Pregled posta

Marketing

I had to twist about 30 half inch bars for a railing. I was thinking about how to do it in the lathe without overheating anything important but the whole time I had this nagging feeling that I owned some thing lathe-like that would be far superior. This morning as I was getting started on the tooling I remembered that there was a pipe-threader tucked away in the storage room. Perfect! It has more torque, slower speeds, and a big through hole so I can put a piece of pipe in as a heat shield.

I spent the several hours digging it out and cleaning it up. It is a nice old machine but I would not be surprised to hear it hadn't been used in 25 years. I cut a couple of pieces of pipe for my fixture and it works fine. There is a box of dies with it that includes machine threads as well as pipe dies, so I am set for anything up to 2-1/2 inches.

I spent another couple of hours making a really cool clamping fixture to hold one end of the half inch square bar. I was almost done with the socket to go into the machine itself when I saw the problem. These machines are set up so that any length of pipe can be fed in from the back but pipe threading rarely requires more than a couple of inches of movement. The longest twist that I am gonna be able to make with that machine will be 6" long. The one change that the client had asked for from the drawing was a longer twist.

If I had started twisting this morning I probably would have been finished already.

The good news is that I own a nice pipe threader. Maybe in the future I will mount it to another table so that I can use it as a twisting machine. Someday when I get some of this time stuff I have been hearing about.

Spoiler alert - more on the shrine for tiaragoth! Don't look if you don't want to see it yet!

I tried painting the clock base flat black --- and suddenly it was WAY too much like a tombstone. That wasn't really what I wanted to relay as the character of Death in the Sandman series really isn't totally depressing. I needed to I to give the shrine more depth, so I first tried more painting and some stamping. Violet and dark blue acrylic added to the black -- now it's more like a night sky. Then I added silver stamping to highlight that night-time look. But now the accents seemed too "shiny" and nice...so I tried to bring down the tone with a coat of matte Royal Coat decoupage sealer. The swirls and stamping started to smear...oh no! Really, I shouldn't have worried...with the less distinct stamping (you don't see that here) the look is much more in keeping with the art in the Sandman graphic novels!

The piece you will see in Shrine 103 reflects the smeary look...which I am actually quite happy about!

I antiqued the little table by painting it black and rubbing the paint off. Then added silver highlights and rubbed those down, too.

I used chipboard to make a name plate for Death, using some gold stick-on letters. These seemed to bright, so I dabbed them with silver.

The star stickers, silver marker, crystal glitter & Diamond Glaze don't get added until the shots in Shrine 103.