All posts by Tom

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Shop Talk

Wracking my brain

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People have often wondered exactly what I have been thinking.  I’ve been told more than once that I really need to have my head examined.

(For those of you who may be concerned… relax. I’m undergoing a 24 hour EEG test just to verify that I truly am OK after a recent health issue. Everything so far looks A-OK, and I’ll have the results for sure in the next few days.)

Since I have the rig on, I’m sure the doc is going  to be surprised at just how much I’ve been thinking about how I need to fix a boo boo on another project.  You would think by now I have made every single possible mistake there is to make, but I am pretty resourceful.

Basically, here’s the situation.  New project – new issues. I am building a pantry for a friend of ours. I ordered the (EXPENSIVE!) high quality maple plywood and hardwood for the build, and I used the Festool track saw to cut the pieces down to size. This is going to be a piece of cake, sez I, because I have used this before and I know all of the pitfalls of making cuts without using a self-squaring rip fence.

Well, If you put the track of the saw down where it’s not square, and then you make a cut, you will have a perfectly straight cut that just doesn’t quite measure up square. That’s what happened when I cut one of the sides, and I didn’t discover my boo boo until after I had the piece glued and screwed together.  Dangit.

So, I thought I could hide the issue by cutting a long wedge from a maple board and gluing the piece down to the plywood before I put the face frame on. Gosh, that plan stunk. There’s no way I am going to hide this problem.

So, I got to firing those brain cells off – how on Earth am I going to fix this project.  The client was looking to get a pantry like the one I have in my kitchen, and I did a good job ripping the sides on that one straight and true on my table saw.

Think, Tom. THINK!  (By now, the brainwaves are just bouncing all over the place. The doc is going to have his hands full working on this one…)

That’s when a flash of inspiration hit me. When you look at the sides of most cabinets, they are very plain affairs. Just flat end panels sitting there in their monolithic glory.  But, I can also remember a book by Danny Proulx about building your own kitchen cabinets, where he too lamented the fact that slab sides tend to look a little boring.

So, why not take the opportunity to turn my mess up into a design feature?

Danny’s idea was to dress up the end panel of a project like you would the doors of your project to give the piece a little more visual interest. A great idea, especially since I’ll be building the doors for the project, and can use the bits to create a ‘mock panel’ for the sides. Basically, I’m going to mill some maple down to 3/8″ thick, bead the edges and then picture frame the pieces on to the cabinet… making the ends look pretty fancy…

Sure, it will cost a little extra and take some additional milling to make it right, but the finished piece will look totally awesome.

That’s enough thinking for one day… I’ll let my brain sit back and kick its feet up to celebrate another job well done!

 

Reviews

Book Review: Frontier Logs Play Set

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There’s nothing quite like watching the imagination of kids at work. Pull up a chair and a cup of coffee with my mom one day. She’ll tell you about the Christmas when I was a toddler and spent most of the day playing with the handle of a toy. Neither my parents, grandparents or my older brother could convince me to play with something else. I can’t recall what I was playing with that handle, but it must have been awesome.

It wasn’t because I was a simple kid.. but the simpler the toy, the bigger the role my imagination played in making my own fun. That’s the appeal of wooden blocks, Lego blocks, and those frontier-style logs you can use to build all kinds of structures. They’ve been around for a long time and are very popular because they still hold their appeal.

Well, if there’s a special young someone in your life, AND you would like to build him or her a great holiday present, why not look to build a set of frontier logs? Sure, you could buy a set, but they wouldn’t be made by you, right? And, you would be surprised just how easy they are to build.

Ralph Bagnall strikes again, releasing his second book about how to build a frontier logs play set. And, just as with his sand shading veneer book, this one is crammed with straightforward, step by step instructions on how to build a set of your own.  Ralph made his set from a pile of southern yellow pine dimensional lumber scraps, a table saw with a combination blade and a dado blade, and a router table with a convex edge router bit.

The process is very simple and repetitive, and, remember, you are building a set of logs for a child’s play set – not machining parts for the International Space Station. So, cut yourself some slack if things aren’t down to the thousandth of an inch, OK?

The best part of the plans that Ralph lays out is that it includes plans to make roof gable ends, half logs to help you build foundations and how to cut roof staves. Ralph shows you how to cut roof caps and chimneys, to add some more realism to the build. He even recommends how many of each type of piece to build so you can ensure there are plenty of pieces to work with to build a variety of buildings.

Part two of the book shows pictures of some structures you may want to help your little buckaroo build with your new set of logs. You can choose from ranches with corrals, farms or frontier forts.

Now, if you are considering building a set of frontier logs for someone in your life, you might want a copy of this book. And, as we had done with the sand shading book, Ralph would like to give away a copy to one of our readers.

So, if you would like to get your own copy, answer this question. I’ll pick a winner Tuesday night from the correct answers submitted.  Ready? here goes…

What was the first wooden toy I built for my sons?

This one should be easy for y’all!

Hey, Roger Sullivan, you are our winner!  Look for your own copy of the book coming to a mailbox near you!

Quick Polls

Quick Poll

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Some of us began woodworking when we were in a school shop class. Others picked it up instead of another hobby like golf, tennis or stamp collecting. I even bet there are others who go into the craft after they retired and were looking for a rewarding past time.

The one thing that is consistent is that we did get started. This week, let us know the age range when you first started woodworking.


Link of the week

Link of the week

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Wikipedia’s List of Oval Office Desks

It’s one of the toughest jobs in the world – the President of the United States.  The country’s chief executive is called upon day after day to make economic, political, military and a host of other decisions to guide the course of the nation.

So, you’d expect the Prez to have a pretty sweet desk.  You would be right.

This Wikipedia page catalogs the desks used by different presidents since the Oval Office was completed during the presidency of William Howard Taft. There have only been five desks used in those more than 100 years of American Presidency.

The desk currently in the Oval Office is known as the Resolute desk.  It was built from the timbers of the HMS Resolute – a British ship caught in the Arctic ice and freed by sailors from an American whaling ship.  The desk was given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria after the ship was struck from the fleet.

The first desk used in the Oval Office was the Theodore Roosevelt desk. President Taft moved it into the newly completed Oval Office where it stayed until the Eisenhower administration.


After President Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson had the Resolute desk put on exhibit at the Kennedy library, and had a desk built by the Senate Cabinet Shop.  Today, that desk can be found on display at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.


President Richard Nixon moved the Wilson desk into the Oval Office after his inauguration.  Nixon mistakenly believed that the desk was the one used by President Woodrow Wilson when, in fact, it was actually used by President Ulysses Grant’s Vice President Henry Wilson.

And, President George H.W. Bush used what’s known as the C&O desk – a piece built in the 1920s for the president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and donated to the White House where it can be found today  in the West Wing study.

Since the decorations in the Oval Office are selected by the incoming president at the beginning of his or her term, there is always the option of going with your very own desk.  Hmmm, I wonder if one day someone will have an Abram, Klausz or Spagnuolo desk in the Oval Office?

Experiences

Full of life!

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I love going to get my hair cut. With my short ‘do, I need to do it quite a bit.

Why is it so enjoyable? Well, I get to wake up early and head to the barber by myself (most times) on a Saturday morning. I get to crack some funny jokes with the barbers while they snip customers’ hair. I get to stop at the local bagel place and pick up breakfast for everyone  – before they wake up!

And, I get to swing by the local pharmacy to buy a pack of my favorite mints while getting some cash out for the cut. Yes, I loves me some peppermint Mentos!

I don’t know why I am so addicted to these soft and chewy peppermints. Maybe its the nostalgia angle… I used to buy these when I grew up in Jersey. Maybe it’s the fact that you can make them do incredible things when you drop them into Diet Coke.

Quite possibly, it’s  the infectious jingle that went with every ad. Mentos – fresh and full of life. Even if I jabbed a carving fork through my eye, I could never get that out of my head.

Why bring that up now? Well, since my post about online woodworking being dead, it would seem that quite the opposite is happening.In fact, you could say that online woodworking is fresh and full of new life!

Mark your calendars for tonight (Wednesday, Nov. 2) at 9 p.m. Eastern (that’s 8 p.m. in the Central time zone and 6 p.m. in the Pacific). That’s when you will see the triumphant return of #Woodchat!  What the heck is #woodchat?  It’s a Twitter-based discussion on all things woodworking. Yes, you may have seen this in the past, and it was good, but it’s back – and we’re back with a team approach. Folks like Dyami Plotke, Matt Gradwhol, Vic Hubbard, Chris Adkins and Dale Osowski are all on board, helping to spread the moderating duties in order to keep Woodchat a vibrant event.

While you can play along on your twitter page, it might be easier if you use a Twitter chat website such as Tweetchat. Just click on that link, and you will be able to see the conversation as it develops (while avoiding all the nonsense tweets about the Kim Kardashian wedding fallout).

And, I know this is kind of early, but now is also the time to mark your calendars for the week of February 5, 2012. For years, people have bemoaned the loss of shop classes and have questioned the future of woodworking.  Well, this once-considered-dead online woodworking community is doing something about that as well. That week, I am lining up support among the online blogging and woodworking forum communities to bring you a week based around getting to the shop.  We’re tentatively calling it Let’s Woodwork Week.

The purpose of this event is simple – encourage potential woodworkers to dip their collective toes into the water to see what it’s really like to build. Some writers will focus on the basic tools needed to get started in woodworking. Others may focus on basic projects that someone with beginners skills can tackle. Others may showcase some one-on-one training they are doing with some budding woodworkers.  It doesn’t matter… The whole idea is to focus our energies to get people out and  get them working!

I dunno, but if I was a betting man, I’d say the reports of online woodworking’s demise were greatly exaggerated. There’s a lot of spunk out there.. and I think we can tap into it!

 

Experiences

The slasher strikes!

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I’m scared to go into my shop. I think there may be SOMETHING in there!

It all started when I was cutting parts for my rocking horse project. Everything was going to plan, and it looked as if the project was going to be done with absolutely no issues.  I had to cut the last piece of the project, and I went to the band saw to make that ceremonial last cut. I turned on the saw… it made a funny shudder…

And I let out a blood-curdling scream!

The upper wheel spit out the blood-red remnants of its stock urethane tire right onto the table!  This was worse than that scene in that horror movie where that guy with the knife attacks those young co-eds who take too many showers for their own good…

Those red clots of belt on my saw were terrifying to look at. Fortunately, rather than grab my wife and go kissing out in the woods far away from the other campers, I had a better idea.

I scooted up the highway to the local woodworking shop and bought a new Carter urethane band saw tire. Of course, I checked to make sure the coast was clear when I got to the shop, and I broke out a bowl of hot water with a little dish soap in it (per the instructions). After just a few minutes, the new tire was slack enough to stretch over the wheel’s rim and slip on.

After just a little adjusting, I got the tire centered on the wheel. I let the tire cool down for a good hour before resetting the blade. Now, well, it looks awesome and works just like before the slasher went psycho on the original tire.

Now, I just need to sleep with one eye open lest that horrible slasher comes calling again. Fortunately, I think the threats from ghouls and goblins will be over after tonight’s Trick or Treating.

 

Spotlight

The Spagetti is here!

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Yes,  folks, it’s true.  Marc and Nicole Spagnuolo just welcomed the newest member to their household today!  Welcome to the world, Mateo Xavier Spagnuolo.

I’m still trying to get the particulars, but he’s happy, healthy and seven weeks early!

I feel like that extra proud extended family uncle….