Best-laid plans

Well, that didn't go as planned.

I said yesterday that today, besides handling all the mugs I made, we'd also be blending up yucca leaf pulp for paper-making. Denise had it cooked down and rinsed, and I had, after an afternoon's tinkering, gotten the pulp blender running. (Electric motor brushes were jammed, not making contact with the rotor. Once they were free, it only took me another hour to figure out how to keep them from popping out while I tried to slide the assembly back onto the shaft. Spoiler: it involved bamboo skewers.)

Then we woke up to this.

Note: this photo is not color-accurate. My camera looked at the hellish, tangerine orange sky, said, "That can't be right," and tried to correct it to something more normal, kinda like the first Viking photos from Mars that showed blue sky instead of pink. In any event, between the smoke and the ash sifting down, all outdoor activities were cancelled. (Except for a run down to BiMart Pharmacy--there were only 4 puffs left on my asthma inhaler. I did not ride my bike.)

Kind of a shame, really. I was looking forward to running the beast again. It's a four-gallon recirculating blender, 70% recycled materials from BRING and St. Vincent de Paul, 20% Jerry's, and 10% sweat and improvisation.

I can't say I invented it, more reinterpreted it from a marginal illustration in one of Denise's paper-making books. Scrounged from BRING: a stainless-steel 3/4 hp garbage disposal, heavy-duty grounded electrical cord, and light switch, with box and face-plate. At Vinny's, I found a plastic carafe from a water cooler. Jerry's provided four feet of pool vacuum hose, fir 1x2s and various bits and pieces of plumbing to connect it all together.

What is does: Cooked plant material and a lot of water are put in the carafe, which has had top cut open, bottom cut off to the size of a sink drain. Flip a switch, and the garbage disposal spins up, shredding the contents and spewing them out the hose, which is clipped to the top of the carafe, effectively pumping it through the system again. Keep blending until everything's shredded to a fluffy pulp, and then use the hose to direct it into a fabric-lined basket hanging atop a 5-gallon pail. Wait for the water to drain, bottle up the pulp and you're ready to pull paper.

I've made a bunch of paper-making tools for Denise in the past--all her screens, for example, and a nifty water-expressing press made from plumbing parts and a VW screw jack, also a BRING find--but this is the one I'm proudest of.