Well, here we are again, a new month. It has been hot here, not as hot as some other places, but still rather too hot on several occasion for working in the shop. Humidity has been high and when you add in heat generated by the melting pot, you get temperatures that feel like 115 or higher in the shop – just too hot to work safely.

Next year will be better, as construction on our new workspace has started, so by winter we will be working in our new shop (heat, so no more frozen fingers, and AC in the summer, so no more heat exhaustion). Once the new space is “done” we will have a real shipping room, and a place to organize our stock bins and boxes. We should even have a computer in the shop to help eliminate lost bits of paper…

Anyhow, that is all in the not too distant future. In the present, we still have a backlog of orders – the pile is getting smaller, so we might even get caught up some time soon.

Yesterday I finished moving the mold making equipment down to the basement – the vulcanizer and rubber mold shop will be in the basement. RTV mold making and resin casting will be in our current shop space, better ventilation – lots of natural ventilation too. Metal casting will be in the new space, just off the house… Anyhow, back to the moving of the vulcaizer, this is a heavy beast, and since I had no luck finding anyone to move to down the stairs, I decided to take it apart and move it myself – that was quite a chore, but after breaking it down into three pieces, I got it down the stairs on Sunday, and then reassembled it yesterday (Monday). It is now leveled and calibrated and it makes fine molds. I’ll move it one more time, once I move the shipping table into it’s new space, but for now we are in good shape – no more squeezing around it at the top of the stairs!

Gee, I’m just rambling on here and not saying too much 🙂 Mainly because there isn’t much to say – still behind on almost everything, but getting closer – lets see what we can finish up this month, and maybe in September we can report that we are all caught up!