I saw my first Praying Mantis yesterday.
At my wife's church people honk at each each other trying to get out of the parking lot. Brotherly love lasts about one minute after leaving the building.
I've also wondered about Ixonia's unique name! Thanks for the owl and knowledge 👍
They work very well. We've been using a set for four years now.
This is what I did for you our kids. Used a bull nose but in a router for the engraving. The graduations were done with a straightedge while the numbers were freehanded over pencil lines.
I then spray painted it black and sanded off the paint from the flat surfaces, leaving it paint in the engraving troughs.
Their heights are simply penciled on.
We're pretty pleased with it. It looks nice and doesn't feel out of place.
I like the hamster & wine bottle decor
Phone photo of an group of bluebird young. Bluebirds have kept control of one of our nest boxes for about a month now and it's great to see a fruitful result!
I try to leave them alone so this is the first time I've peeked in there.
I think that would be a perfectly good jaw vise. But only put in a few dog holes, as shown in their product photos, to maximize rigidity.
Give CopyQ a try. Open source, cross platform clipboard manager with tons of features.
One example option is being able to only ever paste plain text. It also has lots of programming hooks, I have a few for doing things like converting a line-feed delimited list into one delimited by commas and quoting the values.
What kind of finch is she?
I'd tip out the pot and gently separate the saplings. Hopefully they're not too entangled. Go ahead and replant in the ground with the same potting soil, taking care to make the holes deep enough for the tap roots. They're long!
We have the Brother HL-L3230CDW and are happy with it. Works fine with inexpensive toner cartridges from Amazon.
Our bathroom has very little extra floor space so the scale has been leaning up against the wall.
Taking adavtage of extra wall space behind the door to safely store the scale.
I constructed it like a very short drawer. Cherry sides with 3/16" plywood bottom.
A small table for our toddler to draw on and ruin 😊 Solid maple build with mortise & tenon aprons. The top was bookmatched from a piece of 8/4.
Finish was three coats of amber shellac for color and seal followed by three of wipe-on poly for durability.
Knocked out this medium sized salad bowl the other day. The blank had been sitting around for at least five years!
I made this a few years ago to speed-turn the L-bolts in our Christmas tree stand. They are stiff and super putzy to operate by hand.
I finally got a #7 and needed a place to keep it. My #5-1/2 fit into a drawer so I never needed large plane till until now.
Often these kind of tool cabinets are elaborate masterpieces made from treasured hardwood felled by one's grandfather; not this one, it's made from scrap plywood and gets the job done. I have two little ones that don't leave me much shop time right now.
The box is about 25" wide, 15" wide, and 10" deep. Piano hinge for the door with a rare earth magnet catch.
Drawer box dado corners with everything else being screwed on for future adjustability.
The till is simply leaned up against the back wall and screwed in place.
Made this child's train set for my two year old. It's all scrap cherry. The wheels are 1.25" in diameter while the bases are 1.5" wide.
The wheels are nailed into pre-drilled holes.
The hitches are sort of a half lap joint with the top half holding a dowel.
I use little squeeze bottles for mineral spirits, denatured alcohol, etc. Refilling them has always been a messy and tricky operation while trying to hold the bottle, funnel, and canister all at the same time.
This little bottle holder has made that task much eaisier!! Having it clamp into the vise eliminates any possibility of the bottle tipping over.
I know this isn't strictly about birding but who doesn't like Eastern Bluebirds?
So this spring I put up two bluebird nest boxes (X-Box design on EMT posts) only to have the bluebirds repeatedly evicted by house sparrows.
A few times I ready about using fishing line to deter the house sparrows, and it has actually worked! I attached two horizontal beams to the tops of the houses and then hung monofilament weighted with large hex nuts.
That was about six weeks ago and now we have a bluebird family in one and house wrens in the other.
Edit - on my lappy so I'll post some links
Very weird, this guy seems to have moved into our garage. Just saw it again!