The alarms went off at 4Am. Gabe had a 6:20 Am flight this morning to High Cascade Snowboard camp in Oregon … and we weren’t going to be late. Gabe and I are not morning people.. Diane kindly wrangled us into the car by around 4:30.. We picked up Luke and made it to the Airport by about 5.. Here are Gabe and Luke looking wide awake.. (yeah)..

Gabe is really excited to be going to High Cascade.. It’s his second
year.there. He loves the place and gets to work with some really
awesome coaches. (as well as play dodge ball and eat cobra dogs).
Gabe will have Luke, Sumner, and Ralph out there to hang out with. I
think he’s really going to love it. Sam went there for a year.. so Gabe
is taking soem more amsstones out with him.

We at there and watched Gabe’s plane took off.. It was about 7 when we got home.. I went to sleep for 3 more hours… and Diane stayed up… That made for a very long day for her !

Around 11 Diane and I drove in to John M’s. (aka Yolk’s)shp to begin work on the iron casting course I’m takign this week. There are abotu a dozen of us akign it.. Each of us will cast one or more objects in pure iron. It’s such and amazing process.. My friends Homer and Kat turned me on to it. You can transform any object.. even soft objects into a pice of iron.. like this hat !.

Or this fish (made by Thea)

Here we are learnign the ins and outs of sand casting.> that’s Elijah from NewOrleans teaching the class.. he’s a master caster who’s come up to Vermont just to do this class for us. The other folks in the class there today include my friend Kat the welder, her intern Lucie (married to my firend Cesar) .. her other friend Julia (I think) , Susaqua, Thea .. They’re all very cool people.

So far they are also all women.. which is … interesting .. for a firesport like Iron casting..I’m sure I’m going to learn stuff here.

BTW.. I had to switch back to my old camera..I as borowwing Gabes.. but he needed his for camp. The flares in these pictures hare due to dirty optics.. I’ll have to find a way to clean it.

Here Elija shows us how to tamp the resen impregnated sand into the molds.

Here’s the small furnace that Elijah and Yolk build.. it burns chunks of coke.. and can melt a 50 pound batch of cast iron (from broken up radiators) in abut 15 minutes.

Julia and Luci practice lifting the ladel.. on casting day this will be filled with glowing hot melted iron.

Thea and I got our forms ready to make molds.. I’m making iron SamStones.. and a few decorative ‘E’s (Iron-E’s… get it ? .. ughhh)

So we put 100 pounds of sand in the mixer…

Measured out the resin and catalyst..

And put it in the mixer with the sand.. Here I am holding Thea’s reperator so she doesn’t breath the nasty resin vapors or the silica..

4 minutes of mixing.. and we now have 25 minutes to work the sand until it becomes rock.

Elijah helps me cromble the resin sand into my mold..

Then I tamp it down .. and leave it to cure.. I’ll come back later int he week to do the other half of the mold.. then next Saturday we pour the iron.

It was about 4:30 when we finally left there. I’d gotten much more done than I thought I would on this first day.. Diane stuck there with me through the whole thing (and on less than 4 hours of sleep).. You know you married the right person when something like that happens..

We got home and played with the dogs for awhile.. then went on a 12 mile bike ride.. 12 miles may not sound like much.. but we hadn’t ridden bikes in more than 2 years.. Diane called this the ‘weekend of different muscles’.. yesterday’s tube riding had required about a 2 hour abdominal crunch to make it through the shallows of the Huntington .. then I did about 2.5 hours of sything on the Rivershore trail.. again.. differnt muscles.. then todays’ ligging of 100 pound sacks of sand.. and then the bike rde.. Of all of them.. the bike ride was the touhest.. that particular sore muscle is making it difficult to sit right now 🙂

Finally about 8 Pm we gt the dogs out for a walk on the upper Rivershore.. They neede the run.. they both got in the wter to cool off.. it was in the mid 80’s by late afternoon.

I came home and did some sheetrock spackling in the barn in prep for the painting we’re goign to do in there this week. Then Diane and i cooked dinner. We heard from Gabe in Oregon.. he’s there safe and already having fun.

That’s about it for the day. It was long an fun.. and I’m beat.. but I still have a few hours of IBM work to do.. So I better get on it.. Talk to you tomorrow !.. Gnite all.. Gnite Sam !

-me