jeweler's saw frames

 

My class is making jeweler's saw frames. We've been using the plasma cutter at school to cut these out. The students are machining the handles and the hardware for these. We'll anodize the frames as well. I hope these turn out well.

land rover transmission

I worked on cleaning up the land rover transmission and transfer case a few weeks ago. It was a mess. I power washed it and then took the shift knobs off and polished them. It's too bad someone overtightened the red knob and broke the top off. I was amazed at how these cleaned up. I sanded them on my lathe and then buffed them with some plastic polish. I dropped the transmission and transfer case into the frame. I'm trying to decide what direction to go. Eric and I talked about the possibility of using my Nissan Leaf to power the Land Rover. There are several people who have done this. I had planned on using the Leaf motor in my chopped Beetle that I have yet to do anything with. TOO MANY PROJECTS!

It's interesting Jill and I have been having some detailed discussions on finances now that we are taking a class on the topic. We're to a part of the class where we are discussing our dreams of how we want to live when we retire and when we don't have debt. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have spent time over the years acquiring tools, motorcycles, and cars (that are usually run down, broken, in need of repair/restoration, or missing parts) all because I am dreaming of restoring them when I retire. I buy them is the state they are in because I feel like I would NEVER be able to afford a fully restored or proper tool/motorcycle/car and I tell myself that the opportunity to own them will not come around again. It's utter foolishness and it fuels a hoarder mentality. We have determined that this is my mode of operation because I scrounge and have never really had access to any amount of money that would allow me to purchase something decent. Therefore I have a million partial projects and no money to put into the projects. It's pretty crazy. It's really a result of believing that living in debt is the only way to live. When I realize that my ability to compound interest on my own money has been lost to companies that have compounded what I owe them, it makes me furious that I didn't do something about this sooner. Now I'm left trying to figure out what I can sell so I can get rid of the debt and most of the projects.  I need to make a list of assets and then decide what needs to go. I spent the afternoon cleaning and organizing the shop so I can start to lay out the things that should go. I may need some help figuring this out.

 

deep draw forming

We've been doing some fun things in class these last few days. I was able to get some deep draw forming tooling and we've been pressing some bowls that will form the basis for some commemorative chalices. We are able to take a 6" 18 gauge sheets and press this in one annealing. It's pretty amazing to watch. My students who took metalforming last semester are in awe at the fact that we can achieve these results in under one minute with the press. I look forward to experimenting more with this.

 

kenny

 

Kenny Carder passed away last week. Hoe wife Lisa (who I work with) shared his obituary with me last night. I was helping a student on Thursday when Lilith told me about his passing. It hit me pretty hard in the moment. I just didn't see this coming.

I can't remember the exact first time that I met Kenny, but I think it must have been at he and Lisa's studio. When I first moved to Boone, I lived over on Baird's creek and Lisa and Kenny lived just down the road from me. Kenny had built their studio and added onto it many years ago. It is a gorgeous studio. I remember him showing me around the studio. I took a liking to Kenny instantly. He told me about growing up in Ohio and going to Bowling Green for school. He spoke fondly of his childhood and I could tell instantly that he was a worker and that he was a midwesterner at heart. We talked about Noah playing baseball and I could tell that he took a real interest in the people that he met. We talked about glass, metal, Penland, and him working for Harvey K. Littleton. I was in awe of his knowledge of process and the history of craft. 

Kenny visited the studio that I was renting when I first came to town and it was there that I saw him really light up. I was working on a forge and he gave me some colloidal silica to coat the liner with. I think he realized my love of tools when he stopped by and saw everything I had moved from Milwaukee. In the next several years we would get together from time to time, usually during the summer months. I remember us talking about the Land Cruiser that he had since I used to drive my FJ40 over to his place. He would be getting rid of building materials or tools and I would usually end up stopping by to pick things up. I was just in awe of what he built for he and Lisa. All of his glass tools were built by him and you could just tell that he got things done and made things happen. I loved talking to him. He stopped by my home studio several times when I moved there and we worked on developing a ceramic wheel modification together for Lisa. 

It's difficult to think that he's gone.  

Thoughts of Kenny have filled my heart and mind as I have thought about times I spent talking with Kenny. Kenny was so kind and generous and I truly valued the times that I got to hear about his time growing up in the Midwest and his time at Penland. I felt a deep connection to Kenny. He was good to me and I always felt encouraged by him. Maybe it was the midwestern boy connection, or the genuine love of making, or his resourcefulness to be able to build anything; Kenny was truly one of a kind. I was so so impressed by him and looked up to his brilliance. I feel so grateful to have known Kenny and to have had the opportunity to talk about making things and what it means to be a father and artist. 

Kenny will be deeply missed.

Ken Carder talks about being invited to work with Harvey Littleton. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:00.

Ken Carder: I went to school as an art student and didn’t get involved with glass until after I’d been in school on and off for a few years, and when I got interested in glass I had an opportunity actually to come down and work for Billy and Katie Bernstein—William and Katherine Bernstein for a summer kind of thing. So I left Bowling Green, Ohio and it came down to work for Billy and Katie as a apprentice, I guess you’d call it, and I worked there for three or four months, and before I was going to return back to Ohio, we went to Harvey’s studio to do cold working, because at the time a lot of the small studios, independent studios, around that part of North Carolina didn’t have really good cold shops for cutting and grinding. Everybody could blow glass but they didn’t have very good facilities for cutting and polishing and things. So a lot of people would go up to Harvey’s. Harvey was generous enough to let people come into his studio and use their cold shops. So Billy and I drove up about a half hour drive or so from where they lived over by Celo Lake [North Carolina]. We came up to Harvey’s studio to cold work and Harvey was was was in a ruckus about me wanting to get find a printmaker because his printmaker—he just started this process of printing off of glass plates was going to be leaving, and Billy introduced me and my last name is Carder, C-R-D-R, and Harvey got a big kick out of that because Frederick Carder was the gentleman that started Steuben and I think Harvey actually probably knew Fredrick Carder when Harvey was quite young. And he wanted to know what I knew about printmaking and I’d taken a couple printmaking classes, and I had done a lot of drawing so I knew a little bit about paper, so he hired me as a printmaker and this was huge because I had just gotten introduced to glass basically not much more than a year before, and I was really really interested to it and things, so the next thing I know I’m—you know, hired to work for Harvey Littleton, and I hadn’t even finish my undergrad degree and had only about a year or so experiencing glass—maybe just a little over a year, and then the next thing I know I’m in North Carolina working at Harvey’s studio and the printmaker ended up not leaving, so—her name was Sandy, Sandy Wilcox. She stayed and Harvey didn’t need two printmakers, so he put me in cold shop and then eventually into the hot shop, and I had some carpentry skills so I ended up being involved with building a new print studio, and that was this huge door that opened for me, because all of a sudden I’m working in Harvey’s studio and there’s these fantastic international visiting artists coming by to work and do prints and being in the hot shop, and it was close to proximity to Penland and there was a community of glass artists that were former residents at Penland: Mark Peiser and Katie and Billy Bernstein and Rob Levin and Steve Edwards and Harvey’s son John [Littleton] and daughter-in-law Kate [Vogel], you know, were in the area.

Ken Carder discusses the importance of the Penland School of Craft as an “environmental utopia.” Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:55.

Ken Carder: Oh, it’s just, you know, you could go on for hours about why Penland’s important. Especially its involvement of Bill and Jane Brown in the early sixties and things it coincided with the resurrection of traditional craft materials coupled with the whole sixties idea of a certain type of independent thinking and what was happening in art schools around the country and what was happening with a younger population around the world essentially. You know, and Penland was this very idealistic place in the mountains of North Carolina where the surroundings were absolutely beautiful. And then you have an environment that’s basically a creative utopia. You know, where you got people working in all these different materials, and building equipment to work with these materials and the technology was being developed from the ground up, you know [laughs] literally from the dirt up, and it was a very inspiring environment, because when you get that many different creative minds in a very small location, things really bubble up and sparks fly and and it’s just amazing things that can happen, and that, you know, started in the sixties. So by the time I got there in the early eighties, it was a creative force to be reckoned with, you know, there was so much things going on in ceramics and metalworking and iron working and glass, and there was, you know, people that were working in photography and it was just a super creative environment.

Ken Carder discusses the importance of Bill Brown’s artists’ residency program at Penland. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:35.

Ken Carder: Let me mention one more thing—Bill Brown created this artist-in-residency idea at Penland, and it was—basically, the foundation of it was to bridge between working with a material and trying to develop that material to a point where you could sustain your livelihood from working with ceramics, or working with glass, or metals. It was a way—the residency program was a period where you could live and stay at Penland and build equipment and develop your skills and try to find in established markets where you could sustain your lifestyle being a creative craft artist. And when I say craft, it’s not necessarily—it’s just describing what would at that time been considered craft disciplines—weaving, ceramics, glass, metals, woodworking, things that we associate with like traditional vocabulary of craft and stuff. But that residency program was this grace period between either, you know, undergrad, grad school or whatever you were doing prior, if your goal was to be a working artist and sustain your lifestyle as a working artist, Bill had this vision where if you could give people that little break right there at the beginning and they were in a very creative environment where they could sort of network out and develop their work to a point where it was interesting and accomplished, then they could get over that hump. And once they got things started they could keep it rolling, and he was instrumental in that, and people that came through that decided to stay in the area because you know, but that point you’re a little spoiled because it’s a beautiful environment, but it’s also a very creative environment. And at the time land and property was still rural, western North Carolina, so the property values were not as inflated as they were in a lot of the more developed urban areas around the country and things, so it was very affordable also to stay in that area, and so a lot of people did. And then, you know, once those seeds were planted they grew.

You can hear these conversations in Kenny's words here.

mower drama

Last week the plastic cover on my Exmark mower gave way. There are brass threaded bosses that are a part of the blower shroud. The metal recoil starter assembly is bolted on top. I bought the mower used and there were only a couple bolts holding the starter assembly on when I bought it; becuae the plastic had already cracked around the bosses. Well it finally gave way on a couple more of the bolts and there was very little holding it on. 

I searched and searched for a new plastic shroud. It turns out that Kohler discontinued the part and it didn't look like the new part had the threaded bosses so it wasn't looking too good for replacing the part. I came across the original part number for sale though and even though there were no pictures to confirm it was right; I ordered it. Well what do you know? it was the correct part. 

I bolted the part on Friday afternoon to have it ready for mowing on Saturday. I also gave it a good cleaning. I think I have a leaking valve cover so I need to fix that next. The heat sheild on the muffler rusted off last week. I told Jill that we have to keep this thing running for a long time. I can't afford a new mower. 

Who knows how many hours it had on it before I bought it from a guy who was using it for a lawn service business. As I was hunting for parts I figured out that this Emark came from the factory with a Kawasaki engine so he must have replaced it at some time with the Kohler ZT720-3016 engine at some point. I've had this mower since we bought our place and it's been a good mower. I put a few sets of blades on it, all new belts, new deck wheels, a new drive tensioner spring, and pretty much just kept it greased up. I like that I can rebuild most of it, if needed and it's built like a tank. It's simple too. I like this Kohler engine too. I found a NOS motor on Marketplace for a good price, but it was in Pennsylvania and pick up only. I'll have to keep my eyes pealed for spare parts for the entire motor so I can keep servicing this thing for many years to come.

All of that said, I'm going to need to do a refresh on the engine at some point after this season. I also want to look for a single wheel sulkie/velkie because my two wheel velkie it starting to see some serious wear. The new plastic cover makes it look better than it actually is...lipstick on a pig.

 

shoemaker

 

Well it doesn't get much better than this. I think I might need to take up shoe making when I retire...

metals student accomplishments

The Chair of my Department made this poster to highlight student accomplishments from the past year. 18 of the 25 exhibitions on this list came out of the Metals area. Alissa Goble had an exceptional year. I'm really glad the students are making good work and being recognized for their efforts.

 

silver soldering organization

Yesterday, I spent some time in the campus studio working on more organization. Our soldering bench has several shallow drawers and for the past year each drawer had a different item in it related to soldering. The drawer space was underutilized and honestly a mess. Plus students never put things back in the correct drawers. We used to get some nice pieces of multicolored HDPE donated by a company that makes kids playground equipment and so I used a piece of 3/4" HDPE and made a layout for all of our main silver soldering tools. I spent most of the afternoon tweaking the design while to piece was still on the router only to take the first piece off and discover that my containers of flux were not inset deep enough to close the drawer..ugh. Oh well, the torch tip recesses were over cut by the time I nailed down the outline, so I fixed the depth of cut and recut a new piece at the end of the day. I test fit this piece this morning and I am cutting a second one for our other soldering bench top drawer. Now we'll have more storage space in the rest of the drawers. I need to start my Metals studio improvements and tools website with file downloads for all of these things so people can have the files to modify and use for their studios. Someday...

Also, side-thought: these kinds of projects are super gratifying. Maybe it's because I feel like this piece should be around for a while and be used at least for as long as I am teaching here. It should also help with teaching and I'll feel better when I'm not hunting for a tool when I'm trying to demonstrate something. Over the years it feels like these kinds of jobs are the filler between personal projects. Regardless, it's good to do these things.