February workbench

Don Mintz said:
How does that white spruce carve?
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It carved nicely if I get decent even grain. If there is too much winter (dark grain) then it's harder. Due to our 24 hour daylight the summer wood can be prevalent and quite nice to carve.
This block has no knots and lots of summer wood.
 

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That makes a lot of sense. All the growth would be mostly in the 4 months. My guess when you are cutting stuff out you have the fuel to keep the house and shop warm. We lived 19 years in our last house in Boise before moving out of the city, it had a little wood stove and a loft upstairs leading into the master bedroom. The house was about 1400 sq, ft. Our furnace never worked so feeding the stove was a constant. I never bought or went out and cut firewood. I used wood scraps from carving and various woodworking projects to heat the house along with gathering wood pallets here and there around town. I cut the pallets up with a skill saw and bandsaw. That little stove would run you out of the house. When I grew up in Kansas we also had wood heat and did use a lot of firewood we cut from the fence lines and pecan grove. We occasionally cut some hedge out of the fence rows and when we put it in the wood stove, we called it nuking the box. You really had to make sure not to load the stove up with that stuff. That hedge would have been handy in Alaska.
 
Ronald Bock said:
Never. Ever. Touch the wife's scissors. One of the married life lessons they don't tell us guys.
I'm learning there are a lot of those rules. I've only been married 45 years and I'm still messing up. Sad sigh.
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the scissors that have made it downstairs to the shop... have never returned upstairs. When she asks what happens to her scissors.... I just say she obviously misplaced them as I know not to touch her scissors :ROFLMAO:
 
William Reinicke said:
it might be time for "mission return" and put them back one day shes out of the house. Tell her I was cleaning up and found them in places she may have left them lol.
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She’s always hiding my stuff. She says she is “putting away all of the crap I leave laying around”. I don’t know why I bother to have horizontal surfaces like tables, staircases, and the floor if I can’t leave something on them. Maybe I need to start returning the favor. Marriage is psychological warfare after all.
 
Kevin Puls said:
She’s always hiding my stuff. She says she is “putting away all of the crap I leave laying around”. I don’t know why I bother to have horizontal surfaces like tables, staircases, and the floor if I can’t leave something on them. Maybe I need to start returning the favor. Marriage is psychological warfare after all.
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My shop is mine. Im the worst about putting stuff away. Every 2ish months I have to go through for 20 min and just put tools away and reorganize everything. I get this statement, believe me. The house is hers so I play by the rules upstairs. Plus I like a tidy house but i sure dont leave anything I like upstairs because you are right, she ends up liking it too and it does become hidden.

I got one of those fancy laser, multiple increment screened measuring tapes for xmas. Used it one time to measure blinds for her, since we are repainting and redesigning the kitchen and living room. Never to be seen again. She liked it too much and liked how it gave measurements on a screen. Asked where it was the other day, she put it in the bottom drawer, where nothing else was. She has 2 others, of her own, in the top drawer. Sneaky little devils sometimes. I got it back, then disappeared out of my shop again. She was scary close to discovering the scissors, so i havent asked for it back... yet.
 
Oh, gimme a break, that's small potatoes. Just wait till she finds the pampered chef spatula in the shop, that was pretty bad. However when I asked her where my walking cane went, she had no idea. I found it today hanging on her bedside clothes hanger, hmm. None of my mounts are in the house other than a couple black bear rugs and only a few carvings. I occasionally go through the drawers around the house and find many long lost items. Every place I work whether the shop or the house is a mess, but it's my domain. Considering there are around 100 steel night lights to paint, 144 decoys I flock and paint for decoy dancer and another 50 decoys I'm making at about every stage of incompletion, things are just a little messy. My wife doesn't like it when there is dust on the car that is parked in the 3 car garage I call my shop. Today we were in Walmart and I was looking for some little paint mixing cups, like bathroom cups. My wife said we have some of those, I said I know I've been using them, WHAT! I now have my own little 3 oz bathroom cups. Oh, it's not all that bad, we've been together 46 years.

Oh and I have a pair of my wife's Ginger sewing scissors in the shop, somehow they got lost. She's the seamstress at our Scheels, so I suggested she get a couple new pairs.
 
Those feet look very good. That has to solve a lot of time consuming problems. Not just the look, but pulling tendons and dealing with broken legs and shot holes. I started doing taxidermy in a class I talked the zoology teacher into offering in 1976, I was kind of shocked the admin approved it. That was back in the no artificial heads or bills/beaks. Getting all the flesh off the skulls was a chore and we even had a tool to remove the brains. I just resisted using artificial heads when they came out for years and finally gave in around 2005. I never did give in to the artificial feet, but wouldn't hesitate if I were to mount any birds again. I still make my own bird feet for decorative carvings and even mold a few for decoys with crazy poses.
 
@Kevin Puls They are heat moldable. So they have different styles: open, semi-open, closed, standing and some I think for tucked like standing on one leg. But you stick them in boiling water and then can do some shaping, nothing too drastic I think as I haven't tried myself yet on this, only seen videos.

They are pre colored but aren't exact. Like the mallard was a bright red with a pinkish hue. I painted it to make it more orange red and then did some black/burnt umber on the webbing and joints. Doesn't show up the best in the picture.

For a can I'm sure it would be a blue/grey but would have to have the webbing and joints touched up. Oh and the nails would need to be painted.
 
Don Mintz said:
Those feet look very good. That has to solve a lot of time consuming problems. Not just the look, but pulling tendons and dealing with broken legs and shot holes. I started doing taxidermy in a class I talked the zoology teacher into offering in 1976, I was kind of shocked the admin approved it. That was back in the no artificial heads or bills/beaks. Getting all the flesh off the skulls was a chore and we even had a tool to remove the brains. I just resisted using artificial heads when they came out for years and finally gave in around 2005. I never did give in to the artificial feet, but wouldn't hesitate if I were to mount any birds again. I still make my own bird feet for decorative carvings and even mold a few for decoys with crazy poses.
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If I was carving a bird then I would carve the legs too. Would seem sacrilegious to add artificial feet to a carving.

The first bird I did a mount on was a blue goose, just the breast up as a young kid. I ended up cutting the head off at the bill and molded my own skull to the bill bones. Glad I don't have to try and utilize the entire skull like they used to, the bird taxidermy has come a long way in how things are done.
 
from packing the brain case with tow (raw burlap) wrapping the neck wire with tow, forming the body with wet excelsior wrapped with heavy duty thread. It all seems a lifetime ago. When I was in my late twenties I started molding my own foam bodies for turkey mounts and made a mold for a strutting turkey head and flying turkey head out of silicone. Mounting a turkey was like wrestling a moose. I'm so out of practice now I just don't mount birds anymore. I just never kept up with the technology, not to mention when I moved to idaho over 30 years ago there was a taxidermist on every corner. When you make your living as an artist you have to reinvent yourself constantly. A lot of that taxidermy experience has prepared me for a lot of things I do making decoys.
 
Quick rounding on a common GoldenEye for a AKDNR and Delta Waterfowl project dedication. It's supposed to be -30 the next couple evenings. Time to putter in the shop some more.
 

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