Alan has been hard at work on the front of the oven. He finished the arch, and today fitted the chimney. Look, visible progress! Here is the base plate.
The base plate gets bolted on, then the chimney pillar fits by twisting it into place, and the cap attaches to the top in the same way.
Looks cool, doesn't it?
A bit of heat sealant caulking and we are done.
Next up, to finish the dome. Onwards!
And beasties. Here's a Sticky the Stick Insect, about eight inches from tip to tail. We have had loads of these recently. And Katydids too.
Our cactus is in flower, which is nice. And each flower seems to have an attendant insect of some variety.
These are some of the last wildflowers to bloom during the season. I like the colouring on them.
This is what our gravel patio looks like in the Spring. It gets taken over completely with Bluebonnets. Which is very nice and pretty, but not enormously helpful.
After a few weeks, they all die off, and drop seed pods everywhere so next year we should have even more.
And then it becomes time to reclaim what is ours... it always seems so much bigger once we have all the gravel back!
One grass snake. With the odd tooth-shaped dent in, but no apparent blood. I scooped him up on the end of a stick and he slithered rapidly off into the long grass. If he has any sense, he will stay there.
Meanwhile, The Culprit is now sitting outside wondering where the snake has gone...
Ann Elise is an air racer. She flies this Cessna 182:
I got it into my head to replicate her paint scheme in glass. Here it is cut, and in the kiln ready for fusing.
Next, the fused disc sits on the mould and is ready for slumping.
The finished item.
Here's a picture Ann Elise sent of the dish on her tail.
One of the good things about fused glass is that you can use up all the scrap glass. Just throw it into a project and fuse that sucker! Not like with stained glass, where you end up with boxes of scrap... I need to get good with mosaics, or something.
So I took the scrap that I've accumulated from my class and the recent dishes that I made, and put it into this casting ring.
Proper glass fusing folks will spot the mistake here... I realised at 1230F that there was no barrier between the glass and metal, so if it went up to 1400+ fusing temperatures, this puppy was going to stick like glue to the steel ring, and be a right royal pain to remove, not to mention probably ruining the piece. I aborted the firing, annealed the glass and brought it back down to room temperature. Luckily, it had just got to the tack fusing stage and hadn't stuck too much to the metal; it came out without much hassle. *whew* - lesson learned!
Because it was holding together just fine by itself, I elected to fuse it without the ring (not that I think it would have gone back in anyway). So eight hours later, I had a fused disc.
And two hours (and several geological ice ages) later, I had drilled a hole with my grinder bit... verrrrryy...sloowwly.... which allowed me to turn this into the Scrap Clock you see here!
The hands that came with the mechanism were gold. Not having that; so I painted them black, and the second hand is metallic blue. Because; why not?
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