Photography

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Panoramic Image of Woods and 3 Driveways

Using the Motorola Droid X, I took about 10 photographs at 5MP, freehand.  Then I used Hugin, the open source image stitching software.

I had never stitched images together, but I must say this tool is impressive.  The images were all various shades, angles, and since taken freehand, not straight.

However, see the result below…

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Simondale Excavating from Warriors Mark, PA

Simondale Excavating is doing an excellent job of leveling some ground on a hillside.  If you need any excavation work in the Altoona/Tyrone/Huntingdon/State College area (or nearby), do not hesitate to call Jim or Matt at (814) 632-8590.

Upon meeting Jim Simondale and Matt Simondale, I was very impressed by their knowledge, demeanor, and interest in my project.  I met with them 3 times on site prior to starting this project, and every detail has been covered as discussed.

This may seem like a small thing, but I appreciated that all of their equipment (trucks, excavators, bull dozers, etc…) were newer models, very well maintained, clean (as is reasonable), and had their logo painted neatly across.  All signs of being professional.

[As I understand it, they are also do quite a number of septic systems and sand mounds.]

Update: June 2011: Matt and Jim and their crew came out again and did another whole round of grading, moving, and excavating.  They built and/or surfaced over 1/4 mile of slate covered roads, dug a pond, corrected some frost damage to earthen banks, and made everything really nice.  I thought the price estimate was very fair, and they came in dead on, despite doing a number of extras.  Here is an updated photo:

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Outstanding view from the top of the hill.

See how nice the grading of the bank is?  All done with the large excavator pictured above.

And Mr. Ezra, standing on top of the hill…

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Trees, Trees, and No Trees

Loggers hard at work, clearing enough ground to build a road and level part of the mountain.

This photo is epic, considering the perspective of two youngsters overlooking that much mountain and trees and streams and huge equipment that looks like toys.

(Epic, adj, “Surpassing the usual or ordinary, particularly in scope or size”)

A view up the hill from the bottom.

And lastly, a view north where the road is planned to come in.

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A new stock for rubber band gun #6

In anticipation of receiving the assembly for Rubber Band Gun #6 from Dixon Tool and Die, Inc., we have been making a new rubber band gun stock to complete the package.

This stock was hand crafted out of solid 1.75″ x 6.0″ x 48″ slab of maple.  The primary tools were bandsaw (for the profile), hammer and chisel, random orbit sander, end mill, jointer, sand paper, and lots of elbow grease.

There is a technique that we implemented called “raising the grain”.  It involves rubbing the wood with a wet rag, and then letting it dry.  Loose pieces of grain swell up and in turn raise up out of the wood, where they can be sanded off.

At the bottom-left corner of this photo, you can see another blank ready to be cut.

A lot of thought and testing went into this simple design and it works really well.  The catch (no pun intended) is to allow the rubber bands to release cleanly with no interference.

Here is Mr. E holding the shop-vac to keep the end mill from clogging up.  My Sherline milling machine is not large enough to hold this stock conveniently, so we used a drill press and cross-slide vice to mill it out.  Drill presses are not as rigid as milling machines, so we had to take it slow.