Sara had her dance recital this last Sunday. She was a hambone as normal and danced front and center of the stage w/out being prompted. She had us all in tears she was sooooo funny. Grandpa got a great video of it.
Well Logan came a bit earlier than either Cari or I expected. We barely made it to the hospital before he was born. Cari delivered him 10 minutes after we got into the birthing room. 5 minutes of pushing and there he was. It was so different than when Sara was born. I think that Cari pushed for 2-3 hours before Sara was born. Any how … Logan was born on April 18th at 8:05 pm, he weighted 7lbs 6oz and was 18.5″ long. I’m sure that Cari will post more on him during her time off.
Well the new shop is almost done. I took a bit longer than I thought it would but it looks pretty good. I’ll post some pictures of the new shop once the SawStop is in the shop and all set up. Hopefully that will happen later this week
Ok now here is a tool that I was a little hesitant about a first but have come to really love. When I first got my bandsaw I also got a book on bandsaws and how to use them and tune them up. I made several band saw boxes with it and they all turned out fine. But I knew that there was something wrong with my tune up. It just didn’t feel quite right as I was cutting a board or resawing.
I borrowed a DVD called Mastering Your Bandsaw from my friend John. Half way through the DVD I paused it ran down stairs and tuned up my bandsaw as Mark Duginske demonstrated on the DVD. What a difference that made. My saw is quieter and has less vibration.
I got a riser kit for my bandsaw. This kit increases the resawing capacity of your 14″ bandsaw. When I got it my local JET
dealer didn’t have the JET riser kit but they did have the Powermatic riser kit which fit my saw fine and ironically cost about $10 less than the JET kit did.
I also threw away the blade that came with my saw and bought a 1/4″ timberwolf blade for the saw. If you plan on using your saw a lot you are going to end up finding that you will most likely need 3 blades for it. A 1/4 inch blade for general purpose sawing, a 1/2″ blade for resawing, and a 1/8″ blade for finer cuts and tight turns.
I don’t recall how much I paid for this saw because I bought it when JET had on of their Green Tag Deals going on. I think that the street price of the saw is around $550 and the riser kit is about $80. It’s worth every penny if you ask me.
After much anticipation, sweat and a little blood my daughters crib is finally finished. I must admit that I slacked on this project and got caught up in the “next project” I think that I have 3-4 projects in some state of completion. At any rate I got my act together and Sara now has a brand new crib to call her own.
The crib is constructed of hard maple, curly cherry and curly maple. I got the plans from The Woodsmith Store last summer and purchased all the needed wood and milled it all after a couple of weeks of sitting in my basement. And there is Sat for the most part until after my daughter was born. To be prefectly honest I soon discovered that I had bitten off a little more that I could chew. The slats on the crib were a real pain to cut and mill the fact that the wood that I bought moved quite a bit after it was cut didn’t help out much either.
The basic construction of the end rails is mortise and tennon jointery. The end rails were pretty easy for the most part. The slats on the end and gait rails basically fit into a dado that is cut along the top and bottom rails a spacer is then placed inbetween each slat in the dado. I think that there were about 50 slats and and over 100 spacers. The assembly was definately a 2 person job. Luckily I share my shop with my father and he helped out a lot not only in the construction but the assembly of the crib.
Here are some pictures of the crib.
align=right border=0>This is a pretty easy project for the new woodworker. The
tools needed are a bandsaw, a 1/4 bandsaw blade, glue, and a whole lot of
sandpaper. When a say a lot of sand paper I’m not kiddin’. I think that theses
boxes are named incorrectly, I think that should be called sanding boxes not
bandsaw boxes. That being said I’d suggest using a softer wood like Walnut for a
box. I’ve made several of these boxes out of Walnut, Cherry, and Bird’s Eye
Maple (Drawer Fronts) and I found all of them easy to sand and shape.
I got the plans from all of the boxes that I’ve made from Lois Keener Ventura’s
book Building Beautiful Boxes With Your Band Saw
Basically the process is as follows.
The finished product makes a great gift for the wife or family. Plus it’s something that they can use
every day. Making things that people like, can use every day and are easy on the
eyes are the greatest joys of woodworking for me.
The Dust Gorilla came via UPS in 5 boxes. I don’t have any pictures of the boxes but let me tell you they were packed very well. I think that they were packed much better than any other tool that I’ve bought. I started off by mounting a 3/4″” piece of ply to the wall where the Gorilla was going to go. I attached the plywood to the wall with 6 3″” lag bolts. I then bolted the support arms for the Gorilla to the plywood. After that my Dad and I hung the motor unit on the supports and bolted it on. After that it was simply a matter of connecting the remaining pieces of the unit to the main unit and so forth. The rest of it I mostly did myself and Dad gave me a hand when needed. All in all I think that the assembly took about 2 hours.
The duct work took a little longer … We used the plan provided by Oneida and got all of our elbows, wyes, 7″” & 5″” pipe, and blast gated from them as well. We got the 4″” & 6″” straight pipe from Home Depot. Here is a hint. If you are assembling your straight pipe get a couple of extra pipe connectors and use them as a clamp once you get part of your pipe in the groove. Any how we connected most of the pipe and got eveything laid out before we we began to drill and pop rivet the pipe togeter. We used sheet metal screws to connect the blast gates to the pipe. After everything was all together we sealed all the joints with clear cauk. We did not use any fasteners to connect the pipe to the gorilla. It’s just a friction fit sealed with cauk.
All in all I am very happy with the dust collector it handles all my tools. It is more than adequate for the X5 Uni with the Excal overarm guard. When I’m using over arm guard I get very little dust even when ripping 8′ of plywood or mdf. We have 1 run left to do because when we were putting it together we didn’t have anything built for the miter saw to sit on.
I purchased my Sjöbergs Workbench from Rockler about 3 months ago. I got the 61 -1/2 inch model with the trestle and the cupboard base. I think that the cupboard base was really worth the extra money because I really needed the extra storage in workshop/basement.
The assembly was very easy and I had it put together in about 2-3 hours not including dry time on the glue. I was missing one bolt in the package but I just ran over to my local hardware store and picked one up.
The bench comes with 2 vices and 4 bench dogs. After having only one small plywood bench in my shop for a 10 months this was a really change. It was like cave man discovering fire. I use it on every single project that have now. It make planing, scraping, sawing, chiseling, etc… so much easier. I use my workbench for every project now.
Now if buying your workbench isn’t your cup of tea. There are some good references out there on how to build your own workbench. Some people belive that you should build you workbench before making anything else. Obviously I’m not one of them. Someday I may build my own workbench but for now I’m more than happy with the one that I have.
Now I don’t think that this project is going to be featured in Fine Woodworking Magizine but it will serve it’s purpose. I got the plans from Wood Magizine and they are quite straight forward and easy to follow.My wife and I have a walk-in closet just off out bedroom. I decided to work on my wife’s side of the closet first. So I drove over to Home Depot and picked up a bunch of drilled & non-drilled 3/4 inch sheets of melamine, drawer sildes and some pulls. Then over to the lumber store and picked up a bunch popler for the drawers.
Basically the plans call for several 15″” or 30″” wide boxes that are combined next to and on top of each other. The constructions is a basic butt joint using confirmat screws. The backs are 1/4 inch birch plywood that are floating in a dado.
I figured that the project should take me about a week and a half. I should have know by now that my estimates are usually off. I’ve been working on it for 2 weeks now and have about another 10 hours left to go on the project. In all honesty I think that I could have been done by now but I haven’t been very motivated since the connecting screws are on back order. These are the screws that hold the cabnets to each other.
I’m hoping that they come this next week and I can complete the project. I’ll post more pictures once the project is complete.
Update 2/22/05:
I finally finished the closet system. Well for the most part … I have to install one more false front and a toe kick. My wife says that she has too much storage in the closet now. I just hope that she doesn’t take this as a sign to fill it up 
Terry & Cari