Today is a good day for Castle Wolfenstein.

I’m the “Director of Scientific Computing” at the California Academy of Sciences (@calacademy.bsky.social).
I’m often asked what I do. In lieu of sending them the four page job description, lately I’ve been describing my role as the “chief preventer of stupid”. Some anonymous wag sent me this:

New year, new project. I’ve been feeling a bit stuck in the shop. I realized that most of my stock is odd - large, irregular, figured, often precious, rarely “ready to use”. I needed some just plain old 4/4, and some plain stock for drawer sides, etc. So here it is, and here’s the project.

The last plane on the right is a bit of an enigma - it is also not a known smith, and it was in kurashige's warehouse area. it's a 65mm plane with a very gentle radius bottom; I look forward to putting some subtle curves on some non-tabletop surfaces.

The three blades in the middle are unknown (and, in the the case of the two 65mm blades, unmarked) smiths. The two on the bottom were a) to cute to not buy and b) made by Sekikawa, who is one of my favorite smiths. These came from Kurashige tools, who were also a pleasure to visit.

Some tools purchased on a recent trip to Tokyo. I splurged and got a named blade by Shigenobu Imai. The shop (Sagami Daiku Dougu Kan, who were lovely!) recommended him when I said that I liked notably hard blades. ("Are you sure?") We'll see if I'm skilled enough to put a proper edge on it!

I'd love to get away from Meta properties for sharing my work. So, I'll be posting some older projects over the next few days; let's see if this can get me (and others) away from the algorithm driven hell that is Instagram.

This is my Holtzapffel bench build from 2019. Plans available on request.