Day 344: Burning with Bernie

Bernie came over for a short visit tonight.  My top mystery project from about 12 days ago was building a battery charger woodburner for his birthday.  His wife contacted me and was looking for ideas for his upcoming birthday.  I suggested building a burner for him as we'd been talking about it for a while.  She loved the idea and gave me the go ahead to get it done.  I delivered it to her last weekend, a full month before his birthday.  Bernie and I talked a couple of times since then, including a conversation about building a burner on a future visit.  I told him I'd start to pull together the parts necessary as some of them are pretty specific.   In reality I was just buying time, knowing that his birthday was still close to a month away and that the burner was already at his house, as it turns out it was just feet from where his lathe is and where he spends a large portion of his time. 

I received a call from him the other day, he was cleaning out his wife's car and happened across a cardboard box in the back seat.  Clearly the cat was out of the bag.  Tonight he came over to make some custom brands and to practice some burning.  Together we made a handful of custom brands (spiral, horseshoe, pointed tip, and coil) and then practiced burning on a curved surface.  Burning on the outside of curved surface like a hollow form is much different than burning on a flat surface, particularly when doing a somewhat regular pattern.  The surface area around the rim and around the base is so much smaller than the surface around the largest diameter so adjustments have to be made to the design to compensate.  We talked about the various ways to do that and wrapped things up as it looked like a storm was rolling in.