Wooden Building Blocks

It has been a long while since my last post, not because of laziness or a lack of interest from pending projects, but from an interesting series of events that has inevitably paused updates of this blog. As some of you may know, joblessness was one of the reasons for doing this blog in the first place; to keep me busy and to give me a sense of accomplishment while out of work. Shortly after the completion of the baby bunk I was called into work as a painter for a contractor in Oshkosh. So naturally everything else, including this blog, took a back seat.

I was helping paint the inside of a warehouse that distributed plastics called Pacur. This job lasted for about 2 weeks. After that the contractor (Davis Painting) wanted me to help in their home-shop. There I helped spray 8'x3' wooded decor panels for the inside of a bar. There were about 300 of these: moving them, sanding them, moving them again, priming, sanding, then painting them....and moving them...again. They weren't that heavy, yet for some reason the constant movement or continuous lifting from the waste for 7 hours took its toll.

I'm not an old man. Yet it begs the question why for some reason I pulled/tore something in my lower neck/high right shoulder: at the end of the day it felt like a knife stabbing this area severely that was followed by a sensation of heat. It was rather debilitating. After a couple of days of rest and moderate work load to a high work load, the injury continued until it got worse. After that, I decided to file an injury report and get myself to the Chiropractor to get it looked at.

W00t.


The Doc checked me out and told me that I over-stressed this area and that I needed to rest it-which meant no more lifting. I was officially put on restricted duty. Now instead of workers compensation,  Tradesmen International (the company I work for-they are a temp agency that supplies work force for different contractors when the need arises) put me on what they called "light-duty". "What is light-duty?!" you may enthusiastically ask. Well, it consisted of me and 3-4 other gentlemen (I use the term loosely) sitting in a freezing back room looking at the wall, looking at the floor, twiddling our thumbs, and making paper airplanes (or what ever I could make to keep from going...INSANE!). I got paid for this. $13.50 an hour to do nothing...for 3 weeks.

"You had to have done something while there, right?"

Yes, well I did have to adjust to this new environment to keep my sanity. This is what I did:
1. I finished Husband-Coached childbirth by Dr. Bradley.
2. I started the Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
3. I made paper airplanes: jets, gliders, and other interesting objects that the others said would never fly (they were wrong).
4. I studied apologetics
5. I made a basketball hoop out of cardboard and office paper.
6. I made a dart-board and 2 sets of darts: the board was a discarded cork board found in the back room and I had drawn a fairly accurate board from office paper. The darts I made from push-pins, paper-clips, a rubber band, and a post-it note. They worked amazingly well. I then installed a dart score keeping program on my computer. (We played for 3 straight hours one day....we all came down with an acute "dart-elbow" that lasted a few days)

and 7. I painted the toy blocks I made for our little one that is coming soon. :)

This brings us to our topic: Building Blocks.

During my time in "light-duty", I found myself a little freer to start the next project. It was a fairly easy project that took a couple days; an hour or so at a time. I got the plans from this website. Pretty simple. There was only one draw back to the dimensions that I will address at the end.

The wood that I used was run of the mill Pine board that was fairly inexpensive.

This was a 58 block set with normal geometrical shapes and with some special ones. I didn't want to get too fancy yet with pyramid/cone toppers; the sharp edged pieces can probably wait until maybe the kid is a little older.





So I sliced them all out pretty quickly with my compound miter saw and turned out darn near perfect.

Used my trusty band-saw for the arches.







Once I had all 58 pieces cut out, I sanded them all with the help of my beautiful wife while watching the film
 "These Grapes on Them Branches are Fragile"...or something.
This was probably the most time consuming process.

Though, once all were sanded and all sharp edges were annihilated, we used a tack cloth (which is a sticky cheese-cloth-like rag that cleans the surface for particulates) to clean them and then we proceeded to prime them with a special sealer.


Then I sanded them again so the paint will have a fine finish.

Then, as I said before, I painted them all while on "light-duty".

The Finished Product:

I think they turned out well. The only problem I have with the dimensions is that the sum of their parts don't necessarily add up to their whole. Such as the thickness of a number of blocks doesn't necessarily equal one tall block on its end. I don't know. Maybe I did it wrong....who knows. Though if I do this again, I think I will adapt the dimensions a bit.

There you have it. One 58 piece-set of Wooden Building Blocks. I may even make a wooden storage case for them. Now that I am off "light-duty" and cleared for normal work, we shall see what I have time for in the coming weeks, especially since Our Little One is due to show up in the very near future! :)

Till next time.

Pax

NPM

St. Joseph Pray for Us!