Coconut Amp

I found one of these online that someone had built. I decided I needed one and got to work. The sound is dirty and raw. It's sings similar to the guitar sludge in Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky." It had a short life though. Soon after it worked, It didn't. I cannibalized the guts to start another project that... never was finished.

Amanda's Bitch'n Bike

I had been talking big about getting a bike for Amanda to learn on for a while. After a few beer fueled conversations with some buddies and some text messages I found the perfect candidate.

A 1971 Honda CB350... In a box.

It took a lot of ice tea, sweat, a little blood and hell of a lot more elbow grease to get it looking like a bike again. There are few things better than wrenching on "old bikes" while listening to The Cult in the summer time.

The stable

And the finished product

I gave her the keys and she kicked it over and rode off. That was the last I saw of her.

I picked up a pile of these gems at the J-Ville community garage sale this summer. I can't believe how much relevant info resides in these pages. Detailed instructions on how to make a mini hot rod boat, DIY speedomoter,etc... Unbelievable. There's even an article about how to preserve food with radiation! Oh the 50's. This is a serious find. Kind of like finding your neighbor's dad's ultimate (and I mean ULTIMATE) stash of Playboys when you were 10. Okay, it wasn't even close to that but it's good.

New life for an old chair!

Amanda found this old dumpy chair on her Mom's front porch in Oakland, OR. It started out as a project her Mom never got around to, then Amanda got her sweet little mitts on it...

We scored 10 pounds of leather scrap from a furniture company on ebay for $20 buck! This was the material we used to reupholster the seat. 2 inch strips were cut out of the best of the bunch and woven to make the seat.

Disassembly, re-gluing all posts/legs, reassembly, sanding and staining, here is the finished product.

Project finished 9/25/09

Table Top V2

The original concrete top just caved on me after 4 years of my boots plopping on it. Time for a new one. This top was made from salvaged redwood we repurposed from a small table. The table was purchased for a very fair price from a 60 year old hippie living in Ashland Oregon. It had about 30 years of stories marked in it that the man had summed up without taking a breath, in about 5 minutes. We couldn't bear to tell him the next day it would be raw lumber. Here's to thirty more years of new stories.

Old trusty started as some steel bar welded, ground and polished. The frame was intended to surround the table top so you could drop whatever solid surface you wanted into it. Construction started in 2005.

On the left is the original concrete table top in the steel frame. On the right is our hippie friends offering.

Did you ever notice how everyone at a party usually ends up hanging out in the kitchen? They're not just for cooking you know. 

After a whole lot of hand sawing, planing and sanding we had the overall shape of it. The final touch was Amanda's staining skills she learned in Japan when she was a child apprentice to Samurai Woodworking masters. She also does a damn good job reading the label on the can.

Project finished 10/14/09