Cranking Things to 11

"Cranking Things to 11"

A few weeks ago I e-mailed the chief editor of Good Beer Hunting to see if he'd be interested in perhaps trying out one of my "Captivators".  I fired off the e-mail and didn't think much more of it until last night.  Sitting in my inbox, nestled between two Amazon orders, was a response from Michael Kiser himself: 

"Hey Nick — 

Super cool. I've def seen this around. Would love to get a hold of one for my studio here in Chicago. 

Any chance we could do a custom one? If you can make one that's black or 80% grey, and uses my "Aim True, Pour Liberal' artwork, I'd be happy to continuously push it over Instagram, Twitter and such in perpetuity for a good cause. And if this is something you think you could produce in a significant quantity, maybe we could see about including it in my shop!"

This is pretty huge for me considering that my e-mail to him was off a whim that perhaps on the off chance that my request didn't get tossed in the spam folder he might respond.  The fact that he not only responded but also asked for a request is high praise (at least to us here at WoodEyes Woodworks).

So now the machination of my mind is turning as I try to plan out a custom order for Good Beer Hunting.   I'm thinking the base could either be a stained, charcoal-ish oak but I'm going to really push to try and get some Wenge:

Wenge is typically found in the Congo and super hard.  Like "let's make flooring out of this stuff so people can trample over it day-in and day-out" hard.   It's also got some pretty noxious dust so I'll make sure to wear the respirator.  Can't be breaking out in dermatitis halfway through a big build...though woodworking with swelled up sausage fingers might be a fun challenge. So I doubt there will be any durability issues when it comes to cracking open a beer.  The inlays I'm thinking could be a real nice either creamy maple or grayish maple.  Something to attract the eye from the almost black base.  

I'll probably take some detailed photos of this build.   This could be a big event in the short history of WoodEyes Woodworks. 

Oh, and one other thing.  I promised last time to go a bit further into the milling process and I fully intend to do so.   Yesterday I stopped at the shop and finished up a few orders.  I snapped a picture of the jointer blades so that you can see just how dangerous woodworking can be: 

Reminds me of the sand worm's mouth from Dune:

Anywho, until next time folks!

Tootles,

Nick