Working Drawings

Today's drawings are all diagramatic mechanical drawings that I did while trying to figure out something.  The first one, on the bottom 2/3rds of the right hand page above, I made this morning while working with my friend Fran on a bag for a client.  We have a small business of making bags and wallets out of upcycled materials (www.weRpiecework.blogspot.com), and we recently found a cache of belts at Goodwill, the kind of belts that come with chinos and that at least some people throw away without ever wearing.  So here we have a dozen or so perfectly good belts that we got for a dollar apiece, and we wanted to figure out how to use them without removing the hardware even.  So that's what this drawing and its two little sub-drawings are about.

I use a treadle sewing machine to sew bags and wallets, and sometimes I have to fix the machine.  Today a part that I had ordered from eBay arrived.  The first thing I did was draw it, then disassemble it and draw the parts of the part in the order that I took them apart.  Then I took apart the old one and drew it as I disassembled it.  After comparing the two parts, I decided the old part was really okay to use as long as I gave it a cleaning, which I did.  Then I took apart the other thread tension apparatus so I could figure out how it works as well as clean it up.    These drawings were pretty quick so I didn't count each one as a thing.

It's possible the machine was running kind of sticky because of the extreme dampness.  All manner of strange things are happening here:  driving on the freeway today I kept passing scatterings of dirt and even some piles of dirt off to the sides of the roadway.  Could this possibly be related to flood control?  It wasn't like soil that had been deposited there by a flood, more like the dirt they scatter on icy spots in winter.  But on the freeway?  The bushes and trees are growing so fast that we find ourselves living at the edge of the woods these days.  The paths in the woods have become creeks, complete with small waterfalls and pools.  Our house is un-air-conditioned and un-dehumidified, so you can imagine the extreme swelling and sticking of all doors and windows, the increasingly funky mold smell.  And ants have been appearing in random places in our house, not trails of ants but spread-out crowds, like scouts, all heading in different directions.  Maybe tomorrow I'll draw strange effects of the humidity and endless rain.