The Sasquatch Diaries

Photo gallery Bug

Ben — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 05:24:36 +0000

Unclear when this happened, but all my flash-type galleries stopped working at some point. I just recreated the latest one (SKS) using a different format, and it seems to be working. I’ll work to correct the others as I can.

Home amongst cedars

Ben — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:59:27 +0000

Road Trips

Ben — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 05:43:59 +0000

Jeez. Turns out I’ve driven a whole bunch.

View Road Trips in a larger map

Harness box

Ben — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:23:14 +0000

On Spirit of Massachusetts, like most schooners, crew and students wear harnesses when going aloft. Naturally, these harness have to be in an easily accessible area on deck. Time out of mind, that area was a dilapidated canvas bag just abaft the mainmast. But this fall, the bottom finally fell out of it. We’d just gotten a marvelous tip from a former student (thank you!) so I used a bit of it to buy a sheet of nice cedar plywood to make a more permanent structure for them. I somehow don’t have a photo of the completed box en situ, but the drawing gives an idea of how it sits. Two things particularly please me about it: 1) that it actually looks a bit like my original drawing for once, and 2) tha I was able to make it underway, using only a circular saw and a drill press in addition to hand tools. (and lots of epoxy, of course).

Back of the Rig, Version 1.0

Ben — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 02:14:55 +0000

Since I got my truck and flip-pac last a year ago, I’ve been slowly plugging away at making order out of all the crap I have with me. Here are some photos of the various cabinets is built to contain clothes, gear, bike repair stuff, and my kitchen. Most of the cabinets are built-ins, and I knocked them up way quickly. Can’t wait to get back to LA and use my mom’s new shop tools to improve them.
The kitchen box, on the other hand, I took some time with; I built it while I was training the dog. It’s a mix of Douglas fir and Sitka spruce– all off-cuts from the ceiling planking on Irving Johnson.

Stella’s little boat

Ben — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:33:53 +0000

Stella came sailing with her mom last summer on Harvey Gamage, and totally won me over. What an awesome kid! When she left, I decided to make her a little Harvey Gamage to help her remember her time aboard. Turned into a bit of an engineering project, since I wanted it to float upright (in the bathtub, for example). The rig is proportionally way too heavy, and despite my making the hull rather tubby, I ended up having to drill air cells into the upper portion of the hull, and a large number of stainless steel rods into the keel. Fortunately, none of that shows through!

A pudding for Daisy

Ben — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 23:43:44 +0000

While I was working on the schooner Mystic last spring, my boss tasked me with making a bow bumper, or “pudding,” for his beautiful work boat Daisy. I didn’t much care for any of the designs I found online, so I did it by trial and error, weaving an inner mass from 5/8 Manila and encasing that first in tarred canvas and then a layer of fender- hitched single strand Manila. I covered the top with what Clifford Ashley calls a “prolonged plait,” and some Turk’s Heads. Perfect! Except, of course, that I blocked the nav lights…

Dog and Truck

Ben — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:47:17 +0000

Meet Kobe and my new home! Both are awesome!

Unfortunately, Kobe is not mine all the time. But I plan to steal him as much as possible!!

New Photos!

Ben — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:54:45 +0000

I’ve added a couple of new galleries in the photo section: one with shots from the mountaineering seminar I took earlier this summer, and the other with shots from my first course as an instructor. Check ‘em out!

Sixth Sense

Ben — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:43:24 +0000

I came across this video on one of my favorite blogs, Gizmodo. It’s a presentation on Sixith Sense, a project from MIT’s Media Lab that aims to provide everyone seamless access to the web by automatically picking up information about the world around and projecting information on any surface–using natural gestures to control it all. Sort of what would happen if a bar code scanner, an iPhone, and a mobile projector had some sort of crazy liaison. Very cool. The demo starts at minute 3.10