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So it goes ...

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noon time

1/17/2021

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Wanted to get this down on paper before the ideas floated away.  This dial is often referred to as a Noon Mark dial.  During those in-between times when people relied strictly on a sundial and then relied on a watch, there was a time that watches just sucked.  They were either slow or fast.  In addition, time wasn't standardized across the country as travelers moved from cross country by train.  To help folks deal with these issues, Noon Mark dials were setup in town squares and provided accurate time of noon. People would stop and correct their watches based on the indication of Noon given as the shadow passed the 'noon mark' on the dial.  In addition, homes at that time often had 'marks' on window sills or walls that indicated Noon.  

This particular design is about 183 cm tall and 40 cm wide (scale: 1mm = 10 mm).  There will be (smaller) dashes to mark the first of each month and an analemma to mark the local civil time. The analemma provides a correction for the yearly 'wobble' of the earth and is  is 'tilted' to provide correction for local longitude. The Zodiac is given to provide some reference to the month.
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covid sucks

12/23/2020

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Covid was a very personal, difficult thing to our family this year. 
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a minnesota dozen

12/16/2020

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Lots of experimenting going on so the consistency is not there, but each one tested positive on good cider
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Jiggity jig

12/16/2020

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hockey Tournament batch

12/12/2020

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I've always wanted to build a jig for forging bottle openers and with the Creede Hockey Tournament coming up in January, thought I'd give it a try. There's a few old ones in this pile, but most are from various jig configurations.  These still need to go in the tumbler and get a wax finish. However, getting closer ... 
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final 2020 dial

11/20/2020

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This is the start of what will likely be the last of my gnomonic activity for 2020. Not really sure what this is going to look like, but going crazy not being in the forge. The blank is left over after the realizing that the folks who cut the numbers, cut them in reverse order ... so I turned the dial inside out (or upside down) and started fresh with a new design - TBD. 
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simple froe job

11/20/2020

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A quick froe for a neighbor ... 
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finally getting my hands dirty again ...

11/20/2020

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2020/11/6: Taking me a long time to recover from my injury.  Tore my bicep off, tore 3 of 4 rotator cuff tendons, tore labrum, etc.  Doing small things as the strength slowly returns.  Forged 6 wall hooks for hanging fishing gear and had to rest arm between each one.  
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driving the lane - the hoop driver

7/31/2020

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When a cooper makes a barrel the staves are roughly lined up in a circle and the hoops are loosely arranged around them. The hoops are then hammered into place with ... wait for it ... with a hoop driver. There are a lot of different styles that evolved over the years, this is a hybrid of a few.  This was forged from a chunk of mystery metal laying around the shop - and I paid for it.  The metal must have had an inclusion in the grains and when I was just finishing the edge, the corner cracked off of one edge.  Doesn't impact the usefulness, just resulted in a new litany of vulgarities bouncing off the forge walls.  A little clean up and thing were back on track.  

Some backstory: when I was in elementary school, first and second grade at St. Theodores, within a few feet of the playground fence was the dark door of a cooperage. Lots of smoke, fire and sparks. Clearly magical stuff was going on. The guys would come out for lunch, drenched in sweat, reeking of smoky iron and wood. A couple of us would sit on the swings and, hearing words we had never heard, wondered at what country they were from.  Upon inquiring after our teachers, the nuns had us eat lunch inside for the rest of the school year.  
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Higo Zogan stamp

7/15/2020

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I've been researching this method on/off for over a year. I took a short workshop at Wrought Academy from Jim Austin using the techniques associated with Koftgari which uses a knife blade rather than a chisel. Took a very short workshop from Mitsusuke in Kumamoto, Japan. Finally, I took a Japanese inlay class in Seattle from Momoko in the fall of 2019.  All of these workshops covered little bits here and there, but most of the heavy lifting was done by the instructors. So... I decided to start with the basics and tie all these bits together. 

The first step is making a stamp for the heavier silver and gold that I will need to use for higo zogan. Higo Zogan and Kyo Zogan are Japanese overlay methods for steel, while nunome zogan is overlay for brass.  The techniques are roughly the same, but the tools are different.  I have made most of the tools, but the last challenge was the stamp for the heavier silver or gold.  

I've only tried it on thin copper and silver, but it seems to work very well.  This will be the basic segment of an inlayed aspen leaf.  
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    the Mad tinker

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