Custom Candle Holder for stained glass window

I thought it would be a neat idea to have soft candle light illuminate that Stained glass window so today I made a candle holder for the one side of it at the base so it can hold a decent sized candle in the middle and two votives.

I layed out the pattern on some sheet aluminum using rulers for making guide lines, a compass for the center curve and a french curve for the two end curves then cut out the tabs that I would be riveting to the face of the holder.  They go on the inside so it doesn't really matter what they look like as it will be above eye level.  I could have just cut straight tabs as they didn't overlap when bent over.  I cut the sharp edges off too.  Then riveted it all together and sealed with some caulk which is drying now.  I will put it on later tonight and take another picture!

I'll add another pic later!

Stained Glass Archway

Todays Project, other than fixing a broken stem on my sink faucet was to restore this stained glass window that originally went about the front door to my house.  When they put the porch and a new door on, they took this out.  It is in pretty bad condition as it is just about 100 years old.  I researched how to restore stained glass and being that I don't have the tools and such I would try some ideas that I had with a heat gun as it is really wavy and some of the panels are falling out of the lead caming.

First step was to vacuum it off, and then I lightly scrubbed it with very little soapy water.  Around the edges I removed the paint on the glass with lacquer thinner as best I could.  I tried to heat up the caming with the heat gun and push the panels back into place but at risk of cracking the glass, etc... I decided to just leave it the way it was and clean it best I can.

All cleaned, I drilled some holes and put in eye-bolts aided by wax so I didn't crack the wood.  Then I fashioned two S-hooks out of some nails that I found around. 

I drilled some holes in the middle of my track lighting.  Wrapped the other eye-bolts in a hefty amount of electrical tape and hung it up!  I am kind of wondering what it would look like hanging upside down.  Might be even cooler, but at the distance that I drilled the holes for the eye-bolts I might be at a weak part of the wood frame.  Looks pretty cool!

Most likely you have no interest in seeing this manifold again or even care that it doesn't leak or if the mash tun (cheap cooler) is tilted that it gets all but like 3 ounces of wort to drain, but I am stoked about it!

Next project, gluten free beer!  It won't be so easy learning starch conversions of exotic grains!  Or will it?

Find out in the next installment of Beer is Good Food!

 In the end, it's all worth it!  Slainte!

Water Crafts Involving Barley!

Hi Everyone.  Haven't heard from me in a while have ya?  I've been trying to come up with low cost ideas to keep me busy and have been turning to another water craft that I love, Homebrewing.  I had done a couple dozen batches of extract/grain beers which is fun and the beer is wonderful, but it's not really like brewing the real thing, I had the equipement laying around since the day I had originally gotten into it.  I bought it off someone named Al several years ago, but never used the mash or lauter tuns.  It's actually cheaper to do all grain beer than the extract beer so I decided to finally dive in!  I'd started a brew club (lucky13brewclub.ning.com) at the Grey Lodge Pub with the support of the owner Mike Scoats and have been learning lots from all the members and have been getting lots of support from them and decided it was time!  I don't have the money to build my next board and need ideas to plan that one out anyway since it is a new idea for a wood surfboard, so I deicided to devote some time into my love of beer.  Life has dealt me some ups and downs lately and what is best to do when you are down, relax, sit back and have a homebrew, then make some homebrew!  I used to go downtown to buy me beer supplies to Homesweet Homebrew, but haven't been able to make it there as I drive a very LARGE truck and it is a mega pain in the azz to park there.  So I have been to Barry's Homebrew just off Girard and Second.  Nick is a cool dude, but I am usually just in and out.  I miss sitting and chatting with George and Nancy at Homesweet.  It's just a product of my life. Even though I am out of work, I am too busy to sit and chat for very long.  I'm impatient as well.  But so here I am, blogging about something.  It needed to be done.  I miss my hobby.  Who knows, blogging can go on my CV!

Blogspot has changed their format so please bear with me as I figure it out.  I wanna talk about this last batch of beer that I brewed.  I brewed to previous ones that are just starting to ripen in the bottles.  Those batches I just threw together not even researching yeasts or anything.  I went to Nick's and he was out of the yeast I wanted and didn't have the Demerara sugar I needed, so I supplemented with Sugar In the Raw which is very much like demerara and just used generic safeale 4 for my yeast.  I bottled them and remembered how much bottling sux.  Its not that bad, but in the cold shop, it sort of sux.  I do all my work out in the cold shop which was a pain getting water and all that so I started projects out there to make it more convenient.  While the beers are getting better in the bottles I took on my first project.  A sink. 

I went and got a cheap utility sink and supplies with the financial backing of my father.  Thanks DAD!!!  While pondering location, etc... I opened a "My Uncles Left Nut" nut brown one week old.  BLAH!  Tasted like priming sugar! I drank it anyway and found my spot!  I had to uproot the flooring because the subfloor is rotted from leaking roof.  I found an old sink drain and my uncle (left nut-less) soldered the metal drain to it and we built the sink!  I ran a length of hose to it and voila!  Utility Sink!  It's perfect!  It's only a pain in the azz when it freezes at night and I gotta get my cousin to shut the water off!  But thanks to climate change, there hasn't been many freezing nights!

In the top left corner of the first pic there is my second project.  Well, actually, it is the second half of my second project.  The first half of that project was seeing if a cornelius keg (tall slim 5 gallon soda keg that they no longer use in restaurants) would fit into that wee fridge.  With a little finagling of the upper freezer section, the kegs fit!  I just folded down the aluminum freezer in the top of it so it was flush with the back of the fridge.  I tested the fridge (It's my college fridge which just so happened to use to fit 3 cases of pounder cans in it) and it works fine (after 25 years)! The next step was to clean and tune up the corny kegs which came with the original purchase of all that equipement that I bought off of Al several years ago.  They had moldy beer in them for like 5 years so they needed a cleaning AND they needed new o-rings.  So I was off to visit Nick at Barry's Homebrew for supplies while I was there I checked out his CO2 regulators.  75 bucks!  I thought I had one in the shop, so icks-nae on the egulator-rae!  Turns out, all the ones in the shop were either broken or for other gases so when the time came I went off to Welco welding gas supply on Church Street at the bequest of my uncle who shall remain left nut-less.  Ha Ha Ha.  We had a bottle of CO2 for a welder and I took it with me and got a regulator and a new bottle from Jim at Welco for 60 bucks.  DEAL!  The right nutted wonder saved me some cash there!  After much cleaning and hole drilling in the fridge, I place some cool stickers on her and I now have a kegerator waiting for my current fermenting beer to enter it happily and leave it cold to enter my belly and those of some friends that I intend to invite over for one.

This here is my third beer project.  During some reorganization and cleaning of the shop I found some of my Uncle's refrigerator copper coil.  So at the financial backing of my father, Thanks DAD!!!, I got some more parts and made this immersion chiller.  I was using a huge ice bath to cool my keggle (keg/kettle that you see in the background) which proved to be expensive for the ice and and the splashing was too close to contaminating my sterilized beer.  There were a couple of designs to choose from to chill the boiling sterile beer (wort) and all would have been easy enough to build, but this one fit my needs better than the others and may even be easier to clean than the other designs.

 Hey Blogspot!  You suck Now!  I cannot for the life of me figure out this mess!  It took me seven years to figure out your last format and now you are messing with me again!  How dare you mess with my technical ignorance!  For those of you who don't want to read the small print in the caption, a repost: 
This here is my third beer project.  During some reorganization and cleaning of the shop I found some of my Uncle's refrigerator copper coil.  So at the financial backing of my father, Thanks DAD!!!, I got some more parts and made this immersion chiller.  I was using a huge ice bath to cool my keggle (keg/kettle that you see in the background) which proved to be expensive for the ice and and the splashing was too close to contaminating my sterilized beer.  There were a couple of designs to choose from to chill the boiling sterile beer (wort) and all would have been easy enough to build, but this one fit my needs better than the others and may even be easier to clean than the other designs.

Fourth Project.  Mash tun manifold.

This is called Sparging the grain.

I, for the life of me, do not know why they made this so difficult to post on here.  Do they not want people to use this blog arena?  Need it be so challenging?  I feel like a gladiator in a duel to the death with the digital underworld of ones and twos!  So anyway, above you are seeing what I did today.  If you look up to the top picture you will see a red cooler.  That is my mash tun.  Hey, it is also pictured beside me here with warm sparge water and steam rising from it.  The mash tun is used to convert the starches in the grain (in this case, barley) by way of activating the enzymes on the cracked (milled at the store) barley husks themselves by steeping the grain in 160 degree water for an hour.  This activates the many enzymes on the barley husks to change the starch into sugar.  In nature the starches and proteins are broken down for food for the germinating seeds.  In our case, they will be broken down for food for the yeasts later on to ferment and create the alcohol in which is so beloved to all.  Well, the old mash tun had a stainless steel braided hose in the bottom for a drain.  I found it cumbersome as it always got caught around my mixing paddle.  It also seemed to collapse.  But it really worked fine to tell you the truth, and it was really easy to clean.  The manifold that I made out of copper to replace it is supposed to work better, but I can forsee some issues with cleaning, etc... that may indeed prove to be a step sideways.  But, alas, I had fun making it.  It only cost my father, Thanks DAD!!!, a couple bucks for a few copper elbows and tees.  The rest of the copper I had laying around.  Next time I will use new copper though as cleaning up old copper tubing that has rust laying in it is a huge pain in the arse!

So pictured in the mashtun there is Wiss Brau ESB.  It is actually Nick's recipe from Barry's Homebrew.  He gave it to me out of the kindness of his heart!  Of course I modified the brewing times for the hops he had in it a little here and there.  It has more hops than I ever used in a beer so I tended to shorten brewing times and amounts here and there just to mix it up and try and keep it a little more mild.  It's his take on an old English styled bitter, which are, to me, more mild and enjoyable than a lot of the IPA's out there.  Don't shoot me, but I'm not a fan of the cascade hops in so many American style IPA's.  And I like malty too.  Hey, dare to be different, right?

Alright, well, these are some things that I have been doing while I get my head together.  Diversions of sorts.  I need to build something for this next Mystic Boat Show though.  I was hoping to develope a Stand Up Paddleboard for the show.  It's proving difficult as I deal with the excessive weight issues the board will have to it's cheap lightweight Chinese counterparts.  Not many of these puppies that you see are made in the USA.  Most all are from China and they weigh like 15 pounds.  It's good that they are light so one person can carry them,  they are cumbersome.  When you have them made of wood, the weight skyrockets and so does the cost to the buyer.  Two major issues if I want to ever sell them.  I gotta put on my thinking took!  If you have ideas, shoot me an email!! 

Thanks for reading and have an excellent day!

SO!!!!

Tonight I'm gonna play catch-up (I like that better than ketchup, which one is Heinze?).

Follow ups will be on the folk fest, the Point Pleasant Boat show, the Independence Seaport Museums wooden boat festival AND the Homebrew Club's visitor Ben Potts!

I hope to see you tonight!

-Sean

The Philadelphia Folk Festival, my pics...

My introduction to the Philly Folk Fest:

In need of a vacation, I had not the money to go surfing with Corky Carroll at his paradise resort in southern Mexico and was looking for something to ''get me out of the city". I was listening to WXPN and they were chatting up the folk fest and I remember my uncle telling me how fun it was in the late 60's early 70's and I even knew a few people who still go so I got on the horn and talked to my buddy's brother Joe who is a volunteer there and I am so glad that I did! I don't think I would have survived without his advice. I'm pretty industrious at times but from 6AM when I drove through Harleysville on my way to Schwenksville the confusion started. Well actually the makeshift roadsigns were actually spot on and really helpful, just that everyone and everything else was not from the time that I pulled up to the main gate, or "Point". And not to bust their balls or anything, I mean the whole shebang is run by volunteers on a shoestring budget so there is going to be communication breakdowns. No worries, it all worked out really well and I made some really good friends. Hopefully they will read this and shoot me some of the awesome pics that they had taken of all of us so I can introduce you to them.

Thursday, 6AM, Schwenksville: On a tip from my buddy Joe I got there early. The ride was dark and rainy and my windshield wipers on Moby were streaking making sign reading just a bit tougher for a 40 something with waning eyesight. I drive straight up to the "Point" or main gate without a hitch (I took that off Moby so I didn't bust my shins on the monstrous piece of metal in the center of Moby's bumper. That was a play at humor. Let me know if it worked or not). But I really did remove the hitch on my truck, just so you know, because it will devastate a naked shin. I ask what the ins and outs of this waiting to get into the show thing was and they had no clue. So I drove up to the next gate, same deal, completely oblivious to knowledge of such questions of Life, the Universe, and Everything. One girl does tell me of a staging area for incoming camper traffic up the road so I head that way, the gates are closed so I park in front of them. After a few hours I see people at the entrance to the staging area and think they are letting people in. NOPE. Just volunteer firemen to run the staging area, so I go back to parking in what later will be the exit to the staging area and shoot the sh!t with a couple of the volunteer fireman for a while and eventually they send me on my way to go park in the local firehouse. { HINT #1 } If you get there early, park there. You will know where it is because they send everyone early on this loop to keep driving around until they open that area. Well, it was still raining hard and I found the firehouse while the rain eventually faded.

9:50 AM Thursday: Moby roars and we get on our way...into traffic. LOG JAM! It was now the waiting game to get into the staging area for campers. 45 minutes it took to get into the staging area and then another 45 to get into the camp.

11:15 AM Thursday: I start packing up my wheelbarrow {HINT #2} a wheelbarrow or other sort of cart is MOST important because you have to hoof all your gear by foot to your hopefully available campspot...Thanks once again Joe for this awesome tip. But of course, I do this wrong and try to get into the camp without getting my bracelet first, but of course, they don't know where to send me to get one! LOL OK. Industrious Sean listens to other campers making fun of people like me and I eventually hoof my crap up to the main gate in the swelter of heat and humidity created by the sun and the rain. {HINT #3} Bring one of those sun shade things! There is NO shade to be had, you will need one for over your camping spot and tent too if you can wing it because the sun is going to wake your hung over butt up in the AM by 8AM!!!

So I get my spot, one of the last ones in the area I might add, and all of a sudden the area is jammed up with hopeful campers. My tent is a little out of line as I was hoping to have some space around the tent, but I was taking up space for others and that is how I met Paul, Warren (Bandana Santa as he will later be referred to by some would be partyers), Thom and Lori. I moved my tent a few feet for them and Voila!! they were able to fit their tents in too! So were were right on the painted line in which you weren't allowed to camp any closer, we had a view of the parking lot, but most important, we had space AND a view of the lightning storms that rolled over camp just after everyone got set up! The weather was awesome!

Well, we were all set up. I made a bite to eat, the only time that I would have to cook thanks to the gracious hospitality of my neighbors, a story that I will soon get to. Red beans and rice with some canned organic chicken. Oh, yeah, peas too! YUM!

Things have mellowed out, camp was set up, my belly full so I walked around to check out what is going on the day before and I landed some good pre-party and pre-muddy pics of the local campers and musicians:
I think this was a group of thespians. I have no idea, I never saw them do anything, not because they didn't do anything, but it's just that there is SO much going on, it is difficult to see it all. {HINT #4} The party starts well after midnight and all the stage shows, and on Sunday it didn't start until 2:30 AM and there is MUCH to see and do!






I was keeping my eyes out for cool tie dye ideas, this was an excellent home made tie dye! There were sooo many good tie dyes that I felt inferior. I recently gave tie dying a go and messed up the chemistry some how. I'll figure it out the next time someone gives me a lot of free t shirts. LOL







A lot of people came in light camping. My buddy Joe the volunteer has pictures and video of people racing to get in the gates with all their gear flailing and falling down getting trampled just to get a good spot. Crazy.









The PHiladelphia Jug Band. You gotta look these guys up. They aren't playing here at the time, but they were later that evening. This mostly looks like family and friends, but the band has banjos, geetar, hammer dolcimer (I think that is what it was, it was described as the precursor to the piano that the Knights Templar brought back to Europe and invented piano keys instead of the the drumstick type hammers they used to use playing it, losing some of the flexibility of the hammers that keyed pianos just cannot reproduce), jews harp, Jug (of course), and a fellow who played a saw blade with a violin bow! Great stuff! I have to look them up online and see if i can find some tunes!



This was the Pig Fockers encampment. They seemed to be playing Beatles type tunes most of the time when I would walk by and stop for a listen. This is still Thursday so they weren't playing yet, but later that night....






Bottom Feeders had one wicked flag up! Me loves catfish!








Another encampment with a cool tie dye. I think they were playing music as well. Who wasn't? Me! LOL







So that was the scene Thursday afternoon before all the mud, before all the partying. I went back to camp, then came the rain!

6:30 PM Thursday: A storm is a brewin'! To the southwest we all back at camp could see it. It came on us fast like they would for the rest of the event. Next door Warren had gone home and Paul was there by himself. I didn't think much about the other camps, I just wanted to keep my stuff dry so I moved everything into my tent. I love my tent. Thank you Tammie Painter for giving me the impulse to buy that tent so many years ago because it's really good in heavy weather. The storm hits, first the cooling winds, then they get stronger and are accompanied by large raindrops and mega lightning bolts which indicated to me that it was high time to get inside my tent with my chair, my beer, etc... What I didn't know is that Paul was outside the whole time holding his sun shade down from blowing away in the lightning blasts! I was very comfy inside.

After an hour it passed and my new friends and I sat and watched the lightning blast away at Philadelphia to the east. It was nature's light show! I did a tour of the campsites again on my way to the show on the campground stage, which was lame. A young fellow tried picking me up. That was different. I knew his game, I wasn't down. He walked off, I listened to the music until it went over. It was Funk and it was like taking medicine when I was younger. I walked around camp and some people were jamming, but I was kind of tired and then my buddy Joe calls and says to take a nap and come back out around 2AM. I woke up and 4:30AM and thought it was too late and had no intention of going out. I should have, it was party central!

I went to bed around 2:30 AM just after this, what looked to me to be a flying burning paper bag floated over the encampment from one end to another about 300 feet in the air! There were 3 that night! They were some Japanese flying candelabras or something. I didn't think anyone would believe me the next day so I took a picture. They didn't really believe me until Friday night!




The next morning I awoke to cursing of the heat of the sun at 8AM! Hence the need for a shade canopy, so you can get some sleep! LOL

So that was my first day at the Fest. It was very wordy, but for good reason. The rest of the event was just that, event after event after event and I will have to give that a thorough going over on my next post. Maybe, I will get some pics from the others to comment on as well.

more to come....

Laminating the Hull

For a good portion of the summer it was too hot and humid to do any fiberglassing because of the finicky nature of epoxy and the shop isn't climate controlled, but I bet we could have hopped on this if we had to. I've been reading up on the topic and you can pretty much epoxy in most conditions. I've just been scared since the catastrophe that happened to the Wormhole fiberglassing her. We had a span of good weather for about three days last week and took advantage of them. There were some disappointments with some discoloration of the wood and we really can't track down the cause. It's a streaking and a lightening of color from one epoxied section to the next, possibly due to the epoxy aging in the cup even though it is still workable. The use of laquer thinner may have prevented that, or may have hastened it, I'm not sure. Making a fresh batch of epoxy for every section may have prevented it as well. Like I said, we aren't sure. It's not overly noticeable and when the varnish gets on there it will hopefully be even less noticeable. Either way, we stuck to our guns and got it done. Perhaps we can get her in the Philly wooden boat show this fall (OCT. 8).

She has since been sanded down again and is getting ready for fiberglass tape down the keel and stems for structure. Basically we laid out the glass and painted on the epoxy to laminate the board by wetting out the glass with the brush, we then squeegeed off the exess epoxy so the glass didn't float in any epoxy puddles creating waves that might get sanded off and create a weak spot in the glass if it gets sanded through. That Lam coat leaves air pockets in the weave below the glass and above it so the next coat (which we did in two hours while the first coat was still curing to have that chemical bond between layers) fills in those gaps, and is called the fill coat. The next coat (also done in less than 2 hours) plops a layer on top of the glass and can be sanded (if need be) without sanding into the glass itself. We had some lumpy spots and dry spots so we even did a fourth (Hot coat) really thin within the two hour time frame again. Then the next day we sanded with the longboard and 100 grit paper. It needs more sanding before we get to the fiberglass tape runner and then another full coat of epoxy. There are probably a half dozen different ways to approach what we did and we will figure out what works best for us along the way.







Pretty cool bucket sculpture. Look at that color of the wood on that boat! NICE!









Hah! You get to see what it looks like right side up!






My dad is pretty proud of the boat. We haven't come up with a name yet. I was tossing around the idea of Kindred Spirit. Kinda too pretentious maybe.

And here are some of the other fruits of summers labor! Those feckin tomatoes are incredible!!!