Time to Tinker

Over the last few days, Jess and I have stepped away from work on Velda, our Wonderbus and future home, and have returned to our love of making toys. Colorful bears are multiplying in the living room while dragons breed in the garage, but diving into tinkering is not without its learning experiences.

Although she's sewn dozens of bears out of her quilt scraps, it's been a while since Jess has assembled a teddy...so in her first attempt Wednesday, she fabricated three left arms before a right. That hiccup passed, and she brought a beautiful little pastel-flower bear into being yesterday, with one right and one left arm, and a matching set of legs. Its ears are cushy-soft micro-pillows that beg to be squished, and I envy whoever gets to lay their head on this teddy.*

I spent most of Wednesday learning about my new (almost) all-in-one tool, a Shop Smith Mark V. Especially how to adjust the band saw so that it wouldn't throw the band off and/or break it. Cutting the “blanks” (the rough-draft toy: no sanding, no holes, just the basic shape) for two new dragon toys took almost all day. For comparison, in the past I've managed to cut them out in about 20 minutes each with my jig saw, although the cuts aren't as clean and the tight corners aren't as tight as they are with the band saw. My DeWalt cordless jig saw can only cut approximately one-and-a-quarter toy blanks from 3/4” wood on one battery charge, so it just isn't a practical tool for the entire process. Be that as it may, I learned a lot about my Shop Smith, and got a lot of experience replacing and adjusting the band saw blade.

Thursday, I sanded. Which is in and of itself a simple process: apply friction, remove unwanted material. Of course, when you're dealing with tiny little crevices and trying to remove any possibility of splinters or roughness, things get...complicated. Let's just say that I've been struggling with figuring out what tools will best accomplish my goal of sanding nooks and crannies, and although I haven't had a stroke of inspiration which panned out yet, I've had lots of ideas and have attempted to make most of them work. With the result that I hand-sand the crevices and hard-to-reach bits with custom-folded/wadded/twisted sandpaper. Keeping it Old School. Sandpaper, fingers, elbow grease. (An aside: although I heard the term many times as a youth, it wasn't until late in middle school that I realized that “elbow grease” wasn't something you bought at a hardware store, but a metaphor).

After setting aside several mastadons and panthers which involved unforeseen complications in design, I finished six dragons, each of which had evolved from its own piece of wood in a different way, even though I'd only used two templates for their body types. Each sanded at least three times, with the final round by hand (everywhere, crevices or no). With the toys ready for oiling and wheels, I did my obligatory round of quality control:

Now, I'm not going to mimic a two-year-old and throw my toys across the room or jump up and down on them, but I do expect my product to meet a reasonable level of durability requirements, so slapping them together to get the dust off is a perfectly acceptable way for me to break my own toys. And break my toys I did. Every. Single. One.

In retrospect, I may be asking more of my toys than is reasonable. I gave a prototype to my three-year-old godson in August, and he still hasn't broken it (although his younger brother broke another toy within about two minutes of receiving it, hence the “mastadons aren't ready yet” situation). But no, I thought that a 185-lb 38-year-old slamming toys together would be an appropriate test of the forces that a child might exert on them, and broke every last one of them. The little wings and twisted tails which gave the dragons a taste of whimsy all gave flight, leaving shards and stumps where their fragile grandeur had once been.

So Friday (today, by the time I post this), I'll spend the day re-designing my flock and getting ready to send it out into The Holidays. The good news is, I've learned something new this week. Lots of new things, actually. Many of them have to do with the structural integrity of wood along its grain line. Adjusting my process and checking for weak points before final sanding is another lesson which will come in handy in the future. Humility and Patience were in there too, and Humor was chortling from the sidelines all day long as I struggled to sand the detailed curves of tail and wing, all destined to fly off in their own directions and all, ultimately, to the scrap bin.

Between Jess' extra bear arms and my extraneous wings and tails, it's looking a little like an abattoir around here. But it's also looking like a wonderful menagerie of wood and fabric: rotund little bears; scraps of quilts bursting in color; the scent of cedar, pine, hemlock; dragons, mastadons, and panthers vying for completion amid piles of wooden wheels ready to trundle them into the world.

Strong wings and fierce cuddles, my friends.

*I have used special (i.e. $$$) ergonomic/chiropractic pillows for neck support for over twenty years, and have trouble finding a pillow that can support my neck and head appropriately in both side- and back-sleeping positions. I have used the (very squished) bear below as a pillow for the last year, and have never had a pillow provide such fantastic neck support. Notably, he's also stood up to weekly machine washings and dryings without complaint – or pulled stitches.