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.
