So with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the hysteria, panic, and mandated quarantines that followed, the woodturning club I’m in had to cancel our April, 2020, meeting. Like a lot of other people, it kinda hit the club by surprise and I would certainly say we weren’t prepared. While many other groups just shook their heads, took a deep breath, and embraced Zoom for online meetings, our club isn’t that technically savvy. Our choice was to just cancel the meeting and not meet for another month, or try to do something that would keep the club active, without violating any social distancing requirements or mandates from the Governor.

Since I’m now the President of the group, I kinda felt like it was my place to fill that gap and try to find a way to keep the club engaged. The first thing I did was create a special “President’s Challenge” so people would have a reason to turn during the quarantine. I decided on making a sphere, since all the pictures of the COVID-19 virus looks like a fluffy round ball, the challenge was to make a sphere. I figured that would be good because there hadn’t been a lot of spheres brought in to club meetings for show and tell, they don’t take much in the way of special equipment, and they don’t require 20 years of practice to learn. I was feeling good about myself.

While the feeling of goodness was still swirling in my head, I did a second thing. Before I could stop and think about what I was doing, I opened up my big fat mouth and volunteered to do a remote demo, using Facebook Live from our club’s Facebook group. Have I done something like that before? Um, no. Did I know what it took from a technical perspective to put on a decent Facebook Live presentations? Um, no. Did I have all the camera equipment sitting around at home to make this happen? Um, no. Did I expect it to go well? Um, sure! 14 year old girls can put on a Facebook Live to show off their new make-up techniques, so how hard can it be?

I quickly learned there’s a big difference between using a cell phone and it’s built in camera to stream a head and shoulders shot of a great “smoky eye” and using a camera to do a tight, overhead, shot of the task being demonstrated. This triggered a whole series of good news/bad news situations I had to work through. The good news is the club just bought a whole bunch of new AV equipment I could use. The bad news is it was stored at a club meeting site, so I’d have to break the quarantine rules to go fetch it. Once fetched, the good new is the clubs AV equipment is all digital and produces a high quality, high definition picture. The bad news is they output their picture through an HDMI cable, so I’d need to have some way to input an HDMI cable, which none of my computers have. After some research, the good news is I found a gizmo that would convert the HDMI input signal into a USB 3.0 signal that the laptop could accept. The bad news is it wouldn’t get here until the day before I was supposed to go live. That left me very little time to practice, make sure the camera worked with the gizmo, which worked with the laptop, which could run the software to control in the inputs, which would actually stream into Facebook. Thanks to my son “volunteering” to help, we were able to get all the tech set up, get all the materials gathered for the presentation, and even an outline of things to cover. When the big night came, it actually went off pretty well!

The demo was on using epoxy clay. This is a two part clay, that mixes together into a thick play dough consistency. Once it’s done being molded, it will cure overnight and become as hard as rock. Since I had to make a sphere for the president’s challenge anyway, I figured I’d combine the challenge with the demo and kill two birds with one stone.

Here’s the final product. All things considered, it turned out a lot better than I was expecting it so, and after buffing up the epoxy clay, it’s super smooth to hold.