08 Jul 08

I started work on glue infusing a buttefly panel this morning. Luke, Zach, and Zac took the old body plug table apart as Ben welded the tongue onto the replacement. Caroline, Aaron and Hunt worked on the clothespins. Sean worked on a mechanism that will turn the wood lathe into an engine lathe, allowing us to feed material into the chuck in a rate consistent with the chuck's revolution. We will use this to make the headrest supports. Zach and Caroline went back to Mecks' to finish up the spooling. We also sprayed a light stain on the weave for the butterfly panel before lunch and let it dry. We have found that it really helps to even out the weave a little bit with a stain beforehand. After lunch, we all set Ben's steel frame on the axle that we removed the table from this morning. It fit like a glove; thanks, Ben. Zac and I worked on infusing the butterfly panel while Luke, Caroline, Kendal, and Zach worked on stringing the loom. The mounted all of the spools, pulled the veneer through the clothespins, and started drawing it into the loom. Aaron helped Zac mix glue as we infused the butterfly panel, which went excellently. Everyone took a break for the day on the loom at about 7:00pm, as I worked on infusing the front wing. Ben was working on table for the body shell. Caroline came back from getting some infusion supplies and Chinese food, and she, Kendal, Ben and I ate. After dinner, Ben and I went back to work on the front wing infusion and had it ready to vacuum by about 10:00pm. We finished the night off by slitting some walnut veneer from our buddies at Band-It into 13'X 1/4" strips for weaving tomorrow. It was a good day, but we need a better one tomorrow. I hope get the front wing infusion done, along with the secondary infusion of the butterfly panel, and a full draw-in of the loom. We want to start weaving pretty soon.