Art-o-Mat

Her­bert Hoover — Artist — is single-handedly try­ing to revive the econ­omy (and make up for his famous namesake’s inabil­ity to do the same in a pre­vi­ous down­turn) by means of his con­tri­bu­tion to the Art-o-Mat project.

Lisa and I recently attended an open­ing event for Portland’s first Art-o-Mat now resid­ing in the Alberta dis­trict. Know­ing that Her­bert was present in spirit, if not in per­son, we biked over to check out the fancy new mem­ber of the Art-o-Mat community.

Our new Art-o-Mat is a bright red hot-rod of a machine with obvi­ous care put into every detail from the nice paint details to the very act of trans­port­ing it safely to it’s new home at the Radio Room.

There were a few other peo­ple there to check out the new art dis­penser and one fine patron at the bar even offered to pur­chase my token from the bar ten­der. So off I went — token in hand — to find the object in question.

Sure enough, right there in the first slot, was Herbert’s pewter pret­zel. After feed­ing the token into the mag­nif­i­cent machine, the lit­tle white stan­dard­ized box with Herbert’s cus­tom label­ing emerged (from the slot no doubt used in the past for some­thing with a pic­ture of a camel) into the deliv­ery tray below.

The pewter pretzel

Know­ing that Herbert’s pre­vi­ous saltine offer­ing find’s life in poses and places through­out the world through his Cracker Tracker web­site, I fig­ured that this pret­zel had some­thing spe­cial to offer. So sure enough, as I was off to my shop in “the hole” (home of the P.90 cam­era) I encoun­tered a com­mon imped­i­ment — a freight train head­ing east along Sullivan’s Gulch. Rather than sim­ply wait for the train to pass as is my usual habit, it occurred to me that the pret­zel sit­ting on the seat next to me might offer a solu­tion. So I put on the park­ing brake and got out to test my hunch. As you can clearly see from the video below, the pret­zel came through in splen­did form. Watch and lis­ten closely and you too will find that the pret­zel posses the amaz­ing abil­ity to increase the speed of the pass­ing train.

Reminded that Herbert’s artis­tic skills also include pin­hole pho­tog­ra­phy and pleased with the time-saving ben­e­fits of this pewter object, I put the pret­zel away and made my way up to the shop to work on the lat­est pro­duc­tion of P.90 cameras.

Busy.
Not quite too busy but enough to keep me off the blog for a bit.
With the recent arrival of sum­mer weather in Port­land the sched­ule is top-heavy with the Bun­galoft project. A free­stand­ing Struc­tural Insu­lated Panel addi­tion fol­lowed by removal of all but the bath­room walls in our orig­i­nal 1928 bun­ga­low and the con­nec­tion of the two with an angu­lar breeze­way will be the real­iza­tion of the Bun­galoft con­cept (at least as we envi­sion it). It’s a small but inter­est­ing archi­tec­tural project that should make it to the pages of the blog at some point.

In the mean­time work on the 5 inch pan cam­era blue­tooth con­troller project continues.

The 28th Avenue Wood­work­ing Stu­dios (as I have now unof­fi­cially chris­tened this build­ing I work in) has some very inter­est­ing inhab­i­tants includ­ing Jason Andrew Designs. Jason has been work­ing on a beau­ti­ful series of fur­ni­ture pieces since he arrived. Fol­low­ing numer­ous con­ver­sa­tions about our respec­tive work, we embarked upon a bit of col­lab­o­ra­tion on Jason’s most recent design — a twist­ing, black-stained, Ash cof­fee table. Jason asked me to make a set of alu­minum feet for the tapered legs of the table. We’re look­ing at a few other designs for alu­minum feet and pulls.

I’m be look­ing for­ward to the usual bar­rage of sum­mer activ­ity includ­ing one of my favorites — the Adult Soap­box Derby.

Start­ing line at the Adult Soap­box Derby in Port­land, Oregon

The com­pet­i­tive spirit thrives and the water flies.