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I’ve spent most of the last two months moving my shop. It was a huge effort and everything (except for a couple of motorcycles I still need to move) is at the new location. Of course the new location is highly disorganized and I need to get power to my machines but the hard work is done and I should be making chips again soon.

The new shop is much cleaner and nicer plus heated! Also, I won’t have other noisy shop neighbors so I can use more actual machine sounds in videos. Often they were playing music and it meant I couldn’t use the audio or I would get dinged for copyright.

Thank you all for your patience as I get all of this taken care of. More content on the way!

Below is a photo of the old shop. Viewers who watched closely might have recognized that my lathe was under where the two horizontal 2x4s are.

From January into the end of May I filmed 6 bloomery smelts at The Crucible in Oakland, California. Iron oxide is extracted from sand and then put into a charcoal burning furnace which has a reduction atmosphere. Here the iron get separated from the oxygen and combines into a bloom – a blob of iron ready for further processing by the blacksmiths. The iron was used in an art piece which will be featured in the next video.

This is the indexable clutch that I built for the Marble Machine X. The stacked washers are just temporary until Martin replaces them with gears in his installation/testing video.

I’ve joined the Engineering Team for the Marble Machine X! Part of the reason I haven’t posted any videos on my channel lately is I’m spending much of my free time in the shop working on this part for Martin. I’m almost done and will be shipping it off to him soon. He’ll post a video installing it and at the same time I’ll post my detailed video of making it.

While I can’t say I can necessarily get interested in what some of these fellows are up to, it does speak to core ideas which I try to convey in my work – appreciation and gratitude.  So many of the technological wonders we encounter every day, even something as simple as flushing a toilet or endless glasses of clean water on tap, are truly amazing even though they are incredibly ordinary.  And that they are ordinary, dull if you will, is a wonderful thing itself.

First of many very high-resolution beautiful photos I”ve found and edited/cleaned up. Click on the title of this post to see them full size.

After learning about Thomas Telford nearly 15 years ago it was a dream of mine to take a narrowboat over his canal.  This summer I finally did it.

This video traces the path from Copernicus through Galileo to Foucault in one of the paths of possibly the greatest revolution that’s ever happened – the Scientific Revolution.