Wine Bottles

     I work at a locally owned wine and cheese shop downtown on Main Street. One of the never ending debates revolves around what to do with all our waste. If the owner had his way, it would all go in our green dumpster in the alley. Since I have been working there, I take the glass bottles and extra cardboard across the river to the recycling center. With our new wine bar and wine tasting room, we go through a lot more wine that we used to...probably about 4 times as much as before. Right now my truck is full of empty wine bottles and today I wanted to figure out a way to reuse some of them.
     A few months ago, I bought a glass cutter off the internet. I used it to score a line all the way around the bottle. Then I dunked the bottle alternating between a pot of boiling water and a pot of iced water.

Final product after sanding the cut edges with glass sandpaper.

   These turned out the best out of the ten bottles that I tried. The top edge isn't perfectly straight on all of them because of the way the glass separated. I kind of like it that way. 

   With the top neck section, I used some old keys and a piece of driftwood I picked up on Thanksgiving on Lake Erie in Cleveland to make a wind chime. 

The Lake

There's no where better to be than on the water. There's something about it that's really calming and exciting at the same time. I have grown up going to "the lake" every summer and have been waterskiing and tubing ever since I can remember.

Raccoon Lake. Indiana.

I took my cousin's moped down a gravel road a few miles from the lake house. 

There was an Amish family sitting on their porch down the gravel road. I asked if  I could take some pictures of their sheep, which was tied to a tree.

This was before I got my trailer. The trailer will make it MUCH easier to get in and out of the water.
All loaded up and trying to head back from the lake into reality.

The past two summers I have worked as a waterski specialist at a summer camp in the endless mountain region of eastern Pennsylvania (almost in New York). It's an awesome job. I love the kids, love the other counselors, and love what I do. The summer of 2010 at camp is where I learned how to sail. I made friends with Ben who was the sailing specialist. He's from France and has been sailing for many years. The lake at camp is the perfect place to learn any kind of water sport because it's completely privately owned by the camp so no one else is allowed on it.

Callum (Oxford), me, and Ben (France) in Hermosa Beach, CA. Ben taught me how to sail.

Boating and Waterski Staff 2011

Waterski Staff 2010

        I love the lake, but any body of water will do. My first boat was a kayak. Kayaking is a lot easier to do on a whim. My aunt's friend lives on the Wildcat creek here in town so I usually start up stream from his house and end when I see his property. Kayaking the creek is almost like a free roller coaster where you get to control your car. When I was in Yosemite, I remember reading a side by side comparison of National Parks vs. Amusement parks. It compared various things such as price, adventure, environment, value, etc. It really made me think about how much more fun you can have basically for free out in nature. 

A few years ago, managed and lived at a campground which was across Sugar Creek from a canoe and kayak livery. On my days off I could throw my kayak on the trailer and hitch a ride upstream with the livery van and kayak back to the campground. I saw my first bald eagle while kayaking on Sugar Creek.

Bear and my kayak downstairs at the camp store. I lived in the room above the store.
  

The rock bluff and Sugar Creek from the banks of the Canyon Campground

A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.  ~William Wordsworth 

   

     

     

Flea Market Cypress

     I like to randomly browse flea markets, it's something to keep me busy when I have nothing else to do and I always seem to find something interesting and unexpected. A few months ago I was in a local flea market that I usually don't go to, but decided I would since I was on that side of town. I ended up bringing home a 4-5" thick piece of rough chainsaw-cut cypress trunk. It had an awesome shape and I didn't really know what I was going to do with it, but at $15 I couldn't pass it up. I know the guy who works there through a previous job, I took the piece of wood up to pay him for it and it turns out that he knew the girl who's booth it came from. She was cleaning out an old barn that she recently inherited and the cypress was just laying there in a pile of dirt. Fortunately for me, she didn't have a use for it.
     So I took the wood home and started to sand it. After sanding and sanding and more sanding, I finally came up with a nice smooth surface and uncovered the natural wood grain. I loved it so much that I decided I had to go back to the flea market and buy the other smaller piece that I had seen before but didn't purchase. When I went back, my friend was working again. I asked him if he could give the girl with the cypress booth a call and see if she had anymore wood that I could buy from her. Unfortunately she just had two pieces, the larger one that I had already bought and the smaller one which was luckily still in her booth. So I bought the smaller piece and took it home to sand even more.
     I finally got to a point where both section cuts of cypress were both sanded until they were silky smooth...

          At this point I had some decisions to make. I knew I wanted to use them as a table top, but I didn't know if I should make two tables or stack them together into one table and which way would look best to stack them. After much deliberation and mind changing, I decided I would stack the cypress with the smaller piece on the bottom. I wanted to cover up the crack on the small piece and it just looked better with the big piece on top. So I laid them out how I wanted them and traced the outline of the small one onto the bottom of the big one. With both pieces upside down I applied wood glue to both sides, using small L brackets and multiple wood screws I lined the pieces back up and screwed it all together.
   To add a glossy, wear-resistant finish I used about 8 coats of polyurethane and lacquer, letting it dry between coats.
   Finally, I had to decide what to use for legs. I initially really wanted to use nice thick copper piping but after checking prices I decided against that. I kept going back and forth between different ideas (stump, branches, salvages table legs, etc.) but couldn't come up with anything I really liked. In the meantime at work, we were opening a new wine bar and wine tasting room and had an old copper bar top with 4 copper legs donated by a neighboring businessman. As it turned out, we didn't have a use for the copper pipe legs and since I had been doing a lot of the work on the new restaurant, my boss gave me all the extra copper (about 12' of 3" diameter copper pipe, 4 flanges, scrap flashing, and threading for the pipe)! Coincidence I guess, but I always seem to get lucky somehow...I'm not complaining. I cut down some of the piping to make 3 short legs and used the threaded flanges to attach the pipe to the bottom.
    This project in all cost me $25 (cost of the wood) and a few bucks to buy some extra sand paper. I already had everything else I needed in the garage. Another success!

Puffer: Wood parts

One of the first projects I undertook when I bought my sailboat was to refinish all the wood parts. I think I chose to work on the wood first because it's familiar to me. Most projects I have completed have been wood-based. Anyways, I started by removing all of the metal hardware and taking all of the wood parts apart. In order to get back down to the bare mahogany, I used a paint/epoxy remover to make sure I got all the original clear coat off. The next step was to sand everything starting with a 60 grit paper all the way down to a 220 grit to make sure it had a nice smooth finish. I used my random orbital sander for most of the sanding. When I got down to the bare wood with all the stains sanded away, I wiped everything down with a microfiber cloth to remove all of the dirt and dust. I used about 4 or 5 coats of spar varnish (a marine grade finish) from the local hardware store to finish and seal everything off. I chose a high gloss finish, but that's just personal preference.

 Finished daggerboard^

 Finished rudder...

 I wish I had more "before" photos to compare the finished product to, but I think that the one above is the only one I have where you can see the rudder how it was when I bought it.

 The thwart seat is there for a couple reasons: 1) to give additional support to the daggerboard trunk so it doesn't sway from side to side, 2) to sit on when using the puffer as a rowboat (it has oarlocks on the top edge, barely visible above the round hole in the photo). As you can see above, the original thwart was totally rotted out so I had to build a new one. I used birch plywood and drew everything out on the board with a square before making any cuts. I finished it the same way as the rest of the wood.

Puffer

     I bought my first sailboat in October of last year(2011) and have been restoring it ever since. It's a 13' AMF Alcort Puffer, from my research, I'm pretty sure that mine was one of the first ones off the line built in 1972 or early '73. So far I have refinished all the wood pieces, built a new thwart seat, began fiberglass repair, bought and repaired a trailer, and there's still more to do before sailing season!
     The photo above was taken on the first day I had the boat. I loaded it into the bed of my F-150 and headed straight for Cecil M. Harden Reservoir, more commonly known as Raccoon Lake. It was an awesome 80 degree fall day in Southern Indiana. Breezy Monday, clear lake, shining sun, perfection.