Lathe and Laundry

I'm overdoing it, as usual. This past week, I wrote three short articles on Atlantic City for the AOL SEED site, taught my class, got a freelance project to the printer, saw a gamelan opera, and did a half-dozen other little things, and today I have to go to a wedding.

On Wednesday nights, I have woodworking class at SVA. This is scary, because we use big power tools, but it's also utterly engaging, because it's so different than anything else that I do.

Unfortunately, woodworking class comes with homework. I took a few hours yesterday to do this week's homework, which was to make a mallet out of wood. We'll use these mallets to whack our chisels. My Friday night plan was to lathe at woodworking class, then head to the laundromat with my two weeks of dirty clothes and sawdust.



Here's my starting point. This isn't really a solid block. It's the piece we cut last week with the chop saw. We glued the two halves together and clamped them.



Progress! My block of wood is now round-ish.



This looks sort-of mallet-like. I really needed to work on it some more to smooth it out, but I was afraid I'd do more harm than good.



I never did get around to laundry.