Bit of spring cleaning and reorganizing today, but before I go over that, I had a really cool ‘chance encounter’ this morning.

One of the things we were getting rid of was a large stack of maybe a hundred old redwood fence boards, and since one of our neighbors didn’t want them, I suggested we put them up on the free section of craigslist. I did so, and before dinner was over I’d already gotten three or four replies (something that surprised me, honestly).

I contacted the first person on the list, a Mr. Dick Vennerbeck, who’d said he was interested in using them to make an eclosure for a generator (if I recall correctly), and just happened to catch my ad right after he’d gotten home from working on a steam engine. This sounded pretty damn cool in my book, and we arranged to have him stop by this morning to pick the wood up.

Fast forward to this morning, Dick shows up, and we start talking as we load the fence panels (along with some other scrap wood) into his pickup. Turns out this Mr. Dick Vennerbeck is part of the Kinectic Steam Works, a group whose work I’ve marveled at before at a Maker Faire a year or so ago. We talked for a bit about both our project vehicles (his steam powered boat and car, among other things he’s worked on), and gave me some good ideas for leads on potentially getting a wood frame made up for the MogRod. I’m looking forward to meeting Dick again in the future, it’s not every day you get to meet someone with such a cool story to tell and a such a unique set of skills. I definitely think I got the better deal out of this craigslist ad, and not just because he gave me a pair of really damn good work gloves in exchange for the fence panels!

Ok, so, the spring cleaning. We’ve needed to reorganize the place for some time, and the Solstice parts-car needed to be moved out of the garage to a space out in the shop lift area. Getting the wood out of the shop lift area cleared up the remainer of the space needed, so I started shuffling about all our stuff and pulling things out of the garage to make way for what’s left of the Solstice. I was hoping to put this off until I had a set of wheels on the car, but my parents had requested I move it now for other reasons; I was fine with this as the Solstice is at the point where nothing else top-side really needs to come off.

The Solstice itself actually moved pretty easily, I can’t imagine how many hundreds of pounds of metal and other parts I’ve removed from the frame.The only thing that gave us any trouble was one of the four cheap dollys we’d picked up from Harbor Freight, as a wheel had bent in and made it totally useless. A bit of creative positioning of the remaining three dollies, and my father and I easily moved the car out of the garage, along the front of the house, and into the space along side of the two post lift. We’ll be building some simple shelving above the car to store the various Solstice and Morgan parts out of the way, so that’ll keep me busy tomorrow.

All in all another productive and interesting day.