Crockadiles and Boxes in the Making

RDO today. It had its ups and downs. To start the day I spent 50 minutes on the treadmill and Gaye on the exercise bike watching 'The Plan' from Battlestar Galactic. This was good and bad. The good - a great episode. The bad - it was the last episode. Gaye and I are hoping that the tele-series 'Rome' will take its place as a motivator to exercise.

All this achieved before 9:30am. A quick cup of tea an then off to Miter 10 to see if they were able to do anything for me about replacing the blade guide on my Triton Scroll Saw, which had worn out. And YES, they generously took a guide of a machine on the floor. Cool - this is 'good'. Especially because Triton had gone out of business and were not manufacturing any more.

Feeling especially elated by this act of generosity, I purchased a Rockwell planner/thicknesser, from them.

But before we were off to home to install the P/L, we stopped the surf for a coffee, and pie on the beach. Can't believe the temperature for early May. It was 22 deg. It should be winter.

OK, coffee and pies behind us, off to RipCurl to have my wetsuit replaced on warranty. The seams had given out. But, here was a 'bad', they wouldn't honor their warranty. Jury out as to the next steps here.

Not to get too upset, there was the planer/ thicknesser to get out of the box and set up and start making wood shavings.

More bad - This wasn't to be. Well the set up was, but it would not make wood shavings. A closer inspection revealed that the table was broken. It must have been dropped ( I think in China) because we had earlier noted a score mark on the table as we were removing it from the packing. So here was another 'bad'.

By now it was 4:45pm and we were into the car and back to Miter 10 to see what they could do. Gratefully they refunded our money.

Back home, consoled myself with a bit of sanding to bring out the figure in the Victorian Ash box I was making for Gaye so she would have somewhere to put her tea. his was a good. It has come up really well.

Oh, the crocodile? A lovely piece of Cyprus Pine I had cut down and slabbed 20 years ago in Bacchus Marsh. Never knew it had a crocodile inside. The last pic is the timber before we found the crocodile.

Finally a pic of a bowl I made out of a 7 inch diameter piece of 3/4 inch thick Radiata Pine. Very efficient use of the wood. I like the result.