Adventures of an Imperfect Man In Search of a Handmade Life
Still gathering old images of tools, occupations, and craftsmen. Now I just need time to edit and post them in a sensible way. To kick off this series, it’s a wood turner and his lathe from the early 15th century (German). I think the artist may have neglected to show the tool rest here.
This one goes out to Kiko, Mick, and Veloja for their recent enthusiasm for the foot-powered lathe.
What a nice little setup found while searching images on my computer. Maybe from Lost Arts Press?
Bridgette and I worked on some willow basketry last week at the Echoes in Time gathering in Champoeg, Oregon. We spent the week with our friend Mick and his family with his fantastic vardo.
I have wanted a new pack basket for quite a while and the great Oregon basketmakers provided some excellent materials for the class. I only had eight students for the frame-saw class I was teaching so I was able to work in some baskets around the teaching schedule. I would have loved to document the whole process but I am such a novice that it would have taken three times as long and disrupted the flow of the basket in ways I wasn’t prepared to deal with.
Here is the first round of basket making including the base, addition of spokes, and working with weavers. The various colors come from the different willows harvested at different times. For those truly interested in the weave, this basket consists primarily of wales and rands with the addition of a rim and a foot to protect the bottom.
I’ve made a few other basketry projects under good instructors but this is, by far, my biggest effort to date. I really hope to dive into this craft more deeply sometime in the future. Enough for now, back to Making stuff (right after my nap).
Found on Pinterest:
Hmm. I like. Our Sloths are quite a mystery to me.
Eremotherium laurillardi, a species of giant ground sloth, apparently was abundant along the Georgia coast during the Sangamonian Interglacial (~132,000 BP-~118,000 BP). Fossils of this species have been found at 7 of the 9 known coastal fossil sites of Pleistocene Age. It was really a spectacular beast growing as large as 18 feet long and weighing 6000 pounds. When it sat on its haunches, it was even taller than a mammoth. It disappeared from the state when the climate turned colder, probably some time between ~75,000 BP-~30,000 BP. The fossil record is too incomplete to determine exactly when this species succombed to the cold in this region. Eremotherium continued to exist in South America until the end of the Pleistocene. Two other species of ground sloths were better adapted to the cold and likely lived in Georgia as recently as 11,000 BP. Jefferson’s ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) and Harlan’s…
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Love it. What a cool design.
The French inventor, Loubet, who holds a record number of patents on practical sporting and traveling equipment, has recently demonstrated the latest of his constructions for the benefit of people who like to travel and take their homes with them.
Built along airplane construction principles, on the chassis of a light auto truck, the frame is very light, containing thousands of small pieces of wood glued and nailed together, then covered with panelling, canvas and paint. The home is streamlined and houses four persons easily with all accommodations. The car is 24 feet long and weighs about 3,500 lbs. At the top of the page is a general view of the car home; on its top is a canoe (full size), which is easily removed for use.
The photo at the left of the page was taken from the kitchen; in the center, where the men are sitting, are two…
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If Ettore Bugatti had been diverted away from car design and into motorcycles this is almost certainly what he would have built. This remarkable art deco motorcycle was designed and built by master bike builder Arlen Ness, surprisingly there isn’t much information available on this jaw-dropping two-wheeler, the Arlen Ness website is down and emails to the company have gone unanswered, Wikipedia hasn’t been much help and Google throws up relatively useless links when searching for “Arlen Ness Smoothness” and other variations thereof.
What we do know is that Arlen Ness is currently based in Dublin, California and they have a bike museum featuring 40+ bikes, including the Smoothness and a number of other remarkable customs including a jet-powered bike creatively named “Mach Ness”. Arlen and his son also appeared on an episode of “The Great Biker Build Off” in 2004, a competition which is son Cory went on to…
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Preindustrial Craftsmanship 