Mornings!

I love early mornings, bright sun, quiet except for birds in the trees. A hot pot of coffee and a smile on my face. Saturday was raining, but Sunday was bright and sunny...as was my mood.

After I drank all the caffeine I could manage it was time to test fit the pantry.

Everything fit like a glove. The guide strip on the top took a little patience.  Now here is the rub. If you look at the bottom of the pantry take a look at what you don't see. You don't see the drawer slides. Under the bottom drawer I have a center column with the slides mounted to be hidden. 

Awesome! 

Great!

Just the way I wanted it to look! But I created a huge issue. In order to mount the slide column I need it be inside the cabinet. I cannot remove the slides from the pantry. So The solution is to get in behind the pantry.

 

 Through the side wall under the galley counter.

The only complicating factor to this is that my old man knee is causing me grief, so a simple task is harder than it needed to be. And yet somehow with such a simple task I still manged to draw blood.

And now you can see why, I need to be inside and behind.

Now that the pantry is in place it's time to set the wheels in motion on the latch. I felt i needed something a little more beefy that the locking drawer pulls used for all the other cabinets. Luckily I have been contemplating all of this over the last few months as I peruse Amazon. So what we have here is a old fashioned slam latch I had intended to use in the bathroom of the bus....(that didn't quite work out) and a flush mount door pull for a marine application, which I just knew I would need some day. The trouble is....they were not meant for eachother. I had a round peg and a square hole.

But with a little patience, ingenuity, stubbornness and naivete. I made it work.

Now I've got all the pieces, lets see if I can put them all together!

Come to fruition

 What to do what to do......life is tough when the world is your oyster. Some may say that living in the country you limit your access to various things. I disagree. Perhaps in a rural school you don't have enough bodies to do a huge number of  non mainstream sports and arts programs. I will grant you that. But in a rural school you do have all the mainstream sports and arts programs, with the added benefit that if at 16 you want to start a sport (with perhaps the exception of hockey) they welcome you with open arms. Especially if you are athletic and driven.

 Jeff loves Volleyball, but he has always longed for the opportunity to channel his inner beast.Volleyball, although requiring its own set of tremendous athletics, is a game that requires a very strong mental game and not much latitude on the allowance of celebration and physicality. More specifically you can celebrate but when you do, you cannot look at your opponent, no (official) talking to the opponent, no touching your opponent.

 So to say it was a departure is an understatement but not a surprise to me. It was much to the chagrin of his mother of course....that Jeff REALLY wanted to play Rugby.  Being from a rural school this means he has the opportunity. It's everything Volleyball is not. Running, tackling, verbal, and physical with your opponent. And not to my surprise...Jeff is excelling at it and loves playing. And I will gladly stand in the rain and cold windy weather to watch the smile on his face at the end of a game. Just like Anna and her dance, the look of satisfaction and contentment in who they are and what they are doing is worth every moment as a parent.

 But not every day is spent watching the kids and their endeavors. There come days where there is nothing on the docket. No lawn to mow, no wood to split, no dishes to do(cause I did them already). So I get to brew a pot of coffee, turn on classical music and play in my work shop, made only better when it's cold and raining outside cause that removes guilt as well!

On today's wish list is the pull out pantry. I have in my mind what I want  after researching pre-made pull out pantry designs from companies like Richelieu. I decided that for a fraction of the cost....but perhaps a significant more amount of time, I could make my own. Using 5/8" Baltic birch plywood I constructed the overall skeleton or framework.














Then moving to a 1/2" Birch ply, I made a couple of movable shelves with a sturdy shelf base rebated into the sides and end.

The test fit was trial by error. Meaning , where I put the shelves was decide by the arm load of groceries I stole from the house to see what room we needed. Cereal, Kraft dinner, spaghetti sauce, peanut butter....you know the basics!After a coat or two of tung oil things are looking pretty good.

 And they are moving just the way they should. The good news is my vision of the pantry seems to have come to fruition, but because of my unconventional design the heavy duty slides pose a problem at the final install stage of the install....but I have a plan. Fingers crossed!

"Mudder Trucker!"

 At the end of January this year, I made my annual trip to central America to do some volunteer work with Dentistry For All in Guatemala. Once again, my hats off to the organizers of the trip for there is a tremendous amount of administration and logistical work to be done in order for a trip of this magnitude to be successful. Below is a picture of the entire team at what we call the cross over. Basically where week one individuals and week two individuals share the same place at the same time while one team comes in and the second team finishes up. It ends up being 24 hours of a lot of bodies, but the photo gives you an idea of how many people are involved on the front lines.

 In particular I want to point out Cody and Kari, who got engaged on the trip(yay!). Cody is a rancher from the Water valley area north of Cochrane who, as his hobby (like hes not busy enough),builds and races what I can only describe as "mudder" trucks

 May long weekend, a handful of us from the spring DFA trip decided to meet up, go camping, and watch MUDAPALOOZA the qualifying event on his ranch for the weekend.

 And what a weekend it was, some pretty impressive engineering that goes into these beasts.

 And the drivers are constantly pushing the limits to try and win.....

sometimes they push a little too far

 And now the tie in...I of course took Fillmore camping. When I got to the ranch and parked I saw that I had a wee coolant leak from my mid station heater core. Being that I was on my own in the bus for most of the weekend (jeff did join me on the last night) I decided to take apart the core to see where the leak was.

 Try as I might I still wasn't 100% sure if it was coming from a hole in the core or one of the hoses. But it was a slow leak....so I decided to put it in a tub for the ride home. Full pictorial disclosure, I didn't have the where withal to take a picture at the time of the incident. The previous two pictures are after we got home and I had disconnected the hoses. So, where was I??....
monday morning we pack up and it was time to head home. I was first one out of the gates and left the ranch. About 5-10 kms down the road I pull over to wait for Jeff (in his car) and my buddy Brad and his contingent as they are pulling a big trailer. As I wait I get up to make sure everything is in its place. As I turn to the back I see that the tub I used to hold the heater with the slow leak is FRICKEN FULL and slopping over onto the floor! My slow leak turned into Niagara Falls !! I shut everything down, raced to the engine room and shut the cheater core circulation valves off. (Why I didn't do that when I found the leak in the first place is beyond me). Luckily I travel with some extra fluids and we topped up the coolant.

 Also lucky for me, I have a spare heater core sitting in the garage at home(don't ask, its a long story). Being that the other one was submerged in coolant....I'm not sure how well the electric motor will 'dry out'. With a little help from my progeny the new core fits beautifully in the original spot!

 Next project on the docket....Pantry!

beauty is only skin deep

OK, so I finally got the material I needed from 3fab manufacturing, and by that I mean sheets of 20 gauge brushed aluminum panels. I traced,modified,and cut the panels before finally used a very sophisticated template for rivet location.

I was worried that I needed to pre-bend the panels on two planes to make them adapt properly. That was always my biggest progression stumbling block.

But, I threw caution to the wind, and decided to let fate take control. If it works,  then it works and I look like a chump for over thinking things and letting years pass by before taking the leap. If it doesn't.....then its a costly dumb-ass mistake. So pretty much a win-win which ever way it turns out....right?

OMG it worked!!

I mean....of course it worked, I knew it all along!

As I sat there drinking a celebratory beer and getting a muscle cramp from reaching so far to pat myself on the back....I saw a big mistake....






















The drivers side is supposed to have a dome light, stationed above the driver. You know to read a map....which are now on phones and have back lit screens but, sometimes you need a light to find your bag of Doritos! Anyway, in my excited haste once I realized the panels were going to work, I riveted the drivers side panle in before cutting the hole for the dome light. Luckily by removing the MDF backing box for the speaker and squishing my hand into a place only a mouse could squeeze into. I was able to retrieve the dome light, then using a pneumatic reciprocating saw , cut an install hole, and boom!...

Then there was light! I was so lucky to get this done....I had nightmares of drilling out 40 rivets!

In the end, things look great!

Next on my adventure is the pull out pantry!

Roof Over My Head

Have you ever driven somewhere, only to get to your destination, throw the car into park and think..."How the hell did I get here?" It's not that you are asleep at the well, but rather the scenery is the same day in day out, and after a while you grow so accustomed to it that you forget that its even there. This is the scene on my daily drive home. Stunning when you see it here, but I must admit that I drive this every day and there have gotten to be more days than not that I don't see the world around me. I've (sadly) grown accustomed to it

The same could be said for the entry into the bus. When Randy and I skinned the interior roof, I was having issues getting a satisfactory adaptation of the panels in the front of the bus. So I did what any good bus guy would do....I put it to the side and said..."I'll let that simmer and get back to it!"

As recent as last summer at the The Grey Owl golf tournament Shawn and I sat in Fillmore and brain stormed different finishing techniques for the roof. Shawn's idea was to have smaller "slats" for lack of a better term      

But after I installed a few I decided to abort. I really didn't like how it looked and figuring out the tapering angles was driving me mad.

Even with making a fancy jig.....it really didn't work.

I had kept the original panels from when I tore everything out in 2009

With some slight modifications, add here and there. I might be able to recreate the panels in a different material

Wiggle Wood!

This stuff is awesome, easy to work with and lite as a feather. I was sold......until Shawn put doubt in my mind.....doubt, or you could call it encouragement to continue on with my train of thought. But to do that I needed more (different ) material. Which I ordered from 3 Fab

 

In the meantime I decided to layer in insulation. Two layers of reflectix foil/bubble insulation sandwiching a layer of Aspen Areogel

The result was great, clean and contained. I had a layer of automotive 'jute', then this bubble wrap, then hard foam insulation