Flight of fancy.

 Its always fantastic in the winter here when you wake up to find the sun breaking through the clouds. For me, if i'm lucky its followed by a phone call saying "lets go flying."

 There is nothing in this world like flying. Whitewater is amazing and surprisingly shares many similarities to flight, for shear take your breath away flying has it.

The whole flight we had a low cloud cover that clung in wisps in some places, cleared in others, and completely covered the ground in some.

It gave way to amazing views and looked like a flowing river at times.

 The low winter sun back lit the mountains making for a spectacular display of contrast.

If you can imagine it, it seamed like floating with islands in the sky.

A place to hang my hat.

Its been a long and rocky start to 2014. I won't bother you with the details lets just say i have  used so much tissue i should buy stock in Kleenex.

When i'm having a rough go of thing i always look around the house and begin to be bugged by the little things. This time around i realized that every chair back in the house had a coat or sweatshirt draped over it. This will not doe i thought so i put some sketches down and came up with this. 

A lot of the furniture i design ends up looking aeronautical. Turns out that this is no exception. As soon as i had my hands on a cedar 4x4 i started working on my coat rocket.

I don't have a band saw so to cut the shape into the body i needed to draw it out, cut and chisel the excess away until i could smooth it down with a plane and spoke shave. 

Once the thing was four sided i set about making the whole thing round. This process is just like making oars round so if you are curious about it you can look here.

 Once i got the thing reasonably round (I wasn't trying to win any competition here). I lopes off the leftover square ends and set about finishing off the top and bottom. I now had to figure out how to attach the legs to the thing.

 I had made the legs out of knotty pine. I cut them out with a jig saw and cleaned them up with a hand plane and a spoke shave. I decided to take a play out of my child hood model building. I never had the patience as a child to glue just one fin on a rocket at a time. I remember my dad and i building a little jig to glue all the fins on at once. So i just scaled the jig up with scrap lumber i had around.

 Out of the jig and getting varnish.

 

The finished product looks great. I don't know what i'll build next but i think there is some lofting in my future if i can just bring myself to focus for long enough.