Update: No sale, high bid: $550,000

Recently I finally got around to rebuilding it. I decided it was time to put some wood a friend gave me about ten years ago to good use. I believe it is Brazilian Bloodwood. The sun oxidized it to a dark brown, but I knew the wood would be red when cut, and boy was it RED! Orange, in fact. A person at the local  hardware store told me the wood sawdust was used for red in artist paint centuries ago. I cut it into slats on the tablesaw, planed it, and sanded the heck out of it.

Any sawdust gets everywhere, but being red this sawdust let its presence be clearly known. It even turns your hands red when working the wood. Your hands look like you’ve been working with red stain but it washes away relatively easily.

Here’s the how the tablesaw left the floor.

Below on the right is the raw orange-colored wood. The red sticks on the left have had the first coat of Watco Natural Oil applied.

I took the bench apart, sanded, primed, and painted the cast and steel components. Two coats of Watco Natural Oil and three hand rubbed coats of Watco Wax went on the Bloodwood, leaving it a rich, deep red. All held together with chrome cap screws to set it off.

Makes a wonderful addition to the front porch and well worth the roughly 30 hours labor to put it all together!

• Walla Walla, WA: $76.65 for the car BUT an additional $74.84 taxes and fees. Just shy of 100%.
• Boston, MA: $63.32 for the car BUT an additional $67.18 taxes and fees. Hello? That’s OVER 100%!

Where’s the tax tea party when you need it?

That all worked ok, but a week later Sharlet saw a sock feeder for thistle seed. It had a picture of something like eight finches on it. I commented that many birds on a feeder must have been Photoshop’d in. Little did I know! After a few days for the “news” to get around, we’ve counted over 20 Finches on the sock with more flying around trying to get on. They eat through the thing in three days! As soon as the sock feeder showed up they ignored the other thistle seed feeder so I’ve converted it to a second sunflower seed feeder. Who’d a thunk?

Key features

• 18MP APS-C CMOS sensor
• 8 frames per second continuous shooting
• 1080p HD video recording with manual controls
• 3.0 inch Clear View II LCD screen with 920,000 dots
• 19-point AF system (all cross-type)
• 1.0x magnification and 100% coverage viewfinder
• Wireless flash control
• Environmental sealing

Take a look at what my favorite camera review site has to say:

Press Release coverage
Hands-on Preview

For the last couple years I’ve bought nearly all my still and video gear from Adorama.com, but recently I’ve been ordering mostly from Amazon (although places like Adorama and B&H have a much wider and deeper selection). They’ve added a section dedicated to cameras (amazon.com/camera) and their prices are very aggressive. They are also taking pre-orders of the Canon EOS 7D but haven’t announced pricing as of the date of this writing.

Check it out if you are in the market for chroma products.