Backyard in Progress

...pied by a dead tree. A few years ago we used the area to mine clay for our adobe oven. This left a shallow depression that I filled in with compost and routed the downspout towards via an unsightly pipe. Lacking definition and choked with weeds, the area never looked good. Our landscaper Laramee proposed digging the depression out by about a foot and adding river rock and a little dry stream fed by the downspout. I made a bridge so that when it ra...

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I Made a Little Library

...id the best I could do to make the little library look like a southwestern adobe. A neighbor gifted me a nice new piece of 3/4 plywood and most of the rest of the components came from scrap wood I had laying around. The universe kinda came together to make this project happen. I used simple rabbet joints done on the tablesaw to create the plywood box. For the doors I used mortise and tenon joints. I picked up some piece of metal flashing material...

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What’s Buried in Your Backyard?

...the artifacts of previous inhabitants in addition to the raw material for adobe ovens. While recovering from a bad cold this weekend I fell deep into the hole that is the Historic Glass Bottle Identification and Information Website created by a retired Bureau of Land Management Rangeland Management Specialist, Bill Lindsey. While the bulk of the internet consist of intemperate tweets and cats, it still has useful information like Lindsey’s bottle...

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Restoring the Original Black Box: Our Western Electric 534A Subset

...posted a video of the interior of our ringer box in action. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what it sounded like when the phone rang in 1920s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2VHhmKTFsQ And, yes, I will be making this available as a ringtone in about a week. Though, I’ll note, you probably won’t be able to fix your iPhone 96 years in the future. Does your old house still have a ringer box?...

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