I haven't had regular online access in a while, so it's difficult to fit everything in when I do go online.
Besides putting together a video, I've been doing a couple of small projects in the shop.
I've been helping a couple of different people with some small fabrication projects, a couple of front racks. 
The one I just finished was a rush job for someone who needed to leave town 
within a few days.
We just met a couple of times in the shop, and just Did the project. The person acted as a helper, and the whole build took a total of about ten hours.
It's a little crooked, but it went solidly together, and the person was happy with it.


The other one was a lot more carefully planned out, as this project has no real time limit.
The first thing I had this person do was send me some pictures of units similar to what he wanted, then we met up in the shop and

I had him draw a template of the rack as he envisioned it, we checked it for fit with a bike similar in size to the one he intended to put it on.


Then we selected some materials, and measured them out against our template to make sure we had enough to do the job, and marked off sections of the material to match up with the sections of the rack, and finally, cut the pieces out.


The next part of this build is fleshing out the template and turning it into a welding jig that I can set the parts into in order to hold them in a rigid alignment while I weld.



This is where we're going to pick up the next time we meet for a work session. 


I can't really say I prefer one of these approaches to fabrication over the other. I really, really like getting into a project of stages, and watching it evolve through the various steps. 
When I was a kid, I used to save the instruction sheets from my plastic model car and plane kits, and just study them, just observe the way the images went together, and look for any kind of ways the images were different in any of the other languages the instructions were printed in. There never were, it was always the same set of images, with different words or symbols depending on the country.
The Images told the story in a way that Bridged the language gap. I thought that was Profound.
I liked to critique the way the images went together themselves and study it against the parts to judge how clearly and understandably it was laid out
I wanted to be the person who made those precise technical drawings...


But I also know what it's like to have an idea burning in your head that you can't quite fully see, but it's yelling at you that these particular pieces in front of you Should be able to go together in This way... If only That part were removed... And it's Right  There in front of me and I can either stop and hunt down the tools to Document what I'm thinking with, or I can just DO it, and see if it works... and whether it does or doesn't, I kind of get pulled into a trance where I just move about in the shop looking at things, considering and rejecting everything I see almost unconsciously until I find the next part, and so on and so on,
until hours have gone by and I'm either Done or Exhausted.


And some of my best work comes our of working that way.
So I don't know. I think it needs to be a balance between the two approaches, which is not saying anything that hasn't been said before,
But sometimes I need to remind myself of these things.