Yay isn't it cute! :)

Well today I worked on solving a Lego Robot Challenge. Here are the bot's requirements:

1) Must be able to self-maneuver through a given "area"
2) Avoid Obstacles
3) Gather up 3 ping-pong balls of 1 of 4 colors (white, red, blue, black)
4) Reject all colors of another team(s)
5) Return with the most balls of your own color (lose points for wrong colored balls)

The bot isn't done yet, but I should be able to finish it tomorrow. Here are some of pictures of it.

Well I'm back from Texas where I spent the holidays with my family. We finally got my camera working again (i think). So I finally have some pictures to post for everyone to see.

Here's a pic of my finished White Oak/Red cedar Chest that I made for mom. I can't get the interior pics to load though sorry. It has a full size shallow lift out drawer/tray with a cedar interior, and a prop open safety hinge so that the lid will stay open and not smash people's fingers.



Aaron and Jme were with us for christmas this year too. It was fun to see them, especially since we played a lot of card and board games as a family. That was fun.



Apparently it snowed around 3 inches saturday morning before me and cheslie flew into salt lake yesterday. And the big snow storm from california is headed here tonight and tomorrow. It should be cold and miserable. Yay.

I finally have wireless internet in my apartment! Yay again. Thanks dad!

I hope everyone is having a great new year, and good luck with what's to come! Bye.

Well this week has been exhausting work. 2 new classes just started up for me last week and they are a handful in the way of reading/writing assignments. i'm chugging along as best i can. anyway, i finally have some pictures to post for everyone.

1st off is the pumpkin i submitted to an area carving contest. i call it "revenge of davy jones". i discovered yesterday that it took 1st place, and i will get a free pizza for it. hooray! whatever.



i also have a picture of another pen i finished a while back but never got online. it's another patriot style pen, with black chrome plating, and the material used is an acrylic called toucan. you know like "toucan sam" from the frootloops cereal box.



here are some pictures of some of the plants i've got in my apartment here in Provo. so far no plant deaths this semester. so far so good.

Well I got news Friday afternoon of another official pumpkin carving contest. Of course I couldn't hold back from another opportunity to "glow". I hope to have a pic of the finished pumpkin early next week. It's almost done, but I don't want the pumpkin to go bad before Halloween. That would be sad. I think it's a lot of fun.

In wood shop I've been working on building a piece of furniture for my mom. I am building a White Oak blanket chest with red cedar inside of it. I hope it turns out alright.

I finished reading the 2nd book in the Hitchhiker's Guide series. It's called "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", and I'm well into book 3 called "Life the Universe and Everything." It's really funny set of books and I recommend it to anyone who has time or chance to read it.

Well the Halloween Party last night was fun, and a lot of people said they were impressed not only with my pumpkin carving, but with my costume. I went as a pirate again this year. A little more complete this year than last, but it came together rather nicely.

Chelsie really liked the outfit, but that may be because she is a real Johny Depp fan. If you hadn't guessed yet I went as Captain Jack Sparrow (or close to it). Hope you enjoy the pic (taken by Chelsie herself).

Well it's finally here for everyone to see! Pumpkin carving took several hours. Hope you all enjoy it.

Sorry about that. I didn't realize that I had a setting that made it so only registered users could leave comments enabled. It should be fixed now so that anyone can leave a comment/message for me to see/enjoy.

I spent several hours yesterday working on this years pumpkin carving design that I hope to submit for the campus competition. It took me 3 hours to come up with the design plans shown below.



I spent a couple more hours transferring the outlined image to the face of the pumpkin last night, and it's all ready to be gutted out and finally carved. This is going to be really challenging. Probably harder than last years pumpkin that I did. If you didn't see the one from last halloween just search some of my old posts from Oct/Nov of last year.

I hope to have my 1st wood salad/candy bowl turned in my wood-shop class today. Should be lots of fun (and work of course!). TTFN.

Hey everyone! I just completed my second Bud Vase in the wood shop today. I'm not sure what type of wood it is, but I was able to include both the heartwood and the sapwood in this vase. I don't have a pic of my first vase cuz it still needs graded by my professor. I love turning things on the lathe. It's so much fun. Artsy-fartsy is another way to put it, but I will leave it at fun. Enjoy the pics!

Here are the "Patriot Pens". They are twist pens where the twist mechanism is simply the end cap where the clip is. The top pen is made with a rhodium finish and turned from a block of Amber (fosilized tree sap). The other pen uses black chrome finish to play off of the custom made pen body (by yours truly). It's a laminated set of Bloodwood bands and a 2 inch barrel of ebony (black wood). It was my first attempt at laminating custom pen bodies! It turned out great. Interested?

Ok. Here it is! The ad of what's currently available. Enjoy.

I made up a kind of ad for selling my custom made pens, because of some outside interest of people here at BYU for purchasing them. If you would like a copy of my ad just email me and I will send you the PDF file. Have fun!

I almost forgot! Here's a new acrylic that is really cool looking and will make an awsome pen. I think a click-style pen, but only time will tell.

Here's a few photos of my pen making. My favorite is the "celluloid" acrylic pen (the blue one). It's called Caribbean Blue. The others use a variety of woods including purple heart, maple, curly maple, oak burl, coco bolo,and marble wood.

There are 2 basic pen styles in these pics. Slimline (aka twist pens), and 2 "click" pens - including the blue pen. I can make anything from fountain pens to cigar pens to gentlemen pens to patriot pens and many more. I can get all sorts of exotic wood and awesome acrylic to use as the pen barrels. I can also use deer antlers (good as a custom center band) or buffalo horns.

Platings I can do are 24k/10k gold, black titanium/chrome, satin, and rhodium. Some additional textures are available with certain pen styles. It's fun to make them. I enjoy the time I spend turning pens. If anyone has any pen requests are is interested let me know and I will be able to help you out.

I finished reading "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" (book one) yesterday morning. It's a great book and one of my recommended reads. That is if you care about listening to anything I say here, but its just nice that someone even reads these posts anyways.

Our research paper is finally rolling along around here. The topic is of Mechanically Stabilized Earth Walls. Not an entirely exciting topic for writing, but it should be a good experience for presentation (not that presenting is fun either).

I hope to have a new laminated pen design laid out tonight for turning Thursday afternoon. Sorry still no photos yet. My camera isn't working at the mo. But just keep checking back!

It has been a while since I last updated my Blog, so hopefully I can get ya'll caught up with my current escapades in the next few posts; along with some wonderful photography.

I am currently turning handmade wood/acrylic pens on a lathe, and hope to be able to pick up a little bit of money on the side by selling them. All the funds will help with school and the shop equipment needed to make the pens in the first place. They keep getting better and better with each pen I've made. I should have some photos for ya'll soon to enjoy. If you are interested in any particular pen let me know! I can even make custom pens with specific woods that you may be interested in, and several different pen styles (some pencils too).

I just finished reading Book One of the Septimus Heap trilogy called "Magyk." It was a good book and would reccomend it to anyone who likes fiction and fantasy novels. I moved on to read the 5 books of the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy." So far they are unbelieveably awsome.

I am designing a piece of furniture for a woodworking class here at BYU. I havn't decided on the wood material to use, but it is going to be a small night stand with a inset drawer.

Look! I made my own beanie while watching the BYU bowl game. How lame am I? Here's some more pics.

It's been a while since the CO2 race car races, but I can't remember ever posting pics of my car (which won by the way!!!). Cool enjoy.

Last week we held our SUMO BOT (robot wars) competition and these are pictures of my teams bot. We had too much fun with the paint job, but we finished in second place. Although that's not bad considering we did beat the 1st place team in one round, but because of the way the rounds were set up they got another chance to battle us and won. Darn. Enjoy.

Well the semester is finally over, and I can finally take some time to update this blog of mine. Here are some pics that everyone should find interesting.

This was a pewter chess set that I designed and built for the final project in my Material Properties class and finished it just last week. Enjoy.