The drums, recycled from industrial use, provide an elegant solution to managing sawdust. In both the turning studio, and machine room, we can make sawdust and shavings at a rapid pace. The translucent drums show the level of their contents, so they can be exchanged as necessary.
The drums will also facilitate the use of sawdust to build the soil on the ESSA campus.
In the photo, they are upside down in order to drain the last bits of soybean oil from inside.
In my home shop, I've returned to making drawers for small five drawer jewelry chests.
We are having real winter weather in Arkansas, of the near normal kind like we had in the past before the effects of global warming became so pronounced. It is easy to fall into a digital coma and forget that there's a real world out there, were it not for the weather to remind us.
A couple years back, I was caught in a local controversy when a major electric utility announced plans to build an extra high voltage powerline 75 feet from my deck. That got my hackles up. I joined with others to stop the powerline. With the assistance of the mainly passive National Park Service and the National Environmental Policy Act and sustained by the pool of outrage that energized our local community, we stopped the unneeded powerline in its tracks. We proved that a few folks with energy can stop corporations from running roughshod on the beauty of the Ozarks. In that case we were up against two major utilities and the full force of the Southwest Power Pool, and came up right.
There is actually an even larger danger to the environment in that human insensitivity to it whittles away at it in very small slices each day.
On my desk, I have a ball that I began carving at our carving club at ESSA last weekend. Going from a square cube to a near perfect sphere is a gradual process. The first cuts are made along lines I have carefully marked. But then the following steps are tiny, tiny, very tiny cuts, that are guided not by sight but by what I feel in my fingers. Where there is the tiniest bump, I apply the knife.
The restoration of the environment is like that. The degradation of the environment is like that also, but in reverse. A huge amount of sensitivity is required is required to prevent the relentless, inadvertent destruction of the gifts of a healthy environment
Where will children (to whom we entrust the future of the planet) gain the necessary sensitivity to it if we do not expose them to it and allow it to educate them in its ways? And yet, we allow our children hours upon hours distracted from reality. Are we preparing them for a future in which their lack of sensitivity will allow corporations to do whatever they want?
Make, fix and create...
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