READIN

Thursday, January 22nd, 2004

Some new woodworking graphics in the photo album: Some candlesticks and The lathe I used to turn them.

posted evening of January 22nd, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, December 20th, 2003

🦋 Back in the shop

My short time in the shop this evening included a number of "firsts". I used my new panel jig (completed after way too long a time, and a poor excuse for what I had originally planned to build) for the first time, gluing up the base for a sharpening station I am building -- it seems to do basically what I was hoping it would, which is to hold boards aligned while I get the clamps on and keep them flat. I cut into the wood I bought for Ellen's bookcase, which marks the first time I have ever worked with rough-sawn lumber. I like it! (Actually this "first" is a bit of an exaggeration but I am going to let it stand.) It is also the first time I have worked with maple since I built Sylvia's high chair (back in the early days of my woodworking career, before I had a proper bench); it is as nice to work with as I remembered it. My scrub plane eats it up. Now I just need to get some better bench dogs, so I can clamp wood that I am scrubbing properly in place -- this would be a major step up for me. I think I will order some new dogs in a few weeks, when I put in my order to Lee Valley for a couple of things I have been meaning to get.

Update: I managed significantly to improve the performance of my bench dogs. All I did was, I relieved the lower half of the dog's face; so that instead of coming up from the bench at a 90° angle, it comes up slightly acute. So the contact with the workpiece is all at the top of the dog and the force from the vise is pushing the workpiece down into the bench. It works a lot better now.

posted evening of December 20th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, November 6th, 2003

🦋 Shop organization

Hey, did I mention I've been working on organizing my shop space in the basement, for a couple of weeks now? It's going really well -- I'm just about in shape to start working on the bookcase. What I have done: I built a lumber rack, and stacked most of my lumber on it; built a shelf with separate compartments for my carving tools; built a fixture for hanging my clamps; cleaned off most counter surfaces; and went a bit of the way towards organizing the big closet where I keep hardware. The last thing is going to be building a rack for clamping up panels and holding them even while the glue dries, which is necessary for the bookcase project. I have a pretty simple design in mind and will be building it next week.

posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, October 14th, 2003

Researching lumber sources for the past few days I came up with this idea: I want to make a page devoted to lumberyards and sawmills in the area. There are already a number of online resources (including the very useful Woodfinder) which I am not really trying to duplicate; what I want to make is a list of personal picks from ww'ers I know and trust -- i.e. the WoodCentral crowd, as well as CJWA members. I have posted requests for recommendations in a couple of places and will see what comes of it.

I will be using this post as a holding area for candidates as I work on the list. Candidates so far:

• Hutt Lumber, Newark
  I found this in the phone book while looking for soft maple for my upcoming bookcase project; I have not found anyone who has bought lumber there, but I think I will use it because they have the right price and are nearby. No weekend hours.
• Monteath Lumber, South Amboy
  Recommended by several people incl. Lee Alexander, Phil Vitale, Bob Sheppard. They offer a 10% discount to CJWA members.
• Rosenzweig Lumber, Bronx
  My primary source when I was in NY and they are still close enough by. No weekend hours.
• NJ Hardwoods, Plainfield
  Recommended by Joe Hurst and by Bob Sheppard.
• Wolbach Sawmill, Easton
• Agincourt, Belle Mead
• Bay Ridge Lumber, Bayonne
• Northeastern Lumber, Jamesburg
• US Mahogany, Matawan
  Recommended by Lee Alexander, Jack Feinstein, Philip Berman. 10% discount for CJWA members.
• Medford Cedar Products, Bordentown
  Recommended by Jack Feinstein.
• East Coast Log, Bloomsbury
  Recommended by Steve Antonucci. Wow â?? I just spoke to the owner of East Coast Log and he confirmed all lumber is $2/bf. He is around on Saturdays from 10-4. He has a lot of turnover so not all species will be in stock all the time.
  East Coast Log
  50 CR 639
  Bloomsbury, NJ 08804
  (908) 995-2902
• Casterline, Morristown
  Recommended by Mike R. -- the man who works there gave him a lot of help though he did not end up buying the lumber. Also by Philip Berman who says they are a bit expensive.
• Center Lumber, Paterson
  Recommended by Philip Berman.
• Jay Samuels, and Rich O'Connor of WoodFinder, both write to recommend a number of smallish sawmills in NJ and PA.
• John Aniano writes to recommend the unfortunately named Rippoff sawmill in Allentown, NJ; Mike Obertlick's sawmill in Howell, NJ; Willard Bros. in Trenton; and Josh Cavet's mill in NJ.
• Congden Lumber in West Orange: very close to me and they have hours on Saturday morning.

posted afternoon of October 14th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, October 9th, 2003

🦋 My next project

My next woodworking project will be a built-in bookcase for Ellen's office. I am going to use this plan from American Woodworker as a starting point, but will make a few modifications. There will be three verticals instead of two, to double the amount of shelf space. A half-round table will come out of the middle of one side of the bookcase, to match the look of Ellen's desk (which is half-round on one end). I will be using mortise-and-tenons instead of biscuits to join the shelves to the verticals. The case will be built from soft maple; I hope to buy it at Rosenzweig's Lumber -- but only will if I can get a day off work soon, as they do not have weekend hours.

Update: Actually the place I will buy the lumber if I can get a day off work soon will be Hutt Lumber in Newark (sorry, no web presence; their phone number is (973) 242-7300 and their address is 301 Badger Avenue; they are open 8 to 3:30 Monday through Friday) -- they carry roughsawn 4/4 soft maple for $2.42/bf, as opposed to $2.92/bf at Rosenzweig's, and are closer. (Rosenzweig's soft maple is D2S but that does not make a difference for me as I will be reducing the thickness anyway.) Looks like I will need 100 bf for the project, but I think I will buy 120 and err on the side of caution.

posted evening of October 9th, 2003: Respond

Saturday, July 26th, 2003

🦋 Projects

Here is an inventory of home improvement projects I want to work on:

• Window seat: which I have, ridiculously, still not begun working on; but today I bought some lumber for it and cleaned up my shop, so I have no excuses left...
• Paths in the front yard: I have the slate, I have the tools to cut it; I am hoping to do these paths in the third week of August, when I will be on vacation.
• Path next to the house: Really the same project as the above, I just don't think I have enough slate right now to do it. I want to see how the first path goes before I schedule the others.
• Backyard patio: Again, waiting to see how difficult this slate laying stuff really is.
• Stone at base of side porch: This is going to be pretty complex and I have not really planned yet how it should look.
• New steps for side porch
• Breakfast nook
• Bookcases for Ellen's office: Ellen is breathing down my neck on this so they may come before the breakfast nook.
• Bookcases for living room: I've had an idea for this since we moved here...
• Dining room table: Again, I've had a very clear picture of this kicking around my head for about nine months now.

posted evening of July 26th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, June 8th, 2003

🦋 Who protects children and dumb carpenters

I want to tell a story about the work I did today on the shoe rack I had previously built -- and think I should make clear beforehand what I have in mind, so that I don't bog down in details. My basic points here are, that I succeeded in the task I took on largely through dumb luck; and that I ought, when I noticed that my initial design would not be an adequate solution, more thoroughly to have investigated the alternatives available.

The problem was, I wanted to bolt my shoe rack to the wall, since it is tippy and hard to avoid jostling against. However there is an obstacle at floor level which prevents the rack from backing up hard against the wall. Initially I thought this obstacle was the saddle in the door to the left of the rack, and my plan was to cut a square out of the back of the left leg so that it would go around the saddle. But when I took the rack away from the wall, I noticed that there was also a baseboard, which started about where the saddle left off, on the right side of the rack. My immediate thought was, I'll just cut a similar square out of the back of the right leg; I took the rack downstairs and got ready to do it.

But I noticed when I was laying out the cuts, the baseboard is too high; it will butt up against the bottom rail of the rack and keep it from going flush with the wall. More quick thinking; I decided to cut a mortise out of the back of the rail, to fit the baseboard. This is where I think I goofed; if I had been thinking more clearly, I would have just taken the baseboard off the wall. As it was, I made the mortise -- it took only about an hour -- and it is testament to the solidity of my joinery that the rack was able to take all that force without racking or breaking. But it is not an ideal solution -- the rack is now permanently wed to its current location, among other hassles.

posted evening of June 8th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, May third, 2003

🦋 Finishing up

Well I let the moment slip last weekend and did not finish the shoe rack... So I was all set to do it this morning. Brought the rack out to the driveway, with brushes, thinner, alcohol, everything I needed, except varnish -- the varnish I was confident was in a box in the garage, where I had packed it away when we moved. But when I looked there I was sorely disappointed.

I started the search; combed the garage, the basement, nothing -- did some other yard work, then went over the search again -- still nothing. I was getting kind of upset; Ellen offered to look and she had a little better luck, discovering a bottle of Behlen's master-gel; this was not what I had planned to use but it should work. So I started trying to open it and discovered it was welded fast by old dried finish. After a lot of fretting, I hit on drilling it open; over to the drill press and I took a nice ½" circle out of the lid. Great! But alas, I went to use it and found the entire contents of the bottle had dried solid. Not actually too surprising as it's been open for a year and a half or more. But I was back to square one.

The day went by, and eventually I found an opening to drive over to the hardware store and get new varnish. I went to Main Street Hardware in West Orange, a place I've had my eye on for a couple of weeks, and was glad I did -- it is all I want a hardware store to be. Home Depot will play less of a role in my life now. Got some Minwax Spar Urethane and after dinner I put it on the rack! Tomorrow morning I will do a second coat and that will be the end of that project.

And meantime, this morning I started to draw up plans for my next project, a breakfast nook. More on that later...

posted evening of May third, 2003: Respond

Monday, April 28th, 2003

🦋 House work

I put up a hook for the garden hose in our front yard today, and Sylvia helped out, assiduously. [? I wasn't sure what that meant but it somehow suggested itself as the appropriate adverb. Looked it up just now in the dictionary and whaddya know, it fits pretty well. I'll let it stand.] Her description of the activity was, "We're doing shoe rack!"

It is up and looks good, though I made a bit of a mistake in the positioning of it. It has two screw holes that are on a vertical axis, and two more that are on a horizontal axis collinear with the lower of the first two; when I was positioning it I was only looking at the lower three holes, didn't realize there was another one, and I put it in a place where that top hole is not near any wood. Oh well -- the three screws should do a fine job of holding it up.

posted evening of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, April 27th, 2003

🦋 Success!

Well my last glue-up involving mortise and tenon joints (Coleman's desk) was an ignominious affair to say the best of it -- suffice to say it involved a lot of rage on my part, enough to frighten Ellen and Sylvia, and all to no avail (so to speak) -- the glue up was not successful and resulted in some yucky joinery. To contrast with today's endeavor, which came off mostly without a hitch -- and looks fine, better indeed than I had expected: this time I did repeated dry runs and corrected problems, last time not so much; and last time I was expecting my joinery to look "professional", this time my expectations were a good deal lower.

In short, I have gotten better at joinery, and have developed a more realistic assessment of my abilities. Nice combination!

At 7 this morning I asked Ellen for 2 hours to work on the shoe rack, she said ok, see you at 9; and I went downstairs. First thing I noticed was oh shoot, I haven't joined the back of the case like I had been meaning to -- this may take a bit more than 2 hours -- and I started in on that (pretty simple) joinery. This basically meant marking and drilling 8 holes, and smooth planing 2 boards.

While I was working on this, Ellen and Sylvia came down, Ellen to do some ironing and Sylvia to watch everything that was going on. "What you doing, da-da?" So I took a little time out to tell her about the project, and she watched me drilling holes for a little while. And watched me knock apart the dry fitted rack. It was during this knock-down that I made my last adjustment, filing a bit off the side of a too-tight tenon. During this process I arranged all the pieces in the correct orientation, so I would not have to turn them around too much while gluing. Then I set up my gluing area -- pot full of Elmer's white PVA glue, and a wet flux brush; and went to work!

And voila, everything flowed very smoothly. I was a bit nervous about the fact that I had not done a dry fit of the rear joinery -- but it was not a problem. Everything hammered together quite cleanly. I at first was not going to clamp it because the friction of the joints was enough to hold everything in place; but then I realized some strategically placed clamps would get rid of some gaps between tenon shoulder and stile. So I did that; I swept up the shop; and I came upstairs and looked at the clock. 9:00!

Well this project has taken me approximately 3 times as long as any previous one. I think in the end, the time was put to pretty good use -- I have learned a lot and I think gotten more patient as well. Next things on my list of stuff are a banquette for our kitchen; a sandbox for Sylvia; and some fixtures for my shop.

posted morning of April 27th, 2003: Respond

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