bah

so here's the now famous box from ups. it contains a beautiful new wiremac21. what's a wiremac 21? it's a machine for punching holes along the edges of paper & then inserting/closing wire binding into those pages. basically, homemade journals for everyone. this really does excite me to no end. and it punches the holes in the paper beautifully, as sort of seen in this photo ...



my frustration is in doing the covers. i plan to use vinyl records for the covers. and it's driving me nuts. the machine isn't strong enough to simply cut holes in the records, which i expected and that's fine. so i used my drill to make the holes. that worked well enough for the little pilot holes. but when i was doing the full-sized holes, it went all wonky & did this ...



this is obviously not acceptable. but it only did it on one of the two records i was drilling. and i had them clamped together, hoping to drill one set of holes through both records. so i thought that could've been the problem & finished the one record by itself. it worked better, but the holes aren't quite the right size and the very last hole on the record caused a little split down to the bottom corner. so i decided to start with a new record. cut it down to size & using one of the punched pages, i marked where the holes should be. so then i think, if i score along the edges of the holes maybe the machine could get the rest of the way through.

i'm not sure if it can or not yet. i mean, i think it can. it did, actually, on the test. but when i put the real cover piece in, it totally chewed it up ...



bah. i quit.

and in an unrelated disappointment, my camera was totally convinced that last photo was in focus when i shot it. stupid auto focus.