Happy New Year! However, the Chinese curse is still with us. Not talking about COVID 19, although that IS still with us. I’m talking about the curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” I’m going to try and make the best of 2024. One of the toughest things for me to do is throw things out. My favorite activity is making things. It’s particularly rewarding when I can improve on things that I already own or, better yet, use materials that I find. Throwing things out represents a failure to me. Unlike Marie Kondo, I get no pleasure out of discarding stuff. Particularly, if I remember how much money I paid for the stuff and I have a good memory. I often tell people that I’m a cardboard box short of being a hoarder. But things wear out and if they can’t be salvaged for parts, they must go. I’m beginning to believe that about relationships too.

Sunday was the last day of 2023. Nancy and I don’t go out on New Years Eve. This year we had some friends over to sing Karaoke and keep us awake until midnight. This was new for us, and we realized that we’d not have a big crowd because there were quite a few celebrations and many of our friends are a bit more active than we are. We had seven people join in and it was a good time. There were plenty of opportunities to sing before midnight. Earlier in the day, I used my remote fire making skills to wire up a fire basket full of fireworks. We had champaign and sparkling cider, noise makers, and handheld sparklers to welcome in the New Year. The weather was “Tucson mild.” A light jacket was all that we required.

A few minutes of “oohing” and “aahing” and drinking and we were back in front of the Karaoke machine. The songs were varied: A Country song, followed by a show toon. There were folk songs and plenty of oldies. Everyone got a chance to sing eight songs if they wanted.

I didn’t sit down to write this blog and tell everyone about our New Years Eve party. I sat down to show off my latest improvement to my workshop environment. On Facebook a couple of days ago I posted a picture of my workbench. I had just cleaned everything off it and it looked like an invitation to start a new project. My workbench came from Harbor Freight a few years ago. It’s really made for woodworking. So far, I’ve made a few improvements.

I added a cut-down Fiskars self-healing mat. I replaced the side runners on all the drawers so that they would pull out enough to reach the items in the back of them. I added shelving and lighting above the bench along with a power panel. I also added a “long bar” power strip along the front to support any corded hand tools. The last thing that I added was a way to mount a bench vice without ruining the surface of the bench for woodworking projects.

In honor of this being a new year, I wanted to make a better-looking bench vice mount. The one I made out of scraps of wood worked but not as well as I wanted it to, and it was UGLY. I drew up a new one on Tinker CAD and sent the file to be produced on my Bamboo Labs x1 Carbon using black ABS filament. Six and a half hours later, I had my finished mount. It took a little adjusting because I didn’t get everything perfect. Here it is:

Beautiful, isn’t it?