Finally.  FINALLY!  I’m working on sculpture again.  It’s not much, but it’s more progress than I’ve made, more work than I’ve been able to do, in over a month, and, man, does it ever feel good!  I’m coming up from the basement with sooty black marks in random places on my face, and my fingers look slightly blackened and they smell like metal.  Life is good.

This is the top gear for my chain lift.  Getting things to line up and track properly could prove to be a challenge that will have me cursing and swearing on future blogs, but I trust you’ll all get a big kick out of that anyway.  The chain is called ladder chain.  I found it on the web.  The gear is out of a windup clock, because I thought the gears that you could buy to fit the chain perfectly were ugly, being plain black plastic.  This is way more hip.  It will likely be the source of much cursing (aforementioned), but you can’t tell me that it looks unbelievably boss.  The bracket holding the whole mess is a cut up and bent harmonica reed plate.  I think I found that one in the kitchen, or maybe the bathroom…or maybe…it was on my dresser.  I don’t know.  It’s serving a better purpose now.

I hope to have more RBS niftiness to blog about as the weeks go by, but progress on these things can be slow.  Tonight I found out that I need to get the shaft for the lower gear turned down at one end, and I don’t own a machine that can do that.  Kind of a problem.  We’ll see how I figure that out.  Much of the immediate work will be getting the lift positioned and mounted properly.  It’s not the most interesting work, but there’s no way around it.  I’m just happy to have my hands on metal once again.