It was great to get up for a snowshoe to Zimmerman Lake! This is an easy, year-round trail of the Poudre Canyon Highway (Colorado 14). With all the recent snow, the trail was only packed up to the lake. I had fun blazing trail for about 1/2 a mile! Since it was a weekday and the roads were still a bit slick, there weren’t too many others up there. I really enjoyed the quiet of the mountains, and the clear, blue skies.
I had a little 5/4 walnut left over from another project and was looking for a project for the family white elephant gift exchange. Growing up, we always had a maple pig cutting board (I think my mom still has it!). I searched the Internet for some template inspirations then drew this guy out.
Lately I’ve been trying to improve something in my shop every time I work on a project. Having recently installed a dust collection system, I decided it was high time I added a port to my older Enco 18″ band saw (pic to come). What a difference it made! No more fine dust in the air. I’m becoming a dust snob now that I know how well a proper dust collector can work ;).
The finished product came out exactly how I had hoped! I put a couple coats of Howard’s Butcher Block Conditioner on it, wrapped it up, and headed to the party.
Yesterday I did some craigslist shopping to get the pieces and parts needed to add racks to my truck topper. I was going to weld up custom racks but liked the flexibilty of these commercial track systems. The towers and crossbars I found are Thule, but the tracks I found are Yakima. Everything I found online suggested the tracks are identical, but that is not true! The plates used in the Thule system are too thick to nest correctly in the Yakima tracks. Using them like that could lead to serious failure. So, I machined the plates down a little to fit correctly.
This was my first year as a vendor at the Northern Colorado Amateur Radio Hamfest. I did pretty well with 1 table and a bunch of junk! I managed to sell almost everything I brought, and made enough money to fund a kegging system for my homebrew beer endeavors.
I’ve been playing around with old Motorola commercial gear on the amateur bands, and decided to try a cross band repeater. This setup is using 1/each of the VHF and UHF versions. For ID and repeater control, I built an ID-O-Matic IV by hamgadgets.com. The duplexer is a MFJ916B. Antenna is a TRAM-1480 @ 35′ AGL.
Other images of this repeater setup can be found at: mainelife images
My friend Paul let me borrow his 36″ Alaskan sawmill. I purchased a Stihl MS 391 and a 32″ bar to go along with the mill. Yesterday I took this rig up to the Forest to test things out.
With a Stihl ripping chain, I thought the results were OK. Definitely not awesome. I think playing around with the grind angle on the chain will help some. For the most part, I plan to cut beams and build a pergola in my yard. It should work fantastic for that. I was playing around cutting boards just to test the thing out.
http://4wdx.com/
Banjo Hangout