Moved to The Valley Of Silver!

June 17, 2010

Over the last few weeks, my family moved from a Navajo village on the eastern border of Arizona.     I was tired of living there and having to drive 50 miles to anywhere, and my wife wanted to return to family. I had just realized today that whereas Tolkien’s Aulë resides near the Calacyria, a valley [...]

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Finishing Up The Inlayers’ Lathe (OR – Au Reservoir!).

May 6, 2010

Everyone including myself is furiously packing away on evenings and weekends. One of the reasons we have decided to leave, is the weather: While my wife and her sister are finishing administering the school’s quarterly performance tests to all of thier students, and while Little One is counting the days (JUST TWELVE LEFT, DADDY!) toward [...]

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Accessory #3 for the Inlayers’ Lathe: The Splash Guard (with drip feed and drip pan).

April 21, 2010

My wife has that right after the end of the school year, we will be moving back to her hometown, Pinehurst, in the northern Idaho panhandle. She has sent plenty of resumes to various school districts and hopes to get an offer by 1 August. But we won’t be waiting in Eastern Arizona for the [...]

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Accessory #2 for the Inlayers’ Lathe: A Circular Saw Mounted Between Centers

April 21, 2010

I’m so glad that at least a couple people have commented last week asking how close I am to finally slicing. In answer: with this installment of my project, I am a LOT closer now. To slice opal at the thickness that I want, I need an extremely thin diamond saw blade that is mounted [...]

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Accessory #1 for the Inlayers’ Lathe: A Gem Holder

March 31, 2010

Moving right along… Last week when visiting Taig I had brought my Craftsman mini lathe that I had started to retrofit as an inlayers’ lathe since the start of 2010. While showing it to Cliff I noticed that the cross-slide still wobbled some as I turned the crank for the y axis. I fixed the [...]

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My Pilgrimage To Taig Tools!

March 25, 2010

This week is Spring Break for my wife’s teaching job.. and so to celebrate our entire family travelled today to Phoenix, Arizona to fulfill our various desires for things to do in that city. My wife was going for a teachers’ convention, the high point of which was meeting an old idol of hers, Dr. [...]

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Inlayers’ Lathe Retrofit Kit For Sears Craftsman 22106 Wood Lathe is Finished… Batteries Not Included (But The Cat Is Extra!)

March 8, 2010

I know… it has been a while. My only real excuse for not posting sooner is my obsession with getting my jeweler’s lathe retrofit finished. You’ll also notice that I took down the initial pages of my planning and execution of this retrofit. This is because once I assembled my parts together, I realized that [...]

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Interlude: Learning How To Be Perfectly Boring With An Endmill!

February 7, 2010

Hi, all! For the last few weeks I had been putting some effort into machining the additional parts to convert my Sears Craftsman from a wood lathe into a jewelery lathe. I ran into a very bad snag, when I discovered that the pulleys I was going to bolt onto my end support inserts to [...]

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New Years’ Thoughts on Going Forward…

December 15, 2009

Folks, It was only in August of this year that I had resolved to make a serious effort to making jewelry. The good news, is that the results are even now beginning to materialize: 1) I have gained a great deal of confidence in using my Taig CNC to machine diverse types of metals at [...]

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An Essay In Crosses III: Completing My Very First Silversmithed Jewelry (For My Wife’s Christmas).

December 1, 2009

Once the crosses were actually created and finished (see An Essay In Crosses I and II) everything else flowed easily to the conclusion. I didn’t have much established equipment for performing precision drilling work other than the CNC milling machine, fortunately so long as you have the right attachments the CNC can do the job. [...]

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