Pipemaking with CherkyB - Pipe #2

One week after making Pipe #1 ("Toilet Pipe"), I took a crack at pipe #2. This was also a bent ebauchon pipe kit from Vermont Freehand.  Again, I'm just going to show some photos at different stages of the build and not try to teach you how to do it, as I barely know myself at this point.

In the spirit of continuous improvement, I decided on three goals for this pipe:

1. I wanted to leave the "plateaux" (which is pipe-speak for the rough edges where the bark is), as a lot of fancy handmade pipes do this, and it's considered a sign of good craftsmanship to incorporate that into the design.  Though, it turns out, not with this kind of block or the way I did it...more on that later.
   
   
2. I wanted to carve the shank to be the same diameter as the stem, as I was afraid to do that on Toilet Pipe, but it bothered me that the diameters did not match.
   
   
3. I wanted to dramatically cut down on the build time from the 23+ hours to something that seemed more sustainable.  I was getting quite a bit of pressure from Korn Kob to improve this metric.

Here's the kit as it comes from the shop:



Note the beautiful bark plateaux down the front right corner, the preservation of which was design goal #1.  However, also note if you click on it to see it full size, how the front left corner is not that nice-looking but also would need to be preserved for symmetry.



One of the big time-savings methods I applied here was to go from the band saw directly to the 4" belt sander and sanding disc rather than messing around with a bunch of wood files.  You can see how I've sanded down the shank to match the diameter of the stem, achieving design goal #2.  I spent a lot of energy worrying about being off-center on the air bore and accidentally sanding through it, but if you take breaks and put something straight into the bore (I used a nail), you can draw where the air bore is to guide you.  Though the pencil keeps getting sanded off, so you have to do it at regular intervals without taking off too much material between sanity checks.



I didn't want a pipe that just looked like a big rectangular block, though preserving the bark meant I could not really do anything traditionally round.  I made the top heptagonal - basically an octagon with the back side (where the stem is) missing.  I chamfered the lower sides in below the plateaux.  Then, it still looked to slab-like in front, so I used some files to carve a V-shaped notch into it.





Here is the completed pipe.  I finished it similarly to pipe #1, with layers of burgandy and tan, and I rubbed them out a bit with rubbing alcohol, though not too aggressively as it has a tendency to remove a lot of stain.  I'm pretty happy with how the stem and the shank mate on this one compared to on the first pipe.  That was a definite improvement.



The plateaux looks OK.  One side looks great, with the stain darkening up and accentuating the irregularity of the bark. The other looks like I forgot to sand out the tool marks.



Total build time for this was just five hours.  Up close, you can tell that I cut too much time off the finish sanding, as there are noticeable sanding scratches that I didn't get completely out, and it just doesn't shine like pipe #1.

If you look at the front of this pipe, my always-supportive family decided it looks like someone's behind and legs, so they christened this pipe, "Butt Pipe."

Now, let's talk about what went wrong with this design.  Unlike Toilet Pipe, I smoked this pipe.  It smokes terribly.  There are two main problems, both of which stem from the decision to preserve the plateaux.

First, you immediately notice how heavy it is.  It's just uncomfortable to hold the stem in your teeth given the giant block of wood hanging out at the end of the stem.  The angular design also makes it uncomfortable in the hand.  So there's no really enjoyable way to smoke this pipe.

Second, the tobacco chamber is much too deep for the diameter.  This block of briar really needed to be brought down in height to a more manageable depth-to-diameter ratio.  We're looking at a bore that is over 1.5" deep, and only about 3/4" in diameter.  It's hard to keep lit, and it's hard to get a flame down in there to light it if it goes out.

I learned a lot on this pipe, so the process of making it was definitely worthwhile, but as a functional pipe, it stinks.  Happily, its the only pipe I've made so far (out of a total of 6) that was basically just a piece of furniture.

Pipemaking with CherkyB - Pipe #1

Back when I was regularly weather vlogging over at CherkyB, Weather or Not, I would often appear with a pipe.  Usually, it was my first pipe - a beautiful meerschaum carved into a bison head (having grown up in a suburb of Buffalo, I am fond of the bison motif, though around here, it usually means you are a Colorado Buffalos fan which I am not).

Long before there was Facebook to distract everyone with an endless supply of bogus urban legends urging you to forward them to all your friends to protect them from the giant alien ants that are handing out GPS tracking keychains so that they can follow you home to give you cancer from a Monsanto product and then demand a do-over on the last election, The Internet had developed a lore.

You'd come across it whenever you decided to pick up a new hobby.  There were just certain things that a novice researching something on The Internet would always conclude for various topics.

For instance, revolvers are far superior to self-loaders, and the optimum cartridge for a revolver is the .357 magnum, and the best model of .357 magnum is the Colt Python.

All of that is baloney.  Each and every assertion in that internet lore is wrong.

Then, if you decide you really must have a self-loader, The Internet would steer you invariably to the CZ-75.  The absolute most bestest self-loader evah.  Except no one shoots one.  I held one in my hand once at a gun store cuz a friend was interested in getting one due to internet research.  You could see the voids in the frame castings.  You could practically hear the clerk thinking, "Oh great.  An internet shooter."

Oh, and if you wanted a pickup, the Dodge Ram 2500 with a Cummins Turbo Diesel was the only pickup that would last more than five years.  It would last 1 million miles with no maintenance other than changing filters.

If you are a novice pipe smoker, and you do a bunch of research on The Internet, you will become absolutely convinced that meerschaum is the optimal pipe material.  You'll learn how it doesn't absorb any juices, so it doesn't ever "sour" or pick up a permanent flavor from the tobacco.  This means you don't have to dedicate a pipe to each blend of tobacco (I think only hard-core people do this), and you don't have to have seven pipes (one for each day of the week) to let each "rest" for a week to dry out in between smokes.  It also stays pretty cool when you smoke it, it's a light material, and of course, it's easily carved into ornate little sculptures.  It's just absolutely perfect.

You know, except for that one thing.

It's a little brittle, especially when it gets hot.  But a fine internet-trained aficionado knows how to handle it, so this is really only a problem for the proles.

A little brittle.  Eggshells routinely challenge meerschaum to fights without any worries of being cracked.  People place their finest china around meerschaum pipes to serve as armor.  These things are more brittle than a pampered, rich college sophomore who has just converted to veganism and was shocked, shocked! when she stood up in calculus class to state that her answer to the quiz question was only "wrong" because of the patriarchy, and then she heard someone snicker.

Yeah, I busted the hell out of it in short order.  Really, just trying to remove the stem to clean it (after it had completely cooled) caused the stem to not just break off, but to shatter into about five pieces.  I glued it back together with CA glue (something that it turns out is not recommended cuz no one really knows what kind of toxic out-gassing CA glue does when hot, and the manufacturers of it just tell you, "don't do that.")  I smoked it for a while longer, then busted it again the same way.

Well, f---- that.  The Internet is a liar.  I entered the dark side - I switched to non-optimal pipes made of briar burl.

The nice thing about wood pipes is that you have a built-in excuse to get more of them, given how you're "supposed" to have one for every day of the week and for every blend of tobacco.  I started to build a supply (well, really, three).

And then I decided it was time to try to make one myself.  I had stumbled across some instructions on that a few years earlier, and I had always planned to try it, but I never did.

I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on how to do it, because unlike The Internet (which is a liar) and Facebook (which is designed specifically to optimally circulate lies for advertising purposes), YouTube is pristine.  In YouTube, you don't get someone holding up a pipe and saying, "I made this with just a toothbrush and a paper clip, and you won't believe how!" and then you have to click through a 20 page slideshow that wants permission to scrape all your friends' contact information and to make postings for you and in the end, you have no idea how it was made, but you sure know how to save money on car insurance.

No, on YouTube you can actually watch the person make the object.  And learn how.  Though sometimes you have to watch 5 seconds of an ad at the beginning that you can click through.  My favorite part is that you can watch at different speeds.  I watch almost all YouTube video at 1.5x speed, so I can learn 50% faster!

I'm going to start rendering all my YouTube videos at 67% speed so that selecting 1.5x brings you back to normal.  OK, not really.  But some day, I will have some pipe making videos of my own.  Not yet, as I'm still not good enough at it to teach anyone.  I've made a grand total of five pipes so far, of which I would say two are very good, two are so-so, and one sucks.

I decided to start out slowly.  I ordered two "Ebauchon bent" pipe kits from Vermont Freehand, which seems to be the only real supplier that has a web storefront of most anything you need for pipemaking.  I have continued to get all my supplies from Steve at Vermont Freehand, though I've graduated up from the kits.

What makes a "kit" is that the wood block is pre-drilled and the stem is pre-fit.  Drilling the wood isn't all that complicated, though there are a couple tools that make it easier.  You have to drill the 1/8" air hole from wherever you want to put the stem to wherever you want the bottom of the tobacco chamber to be.  Then you have to drill out the tobacco chamber with a rounded bottom just to the depth of the air hole - which means you get a normal spade bit and grind off the end of it into something like a 1" radius arc.  Then you come back and do a 5/16" bore into which to fit the stem, and then use something like a forstner bit to flatten the wood where you drilled the stem bore so the face is exactly perpendicular to the bore, though VF sells a combined forstner with 5/16" drill bit through the center that does this in one step.

Fitting the stem is actually much harder.  They come rough - right out of the mold with mold lines on the sides and kind of a random diameter at the shank from design-to-design.  I still stink at this step, but we'll discuss that on pipe #5...

I got the kit to avoid this trouble.  I got ebauchon because it's a cheaper cut of wood (being more from the center and having less dramatic grain), and I didn't want to throw money away on plateaux on stuff I'd probably mess up the first few tries.

Years ago when I had first researched pipe making, I watched a YouTube series from a guy who claimed you could carve pipes with basically nothing more than a few hand files and a vice.  I can't for the life of me find those videos anymore, but I bought a vice.  I'd always needed one.  I already had files (though I bought a few more).  I didn't want to buy a bunch of woodworking tools if I was going to stink at pipemaking.

I didn't expect to ever start blogging (or vlogging) again, so I didn't do a great job documenting these first few pipes.  But, I used to share the photos of each stage with friends, and one of them was adamant that I put them on The Internet.  So, you can thank the Korn Kob for my return.

Here is the pipe kit before I have done any work to it.  It's just a drilled block of wood with a straight stem fit to it.  I remember from the "files and a vice" guy that the way you hold the "stummel" (which is what the wooden part of a pipe is called) is with an old broomstick in a vice that is stuck into the tobacco bore.  I wrapped this one in blue tape as it was a little too narrow for the bore.

I drew some rough "pipe shaped" reference lines on the outside of the briar block, then I went to my crappy band saw to rough cut.  This band saw is junk.  I had spent hours adjusting the thrust bearings using a feeler gauge and had put on a brand new blade, and still, it can't follow a line.  Both sides of this were supposed to be cut identically, but the saw blade likes to wander randomly.  I've largely stopped using the band saw anymore.  I should throw it in the garbage, but maybe I can pass it on to some cub scout parent who needs to "help" his scout make a pinewood derby car.  That was what the original owner of this saw got it for, then he sold it to me cheap when his kids got out of cub scouts, and mine was getting into it.

Here we are now after literally hours of working on this thing with files and rasps.  I later learned that coarse wood rasps are not a very good tool for shaping the briar, as they leave deep gouges that take forever to sand out.  You need to stick with the "fine" side of a wood file.

After a little more work, I got to discover what every internet pipemaker warns about - you don't ever know what is inside a briar burl until you start to carve it.  They grow in sandy areas and have a tendency to encapsulate sand as well as to have other miscellaneous voids in them.  I would later have to go to The Internet to find that everyone has a different opinion of what to do about voids like this, but I decided to press on with the sanding, as this was, in my mind, always just a practice pipe to begin with.  One popular choice - just don't fill it - was off the table, because that group of 4 holes on the side right where the shank meets the bowl actually penetrated all the way to the air hole - meaning the pipe would be unsmokable without filling those.  The remainder of the flaws were cosmetic.

The other thing I decided was, "Screw the European YouTube guy and his stupid hand files.  I'm an American.  And as an American, it is my God-given right to apply power tools."  Especially given all the deep gouges I had in the wood from the rasps...

Now, another little aside.  This combination belt/disc sander from Harbor Freight is neck-and-neck with the band saw for crappiest power tool I own.  I think this one is actually the second crappiest tools, but only because it actually does function as a sander.  You know, until you have to change the belt, in which case you discover that the casing has to be disassembled to do that (around a dozen little machine screws), then when you go to put it back together after changing the belt, you discover that the seemingly identical machine screws are actually three different lengths (in about 1/16" increments), but there's no diagram anywhere telling you which screw lengths are needed in each of the identical-looking holes. So you go by trial and error trying to find screws that will both go in all the way and bite into something.  And finally, you decide out of frustration that it doesn't need that many screws, and you gently place the remaining screws somewhere over there via air express flight.

If there's one thing you take away from this post it is do not buy this sander.  I don't care that with a coupon it's only $35.  You see that beautiful miter gauge slot on the disc sanding shelf.  Take a close look - it's not parallel to the sanding disc, and it can't be. The mounting point for it is cast at an angle.  Such an angle that out of the box, the shelf scraped on the disc, though the disc has sanded the edge off it now.  

With some belt sanding and a whole lot of hand sanding, I've gotten it pretty smooth for this photo.  I think I've only gone to 400 grit at this point in the crafting.  You end up around 1500 grit, but first I needed to make the patch.  I settled on what many on The Internet recommended - saw dust from the briar mixed in with carpenters' yellow wood glue.  That has to dry for 24 hours.

I would call this significantly improved.  Note that the second picture is showing you the worse side that had all the holes I circled in red on a picture above.  You can really see the grain of the briar burl start to assert itself in these photos.  The totally random grain patterns is one reason burl is popular for pipes.  It's very artsy.

Now comes the staining.  For pipes, you use an alcohol-based stain.  I don't remember why, exactly.  Don't want to raise the grain, perhaps.  The most common alcohol-based stain is Fiebing's leather dye.  It comes in a ton of colors.  I decided to do the top in just tan, and then the remainder of the stummel in a couple deep burgundy base coats with a couple layers of tan over them.  I was trying to make the grain really pop.  In the photo, I've applied two red coats and two tan coats, and I've just ended up obscuring the grain - the opposite of what I wanted.  Though you can clearly see the contrasting rim that just has tan.

Alcohol-based stain is really cool in that it not only dries super-fast, but you can really thin it out by wiping it with a little rubbing alcohol.  I rubbed it all down, which almost took it all off, then went with one red and one tan.

Now, it's time to bend the stem.  This is done with a heat gun (I used low heat setting), and a bath of ice water to plunge the stem into to set the bend.  If you mess it up, you just reheat and do it over.  The only think you can really mess up is you can bubble the vulcanite if you use too high a heat for too long.  But you'll bubble your finger, too, if you do that.  Oh, and you're supposed to put a pipe cleaner into the air bore before bending in order to prevent pinching off the bore.  If you forget that step, i'm not sure you can recover from it.

I took a couple tries, but I got the curve I was looking for.  Some recommend making a bending jig so that you can exactly get the curve you want.  I kinda tried this using a few different cylinders, but I found it was easier to just freehand bend it around the curve of my thumb.  One interesting thing is that after I finished my second pipe stem, I laid it next to the first, and they had nearly identical curves.  Apparently, the curvature of my thumb when I bend it back is a constant...

Now time for more power tools.  I have a drill-mounted polishing kit (also from Harbor Freight) that has a couple felt pads on drill shafts, and a couple types of polishing compound.  I selected the "white diamond" compound which I hear is equivalent to 800 grit, though different pipemakers use different compounds (red tripoli also being popular and about 400 grit and is probably the other compound in the kit).  Some even use both, but you have to have a different polishing wheel for each type.  The people who address this head on mostly claim it makes no real difference which compound you use.  It did shine it up quite a bit more than I expected given that I'd worked up to 1500 grit sandpaper, so an ~800 grit polishing compound you'd expect to make it rougher rather than smoother, but the high speed of the wheel really beats anything you can do by hand.  

You have to polish both the wood and the stem.

Time to look at the flaws that aren't going to buff out.

I have a little gap at the stem fitting because I decided to sand the mating surface a bit.  Everyone tells you not to do this cuz you'll never be able to sand it perfectly flat and perfectly perpendicular to the stem bore.  You can add me to that list of everyone.  Don't do it, or you'll end up with a gap like this.

Also, where the shank meets the bowl I had been going at that pretty hard with a rat tail file to shape it.  It turns out it's really tough to sand an inside double-radiused curve like that, so you can still see the rough slash from the file.  I never really figured out a good way to sand something like that (used sponges and fancy radiused sanding blocks, but pft, no).  On future pipes, I was conscious of this limitation and designed it out.

The last step is a bunch of coats of pure carnauba wax.  You buy a block from Amazon, where it's mostly sold for car detailers, and you use a fresh buffing wheel to apply it (not the same wheel you covered in polishing compound).  You wax both stummel and stem.  This does the same thing that waxing a car does - it adds a "depth" and shine to the finish, and it also protects the wood from liquids and oils from your hand.

The "bad side" of the pipe still shows the patch right where the shank meets the bowl.  It's better than it was when it was not filled and leaked air, though.

There you go.  My first pipe kit built into a pipe using nothing but a vice and some files.  And a belt sander.  And a heat gun.  And glue.  And a broomstick.  And polishing wheels.  And a drill press.  Total labor time on it was around 23 hours, though that spanned a few days.

I've still never smoked this pipe.  I kinda want to keep the first one pristine.

My always-supportive family christened this pipe "Toilet Pipe" because they think the bowl is shaped like a toilet bowl.

Handbell Tree Construction

I recently designed and built a handbell tree, most of which is documented over at my YouTube channel in this video:

I want to provide some additional information here beyond what I can do in the "description" field on YouTube.

First, let me note that in the video, I never installed the O-rings.  The O-rings simply slip over the branches and slide to where you want the bells to hang - one O-ring on either side of the bell's handle strap that is looped over the branch.  I'll try to get a photo of that, but the bell tree is already over at the rehearsal hall where it is getting regular use, so I'll have to wait until the next time I am there.

The following is the list of materials I used to construct the bell tree, including hyperlinks to the actual items I bought at Lowe's:

Item Use	Item Description	Qty	Price/unit (Nov 2018)	Cost
Wood base	2’x4’ 7/16” OSB sheathing	1	$7.82	$7.82
Pipe-to-base attachment	1” black iron floor flange	1	$7.78	$7.78
Attach flange to OSB base	¼”-20x1” machine screws and nuts	4	$1.28/4 pack	$1.28
Bottom half of trunk	1”x3’ black iron pipe	1	$17.67	$17.67
PVC to iron pipe connector	1.5” to 1” threaded bushing	1	$1.18	$1.18
Connect bushing to top pipe	1.5” slip-fit coupler	1	$0.98	$0.98
Top half of trunk	1.5”x5’ SCH40 PVC pipe	1	$4.90	$4.90
T-connector for limbs	1.5” slip to ¾” female threaded T	4	$2.98	$11.92
Threaded end for limbs	¾”male thread to ¾” slip adapter	4	$0.41	$1.64
Limbs	¾”x5’ SCH40 PVC pipe	2	$2.30	$4.60
Clamp limbs in place	1-5/16” to 2-1/4” steel clamp	2 packs	$2.48/2 pack	$4.96
Top Cap	1.5” SCH40 PVC Cap	1	$1.28	$1.28
Hold bells in place on limbs	#18 O-Rings	2 packs	$2.49/10 pack	$4.98
Glue PVC joints	Clear PVC cement	1	$5.40	$5.40
Total				$68.57

 I receive no compensation for promoting any of these items or the store at which I purchased them.  This is just what I used and where I got them.

Note that I am not including the components for dying the PVC, as I still haven't figured out how to get that to work (though people do seem to actually love the strange mottled blue I ended up with).  I have a bottle of solvent-soluble dye on my workbench right now, so I'll be testing it out over the weekend and will update this if I get it to work.

Here is a list of the tools you will need to complete the project, roughly in the order that they are used:

• Tape measure
• Circular saw (optional: to rough cut the base from a large sheet of OSB or plywood)
• Straight edge (optional: if you rough cut a square base)
• Pencil
• Wood screw (for center of circle - this is removed once circle is drawn)
• String 
• Jigsaw with ~10TPI blade suitable for OSB or plywood
• Palm sander with ~80 grit sandpaper
• Drill
• 1/4" drill bit
• Countersink drill bit
• Vice
• Hack saw
• File (preferably a "half-round" file)
• Pipe/Tubing cutter with at least 1.5" tubing capacity (optional - can use hacksaw)

Good luck.

CherkyB Reads CherkyB: The Saga of the Handbell Tree

I've gotta tell you, I kind of enjoy figuring out how to do dumb things with a video editor.  Which gave me the inspiration for my latest recurring feature: CherkyB Reads CherkyB. That, and it's not clear to me that people get the full effect of my written word if they don't know me well enough to picture me telling the story.  This way, it's almost like you're sitting at happy hour with me, and you've said some innocuous thing like, "So, how was your weekend?" and then you sit back and marvel.

Plus, Tuesdays are one of my healthy days, so I don't drink, so I couldn't write a blog.  No rule says I can't vlog sober, though.

The Saga of the Handbell Tree

Those of you who have followed my blog for roughly 12 years know that I am a man of many talents. Those of you who have come to know me more recently (shout out to Korn Kob) are still trying to process all the many levels of my talent and are mostly still just sitting back in shocked awe.  But let me let you in on a little-known aspect of my persona.

I play in a handbell choir.

That's right.  You can try to close your slacked jaw now.  Maybe see if you can get the drooling under control. 

Oh?  That's just how you are most of the time?  I feel like I would have remembered something like that.  But we can play pretend if it makes you more comfortable.

It all started innocently enough.  The Mrs. decided to check out the local franchise of her favorite church chain, oh, something like 11 years after we moved here.  One can guess at the impetus for that appearing out of the blue, but that's not really the point of my narrative.  The point is that said church had a handbell choir.

The Mrs., of course, is a conservatory-trained musician.  Thus, she is uniquely susceptible to anything music-related. 

Not sharing in that particular foible, I liken it to this:  Imagine, if you will, that you decide to drop by your local church one Sunday, just to check it out.  As luck would have it, the prime rib choir is performing that day.  They are performing a prime rib eating exhibition during the intro, and another during the offering.  Upon further inquiry, you are informed that they meet every Sunday for an hour to practice cooking and eating prime rib, and then four or five times a year, they put on an exhibition for the congregation where they eat prime rib up there on the dais while the congregation looks on in awe and applauds.

And, they are looking for more members for the Prime Rib Choir. 

You'd be all over that.  "Sign me the F- up!"

This is what music is like to a musician.  It's never, "Oh, prime riiiib.  I really only do NY Strip.  Not for me, bruh.  Not for me."  It's more like, "Well, I play viola, and violin, and piano, and bagpipes, and a little ukulele.  How hard can handbells be?  Sign me the F- up!"

And thus, my wife became a member of the local church's handbell choir.

But does it stop there?  No.  Of course not.  No one's wife signs up for something and then just keeps it to herself.  Because in her mind, she's just signed up for Prime Rib Choir, and what kind of jerk wife wouldn't want to share that with her loving husband and children?

So now, The Mrs., HannahC, and I are all in a handbell choir.  My inability to ever not do whatever is necessary to please my wife shall be left for other threads.  I am, shall we say, the best husband anyone could ever imagine.  Really.  Ask around.  You'll see. I.am.the.best.

Not content, however, with just eating prime rib on Sundays, The Mrs. auditioned for another prime rib, errr, I mean handbell choir.  And, owing to her intense musical talent or obsession or what-have-you, she got in to that, too.

I start a lot of sentences with conjunctions on this blog.  I always have.  Feel free to stop reading if that bothers you, but be aware that I know I am doing it, and I don't give a flying <> at a rolling donut that it is considered "wrong".  When I get my book deal, I can clean all that up.

Now, fast forward to last weekend.  Innocently enough, The Mrs. says, "I need you to make me a bell tree."

OK, like any normal, red-blooded American man, I have no idea what that is. 

But, if you Google(R) it, you find stuff like this.  The lady on the left is using a bell tree.  Now, I've learned that "bell tree" is somewhat non-specific in that most of your hits will be to little Christmas trees that are constructed of sleigh bells. So, I mostly try to say "handbell tree" now.

The design was largely left up to me, though the following requirements were specified:

• It had to have four horizontal "branches" from which to hang the handbells
• Each of the branches had to be individually adjustable for height and radial angle
• It had to cost a lot less than a commercial one ($350-$550, depending upon model)
• It could not be white

Your ten minute design window begins...now.

I spent a good deal of time pondering this challenge and executing the first iteration of the design.  Not as much time as I spent editing the video of it, mind you, but still a good deal of time.  I knocked out the first attempt this weekend, and I am in the process of preparing a "serious" post about it that includes lists of material and tools and such.  In the mean time, I'll put a link to the YouTube video of it here.  The real multi-media experience post with embedded video, photos, and instructions is still WIP.  In the end, it'll look like this:

I hope to finish the post soon.