A Good Day

Today was a good day.
I can't say that very often. But for some reason, everything just seemed to go well today. I got some good news, I got a new toy, and I got FREE STUFF! And who doesn't love free stuff?

OK, so Good News; My neighbor, with whom I have been having trouble these past few weeks, is being evicted. Yeah! No more screaming matches, no more police visits, no more stealing my electricity, no more taking things out of my yard, no more trash piled up beside my house. Ding dong, the witch is dead!

Seriously, these people are scum.


New Toy; Today I picked up a powder coating kit from Harbor Freight. I've been wanting one for a while, and today I finally pulled the trigger and bought one. I plan to use it to coat pen barrels for custom feather quill pens. I'm sure I'll find other uses for it as well.

Free Item #1; I got this lovely 20"x22"x1.5" slab of quartz counter top material, which I intend to use as a surface plate. I had been using a rather thin piece of tempered glass to do the "scary sharp" sharpening method, but it has a little flex in it. Then, I bought a 12" square granite floor tile to use as a surface plate, but it was a little smaller than I wanted. So today, I stopped by a local place that makes granite counter tops and I asked them if they had any cut offs that would work as a surface plate in a workshop, and they just handed me this nice piece of quartz! I was willing to pay for it, but they just gave it to me. It is nice and big and heavy, and has a VERY smooth surface. My dial gauge can only measure to within one thousandth of an inch, but the surface is well within that tolerance. I am totally tickled about my new surface plate, and sadly, I have no one to tell about it, so that's the main reason for this post ;)

 This is going to work great for a project I am starting. I am refurbishing all my old hand planes. I have already started and the first one came out really nice.

Free Item #2; I got a phone call on Saturday from my local post office. Apparently I had a package that had been sitting there waiting for me to pick it up and I didn't know about it. It had been sitting there for the past four months! They were just about to send it back, but one of the nice employees there decided to look up my number and call me before that happened.

This is a box of Thibra. I had never heard of it before, but it is apparently a thermoplastic, like Worbla or Wonderflex. The nice people at Thibra just decided to send me some of their product to try out (no doubt instigated by this blog). Oddly, the package was addressed to "Herr Doktor", but then under that it said MRX Designs and my PO box address. Herr Doktor is a very talented maker in the steampunk community, who used to operate a blog, but it hasn't been updated in years. I don't know if they thought I was him, or they got us confused, or why his name would be on the box, but I'm gonna keep it anyway. I wrote the company a thank you note. Sorry that it is four months late.

So, a good day. Well, a good couple of days, actually. My hand plane that I refurbished the other day came out really well. Oh, and the other day I went down to the Amish lumber store and found a nice big piece of Ipe in the bargain bin for $5. I guess even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.


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