Aside from celebrating Rubyspam’s engagement, there was nothing too exciting yesterday, though I did order some plasma cutter consumable parts, which is interesting because until I joined TechShop, I didn’t know what a plasma cutter was.  I’ve also got a carbide router bit on the way for the ShopBot CNC wood router.

On the construction front, I drilled a hole in the pipe piece to mount the magnifying glass part.  I think in the end it looks fairly elegant.  Now I need to have a mount for what it’s focusing on.   My concern is it will look too busy no matter what I do.

Otherwise, I painted/stained and attached the backing cradles to pieces. One advantage of this blocking is that I can use it to attach the magnifying glass bracket so that the whole piece is a single object, as opposed to a having magnifying glass separately mounted.

On the one above, I tried outlining the letters in black, but it looked cheesy.

For the stained ones, I’ll need to sand them and reapply.  Where there were glue spots, the stain didn’t bind.  I needed to sand the edges anyway to make the sides uniform, so no no big deal.  That I’ll do at TechShop where they have a nice belt sander.

I also mastered a technique for making the blocks that doesn’t require corner clamps (The clamps I use, thanks to Scott, don’t work for small pieces).  What I do is apply glue to joint edges, press all 4 pieces together to form a rectangle.  Then, holding a corner tightly, I staple them on top. I repeat stapling all 4 corners.  Then I flip over and repeat. Once the glue dries, I remove the staples on top and glue on the top piece and clamp in it place or put something heavy on it.