Our prompts from Eden Hills are: Starts with K, Week's Favourite, and Drink.
Starts with K
My father recently took on a restoration project of one of my mother's well-used kitchen knives - one of her favourites. It is a good quality Sabatier knife, so it was worth fixing. It was so well used that the wooden handle finally gave up and cracked. My father began the project by removing the blade from the broken handle. You can see the blade has been sharpened many, many times by its rather tapered blade angle. It's a very good steel so it has held up to many years of sharpening and is always as good as new!
My father then shaped most of the handle, and drilled the hole, before cutting the handle to length. He had to purchase a special bit to accurately bore the hole into the end grain of the hard-grained wood he used for the handle. That type of bit is usually used for making hand-crafted wood pens, such as fountain pens. Here's the handle before being cut to length, and you can just see his planned shaping line.
He the put the blade back in the new handle with epoxy putty to glue it into place, and made a small hole at the outer end of the handle so that any excess epoxy had a place to squeeze out. He later filled that hole.
The final shaping and sanding was followed by 3 coats of polyurethane. What a great job he did! My mother's kitchen knife is ready for many more years of reliable service!
Week's Favourite
Marc did some repairs to one of the bird feeders - the plastic perches had broken this winter - probably a combination of bitter cold making the plastic brittle, combined with squirrel activity! You can see in this shot where the squirrels also chewed around the feeder openings. Marc glued some new wooden dowels in place for new perches, since the birds couldn't perch any more. I took this shot of a squirrel back at the repaired feeder. I think the wood perches will hold up better than the plastic ones. I love this shot because it really showcases the red coat of the squirrel - he just gleams in the sunlight. I enjoy their antics at the feeder.
Drink
Pippin and Mitten share the same water bowl, although they don't drink at the same time. Pippin also has a water bottle in his crate, but he seems to prefer the bowl. I've noticed that he sometimes puts a foot into the water first - not sure why he does that! I doubt it makes the water taste better!
We used to use a plastic orange water dish for Mitten, which worked well until Pippin joined us. He thought the water dish was a fun toy. He began picking the dish up by the edge, and dumping the contents.
Not very helpful!
Now they both drink from a heavy glass dish - Pippin can't tip it over and they both drink happily from it.
