I’m making a few more 4 string slide guitars to give to friends and maybe sell. Here’s the first of the new batch. Oak neck, mahogany fingerboard, cherry tailpiece, rosewood bridge and saddles.
As you can see I used a colorful Partagas brand wood and tape box. I managed to get the intonation right on this one and it sounds a bit better then number 1. The tone is much better then I expected. Dark and twangy. This will sound mean with some distortion!
The Strat style headstock has an image I cut from the inside of the box.
The Electric Guitar Project got me really interested in making musical instruments. I hope to make a nice acoustic guitar from scratch someday, but I have a lot to learn about building necks and tuning for good tone etc.
To gain experience I decided to make a 4 string cigar box slide guitar. This is the kind of home made instrument delta blues musicians would play back in the 20′s and 30′s. I figured it would be a good starting place to learn about neck building because the stresses are less with only 4 strings and since it is a slide guitar my fretting doesn’t have to be perfect.
Lydia let me have an old cigar box she used to use to display rings. the top was useless since she had cut a window in it, so I routed it off and glued on a spruce soundboard I have lying around. The neck is made of red oak from a local hardware store and runs through the body. The nut and saddle are rosewood and the fingerboard is cherry.
Here it is. It sounds pretty cool. kind of twangy. Very bluesy.
Ive been building this flat top Les Paul style guitar for the last few months. A recent injury kept me out of work for a while so I’ve had some time to finish it up. So here it is, Its wired up and sounds good! The hollow body is very similar to a Gibson, though its not based on any plans. Its a little narrower and deeper then a real LP I think. it would be interesting to compare the two side by side but I don’t have one. My giant, exaggerated F-holes and string-through-body tailpiece help it stand out as well. The back and sides are made from Poplar and the top is an Engleman Spruce acoustic guitar soundboard.
I printed out designs for the various parts and got to work with the table saw. Since it was my first attempt at cabinet building I stuck with relatively cheap materials. Pine boards, two-by-fours and plywood. Luckily I didn’t screw up as much as I expected. Some slight redesigning was done along the way, mostly to accommodate the old walls not being perfectly straight. Here it is, I still need to stain and seal the wood and we are planing on tiling the floor at some point:
