Grinder Build... Almost There.

I'm going to make this quick since it's 2AM. The grinder frame arrived today and I spent 5 hours assembling it (I took a lot of notes and pictures because I may be rewriting the assembly instructions).  There were a couple of snags, but right now the main issue is that the belt insists on tracking about 1/4" of its width into the motor--- regardless of what I try to move it won't stop. Everything appears to be aligned and squared, so I'm at a loss (and it's been a loooong day). I'm using a 600 grit belt at about 10% speed (roughly 170RPM) so it's not like it's ruining the equipment, but it's damned annoying and it's not even lining up with the contact wheels or platen, to boot so I can't really use it as intended. I'm sure I misread an instruction or something, so I emailed Wayne Coe for assistance/clarification. Fingers are crossed that it's a simple fix.  By the way, this thing is gorgeous and I can't wait to do some work with it.

Tatara smelt April 2011

Local bladesmiths Tom Ferry and Dave Lisch advertised that they would be doing another tatara smelt at the NWBA conference this past April. I had missed their first two attempts at making tamahagane, so I was really excited about being in the right place at the right time to watch the process. There were a lot of hands available for the work, but I was able to help with the chicken-wire frame around the chimney flue blocks. I put about a dozen shots together in my flickr stream and this should embed the slideshow... click to see the individual pics, most of them have an explanation of what's happening.

I'm not dragging my feet on this...

I just got my UPS shipping confirmation this morning that my grinder frame has shipped. It should be here on the 27th, then I expect a few evenings after work for the build proper, and then on to testing.


In the mean time I was moderately successful in not screwing up a dagger when I put it on my current 1x42. After that it was back to draw filing, and a combination of block sanding and my "sandpaper plane" that I made several years ago. When my wife saw my using it she said, "that's my favorite tool that you've made." That was pretty cool.

Real Deal

Well that didn't work very well. Even after jumping through some hoops and emailing the photo from flickr to the blog, it didn't work-- the image didn't post.  So here it is from my flickr stream. . . oh wait! That didn't work either, blogger wouldn't accept the URL that Flickr gave me.  This is from the computer... grrrrrr...

"Moe" Boxes Photo

, a photo by Gowaduv on Flickr.

Finally! I couldn't even grab the URL (or short URL) and paste the picture into the post remotely. The photo in the other entry was uploaded from my machine. Sheesh!