Scattered Thoughts . . .

I started off my day yesterday doing some woodworking.  I had previously designed a microscope case and had assembled most of it already a few days ago.  I needed to add a door and some handles yesterday. Unfortunately, I'm a bit out of practice with my woodworking skills so I found cutting and assembling this wood was rough and a bit frustrating due to making some really stupid mistakes which cost me some good lumber.  In the end, the case is looking good assembled though.   I still need to add some medium density foam to three areas on the inside of this case to keep the microscope from touching hard wood surfaces.  I'm happy with the design of this case though.  I still need to add hardwood plugs to cover the screw holes and then stain and finish the outside of the case.  The interior will remain unfinished.   One area where I had some difficulty in the design of this case was how to fasten the door closed.  I opted for two of these basic buckle fasteners. 

It took much longer than I planned because of more lousy health slowing me down to a crawl but I finally finished a small woodworking project I started about three weeks ago. Up until yesterday, the grandkids were using an old, small, plastic stepstool to reach the sink in the bathroom. I never liked that plastic stool... it is sort of cartoonish with rounded edges making it pretty damn ugly... the hard plastic rounded edges make it rather slippery on hard floors... and, it is so lightweight that it is easy to slide it across the floor unintentionally. I wanted to find a nice, old-fashioned wood stool but we couldn't find one anywhere... so I designed and built not just one, but two! (One for each bathroom.) I also designed and built a small stand for Lukey to use with his trains. This stand holds whichever power supply controller is necessary for whichever trains he is running at the time (unfortunately, different trains require different controllers) .  After assembling al

Even though this past week has been lousy as far as my health is concerned, I did manage to have a couple of productive hours yesterday morning. As a result of pushing myself too much in the morning, my afternoon and especially through the night was absolutely miserable but, I'm happy to say I had a couple of productive hours yesterday morning! I cut and sanded all the wood that I will need for two small step stools for the grandchildren as well as doing the same for all the wood necessary for a little stand for a power controller for Lukey's train set. The sanding isn't finished but I did a coarse sanding on all these pieces of wood to remove the previous finish. All of this lumber was recovered from an old church. I've had it sitting around for about a decade at this point but I finally put it to use.  Over the years, I've had various ideas of how to use this lumber but the small sizes of this lumber made it perfect for this little project so this chur