Toaster sculpture!

Our toaster broke. Everyone was very sad. Except me.

Nothing personal, Oster T. Toaster, but I've got an oxyacetylene torch with your name on it. I set myself the challenge of making something interesting.

I misled Oster about his name, by the way. But I do like what it does say.

So, after discarding the non-recyclable plastic and saving the wiring and electronics for other purposes, here's what's available.

When there are obvious faces, it seems foolish to ignore them.

First time with the cutting attachment. It is, apparently, wildly oversized for the thin steel I am trying to cut. The preheating flame burned through immediately without oxygen, so I just melted the face away instead. Not the intended result, but an interesting one.

And the direction is set.

Hmm. No.

Yes. OK, time to find the rest of the body parts. Hmm...

And there it is! Time to switch the torch to the welding tip and braze this guy together.

I'm going to need a bigger quenching bucket.

This seemed like the point where adding things would make it worse and not better. So it's done!

There are more and better photos of the cleaned up sculpture in my shop.

Reusing packaging cardboard for shipping boxes

I'm embarrassed to say that it's taken me this long to figure out that the greenest source of shipping boxes for my handmade jewelry is to make them myself of cardboard that I would otherwise recycle. The cardboard used in cereal boxes and similar seems about right.

I opened the box along its seams and cut out an appropriate chunk, then laid out a simple box plan on the inside. The bicycle chain earrings that the box will contain are shown.

I used scissors to cut out the shape and separate the glue flaps, and then scored the fold lines lightly with a utility knife.

After folding all of the scored lines to about 90 degrees, it's ready to glue.

One drop of cyanoacrylate glue on each tab, and just a moment's pressing of each joint, and it's a box. Very quick, very easy, strong, custom, and extra enviro credit.

To ship these steel filings earrings, which have rare earth magnets at their cores, I needed to keep them separated so they didn't grind together throughout shipping. So I just glued up a little insert, into which I put a small bag of filings to renew the earrings on arrival or as needed.