New Air Compressor for Workshop!

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With the addition of the CNC Plasma Cutter to my workshop I quickly learned that the quality of air supply is critical to getting good cuts.  I concluded that my 20 year old 6 Gallon compressor just wasn’t going to hack it and it was time to replace it with something bigger and more powerful.

I shopped around and found a good deal on a Dewalt 60 gallon, 3.7HP, 11.5 SCFM compressor, on sale locally at a Tractor Supply store.  Less than 8 miles away!  I could pick it up and not pay any shipping charges!  Yippee!

So, I drove over there and found they had just one left, and it was missing it’s intake air filter.  Hmmmm, I checked it out and thought I could build a temporary filter while the store ordered a replacement (right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic!).  We loaded it on my truck with a fork lift and I brought it home.

So, here it is, ready to unload.

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Arrival of new compressor. Fortunately, it’s not going far from this spot!

After a bit of reorganization of my shop (like moving my 300lb dust collector and installing a ton of air filtering/water separators/valves/etc), I successfully unloaded and installed it.

I then made the parts for the air filter…

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Homemade parts for temporary air filter.

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Assembled parts for temporary air filter.

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‘Temporary’ Air Filter

Note that the ‘temporary’ filter is still installed.  Tractor Supply seems to have forgotten that they owed me one.  Good thing the ‘temporary’ one is good enough!

 

 

Man! What a party!

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For my birthday Kerry treated me to a trip to Pinehurst where we were going to play golf and stay at the Holly Inn overnight.  Well, unfortunately it actually snowed that evening so we didn’t get to play golf, but did have a lovely time at the Inn.

Little did I know, that ‘treat’ was merely a trick to get me away from the house so she could have caterers and our daughter’s setup a HUGE surprise party for me.  Several family and friends were there, some having traveled all the way from Maine!  It was great and literally left me speechless.  So… unable to do better than the following photos…

readyForParty1 readyForParty3 cakeAndFlowers

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Clare MADE THIS CAKE! Isn’t it GREAT?!

ImmediateFamily myLoveWithBlooms myHoney

Retirement gift for National Park Superintendent, Kate Cannon

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A very good friend of mine, who has a very close association with Canyonlands National Park, realized, after seeing that I had a CNC Plasma cutter, that we could make a nice gift for the current Park Superintendent, Kate Cannon, who is retiring next week.

My friend suggested that a silhouette of Druid Arch, a difficult to find, but very imposing natural arch, would be appropriate. Fortunately I had a fairly nice and high contrast photo of the arch that I took on a trip in 2005. So…
Here’s the arch:

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Druid Arch

and here is the gift:

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Gift to retiring Canyonlands Park Superintendent, Kate Cannon.

Birthday present for brother-in-law

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With my brother-in-law celebrating his 50th birthday this year, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to:
1. Yank his chain a little,
2. Use my new toy!

So, a popular item in plasma cutting ‘circles’ is what’s called an ‘F-Bomb’. Now without going into the derivation of this name, the object is a cutout that looks like a ‘bomb’ that would be dropped from an airplane with a large ‘F’ cut out of the center (for some reason I’m not at liberty to say). For this occasion, however, we can be sure that the ‘F’ stands for ‘Fifty’ and therefore, the following object seems entirely appropriate:

Click on photo to enlarge.

‘F-Bomb’ birthday gift for Duff.

Happy Birthday, Duff!

For those who are curious, the ‘bomb’ was cut out of a sheet of 11gauge 304 Stainless Steel and I used my Laser engraver to ‘burn’ the printing onto the surface.

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