Saturday, January 18, 2025

Slide of the Month Extra: Philmont French Henry Ore Cart



 
January 2025

Time to make: 3 hours

Finishing: 1.5 hour


Original design:  Philmont/Bill Macfarlane








Back in May of 2022, I had done a slide for French Henry with a gold mining pan based on the Philmont patch. Well didn't Philmont come out with another patch to make me scratch my head and think "how am I going to make that one?".  I worked a lot of ideas in my head some of which included some old HO train track from when I was younger. But the whole thought of both bringing this to a 3D reality while keeping the perspective was baffling me. I drew it out on paper - no good. Tried modeling programs - no good. Finally I just took a piece of basswood and started carving.

The cart is all one carving and somehow I kept it all together without having to resort to making several pieces and gluing them together. (The only exceptions are the dirt, which is some tile floor grout I had around, the pebbles painted gold from my back yard, and the pickax I carved.) I was quite pleased with the basic ore cart and was getting ready to carve the frame the hopper would pivot on when a thought came to mind. What if I used the space between the cart ends and the hopper to hold the neckerchief?
To finish this off I painted each element (except the grout) with hobby paints, labeled the lettering with water slide paper, and gave the slide a couple coats of poly. 

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Slide of the Month: Abacus


  January 2025

 Time to make: 3 hours

  Finishing: 1 hour
 
  Original design:  Tell & Don Gubler










It is said that the Babylonian's created the abacus as one of the earliest methods of counting and calculations before written numbers. Though I can do simple addition and subtraction, apparently multiplication, division, square and cube roots can also be done on an 
abacus. The Roman abacus could even do simple fractions (ie. 1/4, 1/2,  and 1/12). I guess I'll stick to binary because after all "there are 10 kinds of people in the world who know binary".

This slide looked so simple to make...It ended up taking a lot of painstaking work.

Made from some scrap black walnut, the first task I had was to make a simple frame. Not as easy as it seems because the angle had to be nearly perfect. Next I needed to cut slots in the top and bottom for the wood on the inside and these had to line up just right. Gluing was another challenge since I did not have clamps small enough to hole the pieces in place at a right angle. The rods were drilled in place using quilting pins and as the pin penetrated the wood, I added the beads. Once the pins had come through the far side, I clipped the pins off with wire cutters. Using a fine metal file, I filed the pins flush with the wood. Butcher's wax was used to finish the slide off.