eanadan

i promised details on the 'cage' i'll be spending a large chunk of my winter in, and i will now deliver, though it's nowhere near as interesting as i make it sound.

the dilemma:

all summer, i've been carving outside, on the patio, directly outside my bedroom. it's a great place to carve with perfect southern exposure. the house i rent a room in has no heated 'workshop' where i could commandeer some space for carving. there's a workshop in the two car garage, but A: there are two cars parked in there all winter; B: all three of the adults in the house are outdoors gear junkies and the garage is pretty well full with our crap; and C: the garage has a heater, but generally isn't heated unless someone's going to be out there working on a car or something for any given amount of time. the house is heated all winter long, no matter what. and it can get pretty damned cold up here in the winter, as you might imagine.

the only obvious, realistic options were, A: stop carving for the winter and concentrate on some other art; B: rent a heat-able small space somewhere in the valley to carve; or C: carve in the house.

carve in the house it is! but carving makes quite a mess, and i'm sure my lessors(i originally put 'rentees' there, but it's apparently not a recognized word, and when it is used, is used to mean someone in my position, ie: a tenant... so 'lessors' it is) wouldn't appreciate wood shavings embedded in my carpet and tracked all through the house. the solution, my 'cage':



ignore the mess on the bed reflected in the mirror. all of that stuff had been neatly arranged where the 'cage' is now. it's a comfortable, roomy 5' x 3', constructed of nylon mesh and 1/4 round trim with a heavy cotton canvas 'floor'. the mesh catches all errant chips and shavings, and there are a lot of them, especially when working on cottonwood bark. the cotton canvas floor is much, much easier to sweep off of than the carpet and still comfortable to walk on.



so there you have it. the bulk of my day today was spent constructing and erecting that, and carving/painting carvings.

corr le cheile

i sat down outside this morning with a strong cup of coffee, actually, it was a coffee mug filled with espresso and brown sugar...., and got to work fixing that pesky divot. that turned into extending the beard to get rid of those little checks in the wood that i didn't want to end up in the face twenty years from now. kim thinks the wood is likely black spruce, which makes sense. so, here it is, again, and again i'm gonna say, i'm done with the carving part of it.





then it was time to get back to the brush work, which is going a little better now. i'm learning just how wet the brush needs to be. it's sort of a fine line between plastering and washing. of the four in the photo below: the 'white' one has had it's base washes, and will be painted in due time. the monster got some more detail but still has a way to go. the devil is nearly done. i just need to 'age' the teeth and get those horns going. the santa on your right is inches from the finish line. needs a bit of flesh in a spot that needed a bit more carving, and some touch up before getting poly'd.



pricing will be fun trying to figure out. i've come a long way from the stuff i was churning out in mexico, but i'm not going to be able to charge what the long time pros do. my skill isn't anywhere close to someone like Maggard or Embrey yet. i think, at first, they'll be close to my prices from mexico...

aistriu.

got out for a shakedown spin on the Semi-Squishy-Shifty-Therefor-Unmanly-Pony, or SSSTUMP for short. it's got a single ring up front and 5 speeds out back, of which only four seem to work, so it's not really a full on multispeed. i like to think of it as a singlespeed that stutters. besides, the easiest gear it has is a 32 x 24... i need to lower the front end. shorten the travel to 100mm probably and maybe throw on a lower rise/longer stem.

as expected, it's significantly faster over the roots and downhill, and more forgiving of error on obstacles with bumpy exits. climbing was noticeably slower, which i'm attributing to the front end being so high. i also need to actually try adjusting the fork. i kinda just took it out of the box and put it on the bike, like one would with a rigid fork, not adjusting anything. i have no idea what the +/- air pressures are. the maxle is incredible though. 40mm more travel than the reba i was running a couple of years ago on the rigorilla, yet it tracks really damned well through the turns. i like it. gordo rims aren't that noticeably heavy, at least compared with halo freedom disc and wtb ddfr's, which i'm running otherwise. stouts at 50psi had more traction everywhere i rode yesterday than they do at 30-40 psi, and roll alot faster. i did notice more bounce out back on the roots though. even i can admit that 50 psi is a wee bit high for a 29er, especially with 35mm wide rims....



sat down and knocked out a couple of carvings today. first female face i've carved in a looong time....

pre-polycrylic in the backyard sun





post-polycrylic in the behind the garage shade

cosuil le fliuch....

polycrylic is awesome. especially on cottonwood bark. really brings out the colors, darkens it up just enough while maintaining the visual depth of the carving....

for size reference the slats on that picnic table are @3.5" wide.

ag obair mo mhear ar an cnamh

lot's of carving today.

codladh samh

le suil amhain oscailte

sabhailte

julie, who is fully in cahoots with the monkee, posted up some photos from the weekends ride/race and post slog activities over on her blog. click it if you would like to see. i'm featured prominently, as is my thinning hair....

a few posts ago i mentioned what might be my worst carving ever. it was bad enough that i wouldn't even post a photo of it. it basically ended up looking like this guy dressed up as an old wizard for halloween. well, i've finally gotten to attempting to salvage it. the first step in doing so was to break the thing in half over my knee.

here it is in all it's former lack of glory.



i'm really not sure what i was thinking when i made the left arm about half the length of the right one. and i swear there was no beer involved.

i liked the hat, and the face was salvageable enough, to that was a start. the upper half became this:



and the lower half is a raven in progress. just need to do some research on ravens first.



don't hold me to the raven part actually. it'll be a bird, most likely a raven, but that could change i suppose.

i had been scouring the interwebs for a shepherd's hook diamond riffler file, since i hadn't been able to find the one i was using while carving in mexico. it was the most useful file in the bunch for the type of finishing i was doing. i've purchased two different riffler file sets since and none of the shapes included fit everything that the shepherd's hook would. well, i finally located it, along with the rest of the original set, and a handful of very useful gouge shapes. i had it the whole time, it was in the far back corner of the box i never open. of course.

agus glan anois

cleaned em up and added a few features last night after that last post.

it's raining now and amazingly, i have the motivation to ride. i'm gonna go play around at crev mo i think.


edit: ok, now it's raining harder. think i might be losing that motivation.....





and another made today.



riding will commence tomorrow....

an beatha simpli.

eat, relax, waste time on the internet, carve, eat, drink, carve. only thing missing is riding. i got notivation.

not yet finished.

adhmad aris.

rode today, on the karate monkey. having some flexing issues with the back end. i don't think it enjoyed all that bending and hammering to fit the 26 x 3 and 70mm rims as much as i did. good thing the 'other' is nearing completion. one glitch i've run into with the 'other' is that rock shox has decided to go post mount on their 29" forks this year. at least the 20mm axle one anyway. unfortunately, half of the 20mm hubs on the market are 'out of their spec range'. which means that the hope moto v2 caliper hits the friggen spokes when mounted straight to the posts and slammed all the way left. i have a 183 adapter en route in the hopes that it'll cure my woes. according to a thread on the ultimate waste of a mtbers time, it's happening to nearly everyone stupid enough to purchase that fork. i should have known better than to trust a company starting with the letter 's'. other than surly. and speedway. so, starting with the letter 's' and containing the letter 'm'. the ride was a brief one at crev-mo. it was enjoyable, i played around a bit, and walked the steeper hills because im a disgusting blob.



got home and actually did some carving. i've been doing it sporadically ever since mexico. i guess maybe sparsely would be more accurate. but alot more since i moved up here and discovered cottonwood bark, which carves like butta and is in massive abundance. the typical stuff i've always been doing, santas and woodspirits. santas because my mom likes them and woodspirits because everyone likes them wether they admit it publicly or not. what's not to like about a crazy old man with an epic beard painstakingly carved into a piece of wood?

here's a preview. most will be getting some sort of paint. the cottonwood bark actually needs paint to tone down the excessive grain, which drowns out features of the carvings unless side lit.



this one is today's


blurry