Timothy Karl

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I'll make another one in a daintier form and re-submit soon.

Carved a compact stubby-handled eating spoon from a dogwood log from my neighbor.

Used hatchet, saw, wooden wedge, sloyd knife and hook knife.

I've made enough spoons in my day that I can't really make a completely "beginner" spoon, but here's a quick one I made from a dogwood log from my neighbor. It's a cooking or serving sized spoon.

I've read that dogwood is prone to cracking when it dries, so I'm trying to dry the finished spoon slowly inside of a bag, which has worked well to avoid cracks in other crack-prone woods in the past.

Today I sharpened my hatchet that I use primarily to rough out wooden spoons. The hatchet's name is "Norlund".
It had developed a few small nicks in the edge since I last did a comprehensive sharpening last month on it. I could do better at keeping it fiendishly sharp before each carving session, but as it currently stands, I sharpen it when I notice it getting miserably dull and taking more effort to rough out spoons and being less able to bite on the shaping cuts, which is about once a month with my usage level.

My sharpening method is to clamp the hatchet to the porch railing, and make one pass on each side with each of:
- 1 file
- 4 grits of diamond stone xtra-coarse through extra-fine, applied to the edge like a big file
- 1 leather-on-wood strop with green crayon-type honing compound

I colored the edge and cross-hatched the bevel with a permanent marker before each pass to ensure that I was roughly matching the existing angle and sharpening up to the edge, and felt for the existence of a continuous burr on the back side on each pass. The strop removed the remaining burr on the final pass.

The hatchet was then sharp enough to shave a strip of hair off of my arm.

I made the club style mallet out of some wood from a tree that was removed at the nearby school. Based on the grain pattern, I believe it to be the trunk of a young ash tree.
This mallet should be a significant improvement over my previous hatchet mallet, which was just a branch that was too fat to comfortably hold.

I canned the following using the atmospheric steam canner:
- Tomato sauce, 3x 32oz + 3x 28oz = 180oz
- Salsa, 8x 16oz = 128oz
- Dill Bean Pickles, 5x 28oz = 140oz

I canned 8 pints of salsa. Ingredients came from my garden, except for the onions which mostly came from the store because I always fail miserably at growing onions.

Recipe used: https://milesawayfarmww.com/2015/09/01/making-canned-salsa/ This is an adaptation of the canning-safety-authority-approved ultra-vinegary salsa, which uses citric acid for most of the acidification instead, so avoids that "Pace Picante" vinegar flavor that plagues many salsa recipes.

The canner that I used is the VKP Harvest canner, which can be used as a water bath canner or a steam canner. To use it as a steam canner, you flip the rack over and only fill it with an inch of water, and then observe the steam gauge in the lid. I like this pot because I can use it on my portable induction cooktop outside, so I can keep the canning heat outside on hot days.

This BB is worded specifically as "Water Bath Canning". I'm wondering if canning 3 types of food (1 gallon each) in a steam canner would be acceptable for this BB, following all other requirements of this BB. Since there's not a separate 3-types-one-gallon BB for steam canning, my assumption would be that atmospheric steam canning (not a pressure canner) would fall within the spirit of this BB, but I'd love to get some clarification on this assumption. From a technical perspective, seems like steam canning is generally substitutable for water bath canning method in recipes, and uses less energy since it's only heating an inch of water, so I'm likely to use steam canning instead of water bath unless, for the specific wording of this BB, I'm required to not use atmospheric steam canning techniques.

After a ride the previous day, came out to find rear tire completely flat. Hadn't gone "whoosh" when I was riding, and didn't go "whoosh" when I pumped it back up, so it was relatively slow. If it goes "whoosh" and I can identify the location without taking the wheel off, I'll just take off a little section of tire and patch it without taking the whole wheel off, but since it was a slower leak, I had to take the wheel off.

After taking the wheel off and removing the tube, I inflated the tube and submerged it in a dishpan of water. Upon locating the stream of bubbles, I dried that section and marked it with a bullseye with a permanent marker. Pro tip: Marking in this way makes it easy to keep track of the location of smaller punctures after sanding the tube and applying glue.

I scuffed up the tube with a small piece of coarse sandpaper and applied a tiny dab of vulcanizing patch cement and schmeared it thin around the area. Upon allowing it to dry for 30 seconds until completely dry, I applied 1/4 of a Rema patch and pressed firmly for 30 seconds. Pro tip: Buy the box of 100 Rema patches, and cut them into quarters for patching the tiniest holes.

To avoid repeat punctures, I checked the inside of the tire for the offending sharp item. Pro tip: always align the logo on the tire with the valve hole in the rim to be able to know where on the tire to look for the pokey after locating the hole in the tube. I found a small piece of glass that had worked its way through, leaving a small cut about 1/8 of an inch long. The tire is fairly old, so is wearing thin and has more cuts like this, so will likely pick up more glass and get more punctures more frequently. I'm not sure if this will work, but I used some "Shoe Goo" adhesive to try to seal up some of the small cuts in the tire casing to prevent them from being weak points and picking up future glass and possibly slightly extend the tire life.

Reinstalled tube in tire, and tire in wheel, being mindful of tire logo orientation with respect to valve hole and ensuring that no portion of tube was caught between rim and tire. Upon reinstallation of wheel, rear cable-actuated disc brake was rubbing slightly indicating that the wheel was not sitting quite the same in the dropout as before, so I opened the quick-release back up and squeezed the brake lever while closing the quick release in order to make a tiny adjustment to wheel alignment in the dropout and ensure that the rotor was centered in the caliper.

I'll be riding bicycle to the potluck this afternoon, starting from SE Portland! If anyone else is thinking of riding bike from the east side and wants to join up with me , send me a purple mooseage in the next hour and we can coordinate and ride up the monster hill together.