Nibbles the Shark

Wow. How I forgot to post Nibbles is beyond me! I made this a few months back. He began as a few chunks of broken lumber mill bandsaw blade that'd almost rusted through my friend Barbara gave me. One chunk was somewhat straight and could be bowed to look like half of a bear trap, which made me think of a shark's mouth. When I got those bits home I straightened them out and made them into two halves of a jaw, which did indeed look like a bear trap. I then scrounged around, made a few calls, and started building a shark from the mouth back, which seems the most appropriate way to do that.

Nibbles is almost entirely made from bicycle and motorcycle parts aside from the stand with his nose being a football helmet face guard. I took him out to art walk a few months ago and got a great response. He turns on the stand like a weather vane and can be removed to move it around. He's *just* light enough for me to carry around and heave onto the stand.















I'm debating whether to set his eyes to light up red and have a switch or remote control to set off the horn in his mouth to make people jump.

Gifts for a Friend

A while back I went to Austin, TX to visit my good friend Barbara Tomlinson and hang out, climb rocks, and lounge around for a week. While she was at work she asked me to make her something with a small mountain of unused electrical components and general goodies she had around her place, and these are what I came up with over a day or two. The gears turn on the panel piece and I made her the archers since she's been cross that I sold the archer a while back and it wasn't to her. Sisyphis and the horse just seemed to pop up and that mouse ball was asking for someone to roll it.

Been lazy at posting lately. Sorry!

My sorry butt's been slacking off with S2S lately what with house renovations and sharp-tongued bankers, but here's some shade-tree stuff I've been working on the last little long while:

Helped my friend Bri out with a school project. Ever seen a chain-link fence cap as a mouse's head?























I managed to get my hands on a 2ft section of railroad track a month or two ago and decided to try a little forge work with the track as an anvil, so I also tossed together a coal forge from a pipe, old sink, blow dryer, and some of a deceased desk:






























With the best thing forged so far other than my tongs being this:


Twisting an inch thick chunk of glowing hot steel like cold butter and seeing the scale crumble away is pretty damn awesome. I'm seriously debating making a propane forge.















I've also gotten my hands on a gas motor for a bicycle and put it on a bike frame that I stretched out and modified pretty heavily. It started life like this:













and now looks like this:



I'm still wearing in the motor, but once I do I'll strip the frame, add another top tube in the middle of the frame, and hopfully braze up an in-frame long tank for it too before I paint it. Flat black works for now....



My shade tree in the back yard has been making a decent workshop (barring rain) after I made a picnic table, so I made another little bike to take my mind off things that don't involve sizzling hot metal:


















It's a crap photo, but the square nail exhaust came out very well with a little baby-forging and a coat of shellac instead of clear coat makes it feel awesome to hold.

And finally here's a preview of something in-progress that I'm still not sure where I'm going with it, but I'm pretty happy so far:















And a picture my friend Ernest was nice enough to do a great job taking:









































More to come as I get the latest metal man and whatever else I get done finished.