10-16-11

This week hasn’t been very exciting.

We went to a meeting on Friday about the retiree health insurance changes.

Friday evening, we went to watch the Santa Rosa High School football game. The JV’s won again 35 to 18. Harvey #7 made his first touch down in a game.

Saturday was the Home Coming dance and Harvey took his girl friend. Its amazing how fast kids grown up.

Meanwhile, I have been working on a little project in my shop.

Sonny gave me an old clay pigeon thrower.

I have been planning to take it to Arizona this year for another toy to play with in the desert. These things are hard to hold down when they are triggered. I have seen them bolted to a tire and trim or bolted to a palette either way they tend to jump around when they are triggered. I made the one we use up at the cabin. You sit on it when in use so that the operators weight holds the thing in place. I decided to build the same thing only I wanted to make it so that it could be easily dismantled for travel and as light weight as possible.

For the main beam of the device I used a 1” X 2”x 1/4” channel. I had a piece in my scrap metal pile that was 38” long. “Just right!” I cut the channel in half and welded a tongue on one half and a slot on the other.

I slipped them together and drilled a hole for a pin through the whole thing.

Then I welded a short piece of 3/4” square tubing to the underside of the rear piece of channel to accept the rear support.

  

I made the front legs out of some 1” thin wall square tubing That I slipped over the original stubby legs of the thrower and bolted. The whole thing was a little wiggly so I put a couple of braces from the legs to the to the main beam.  The whole thing comes apart easily

and will be small enough to take to Arizona in the back of the jeep.

 

Now, I will have to take the rig to IC and run a box of birds through it to see if it can take the punishment.

Tomorrow, Patti and I are going to take the Kayaks to the river. It will be Patti’s maiden voyage in her new Kayak. I haven’t received the new waterproof camera yet so there won’t be any pictures.