Progress! Progress! And more wood . . .

Well here I am at 3:15 AM, the wind has been howling and the rain pouring down. I can hear the wind blowing the coverings off of my wood piles. I am sure they will be scattered around the yard when I check it out in the morning. Luckily no serious harm will be done, I'll just get things all set up again, ready for the next storm to mess it all up!

Speaking of piles of wood I picked up another maple log last week. It was so long I cut it in two. All of the maple I have slabbed recently have been split-y and this was no exception. I think I will pass on another maple that is down in the cutting area.

I slabbed this one a bit thicker for reasons of practicality and laziness. With thicker slabs there is more freedom to straighten the grain out for things like table legs (= practical). With thicker slabs there are fewer cuts taken out of a given diameter log (= laziness).

Anyways I have no more room left on the side of the house for wood and it is simply piling up in the backyard, unstickered and really not well protected from the sun. I guess I will have to start piling it up against the north side of the garage now, which is in the backyard and kind of visible, and also kind of damp and mossy. Should be OK for the summer I hope.

Good news-wise, I finally glued up the last shelf with its nosing!! I also cleaned up two of them, still need to level the nosings on the other three. After a long period of just slogging along on this, I really feel a renewed enthusiasm for it, as I see the end of the project approaching.

I calculated that each shelf has 25 separate pieces of wood in it! No wonder they took so long to make! The main bookshelf carcass has only 22 pieces in it!

I REALLY hope to get some finish on this and move it into the living room for my wife very soon.

However, there is a new time sink that has arrived, a 1976 Austin Mini that will require a total rebuild. Its pieces are scattered between my garage and a warehouse in town. I have three engines for it, six carburetors, two front clips, etc. Looks like it'll be a lot of fun!

Why I hate the Tablesaw. Reason #7

Well I was ripping the shelf nosings at 45 degrees today. Had a sacrificial piece clamped to the fence that I cranked the blade up into.

Thought I was being clever since I had arranged it so that if the piece moved away from the fence the blade would not dive into the piece, rather it would dive into the offcut. Always easier to remove more material later than add it back on!

So away I went with the first cut. Things were going swimmingly until the end of the cut when I had the "uhoh" moment as I saw the offcut trapped between the blade and the fence. Before I was able to reach over and turn off the saw, the blade pinched the offcut and drove it back, impaling it 4" into the wall. The rest of the offcut shattered and knocked a bunch of stuff off the shelf above. Very impressive. Lucky I was standing off to the side.

So rather than fix the source of the problem by relieving the bottom of the sacrificial piece, I simply moved the piece of MDF over so that the remaining four offcuts hit it rather than the drywall! Just call me Mr. Safety Guy.

The good news is that now the nosings just need a few swipes with the plane and they will be ready to glue to the shelves.

This kind of thing is why I was happy to sell my router table to my friend and fellow woodworker Jamie. I replaced it with a very solid, quiet, and non grabby shaper that I love. And I don't even need earplugs for!

I have to confess that I plan to replace my tablesaw with a Hammond Glider that I have waiting to be restored. It's a super precision sliding tablesaw originally used in the printing industry back in the day. It's sort of the next project after I get the bookcase done.

My dream is to use the bandsaw for everything, and the Glider for precision crosscutting.

Also hit the beach for some more log slabbing on Friday. I thought I had bad luck last time with the maple splitting. This time as I was cutting off one end, the entire log split! Yikes! Never seen that before. Kind of demoralizing. Anyways I still wound up with four pretty good and two OK slabs.

Also picked up another 4" jointer. I only have six other jointers, so clearly I needed another. An old Beaver, it is sooo cute and has potential.

Veneering Done!

Well after I got the tirade of the last post off my chest, things started to proceed rather smoothly.

The veneer press / compressor actually worked well in the end, other than tending to leak oil. And, ready for this now, I got all five shelves veneered! The first two I did not use enough glue so I had to touch those up afterwards (= more work), but once I got the hang of it it worked very well. It really feels like a big accomplishment and I can sense the end of the project is at hand. I really need to focus and drive to get this thing completed.

I need to trim the sapele nosings for the shelves, fit and glue them, then do a final clean up of the shelves and apply the finish. I think I'll just do a couple light coats of shellac and then wax.Oh yeah, still have to do the consoles. Sigh.

I also managed in all the excitement to get a day of milling in, picked up a couple small logs of spalted maple. I still have not stored away the alder and horse chestnut I got last time, my storage space crisis is acute. Maybe they'll just have to lean against the garage all summer!

The longer log cracked as I sawed it, quite a lot of internal stress no doubt. Perhaps I should give this wood away to Nick, he is the master of taming unstable wood!

 Against my better judgement I am considering taking some cedar slabs that have been drying for a year and a  half and putting them in the kiln. This is for the simple reason that it would create some space in my lumber pile. I'd really prefer to wait until they have dried over one more summer (dry season here) before doing that though. In my experience cedar is the most forgiving of putting it in the kiln a bit wet. I checked it with my moisture meter the other day, it is at 15%, I'd probably see 12% by the end of the summer.

"Whatever Can Go Wrong . . . "

Well this veneering thing just is not working out. It's not the veneering itself, it's the compressor used to create the vacuum for the veneer press.  I should have expected problems when I bought the thing off a local teenager who had fixed it up himself.

Get ready for a small rant:

First I discovered that the compressor's pressure switch was the wrong size. I ordered a replacement on eBay that took forever to arrive. When it did it wouldn't fit exactly on the compressor, and it also had three extra air connections that needed to be sealed off. Well the plugs I got to seal them were the wrong type, they wouldn't seal. So I had to buy new plugs. Then the motor wouldn't turn on properly when the compressor pressure dropped down below about 95 psi. After a ton of head scratching I decided to replace the 1/3 HP motor with a 1/2 HP motor I had lying around. Well of course it was a tad bigger and I couldn't use the same belt. And the pulley on it was bigger. So off to my local hardware store, no belts the right size. A couple phone calls later I am over at a local garage. Their belts are all metric, the one I have is imperial. I eyeballed it, took two that looked right, got home and of course they are both the wrong size. Back again for another one, finally got it right.

Latest problem is that the pulleys on the motor and the compressor don't exactly line up. No way to adjust the motor laterally, will need to move the pulley on the motor shaft. It seems like the problems just never end!

Plus I pulled my back this morning and it is getting worse not better so my plan to do some more chainsaw slabbing tomorrow is toast.  I did slab up some spalted horse chestnut, alder, and cypress last week. No pictures though, you'll just have to believe me!

Got the drive sprockets in all three big chainsaws replaced, dressed the bars, got new chains, so I am rarin' to go. Only problem is that there is not too much exciting wood to be had right now at the cutting area!

Hopefully hopefully once I get the pulleys lined up that'll be the end of the compressor woes (ha! not likely!) and I can actually get these shelves finished.

Olympic Hockey Victory!

All the medals in all the sports at the winter Olympics are important. Of all these important sports and their corresponding important medals, hockey is the most important.

Our family had the good fortune to take in a number of Olympic hockey games. There is no doubt that this gold medal game result was the most satisfying.

 Now, back to woodworking.

On Several Cusps, Progress is at Hand, I Hope

Well, when it rains it pours.

Not only did my new chainsaw chains arrive, but the new knives I ordered for my 8" and 6" jointers arrived. Plus the original knives that I had sharpened I picked up. Plus the pressure regulator for the compressor arrived, and after a bit of unexpected fiddling that I should have expected, it works. Also my digital angle finder arrived so I can set the rakers on my chainsaw chains reliably. And I took two of the Husky brothers to the shop to have them tuned up. After dropping off the organ donor for the mechanic to get some parts from, they are both back in business. And I also tore my Parks planer apart and put it back together with new elevation screws. It is ready for testing now to see if it works. So you see, while I have done nothing, I am now ready to proceed on multiple fronts!

Not to mention I hit the beach two days ago for some slabbing (alder, horse chestnut, cypress), with another unfortunate broken chain happening.

And I went to a bunch of Olympic hockey games!

Kind of Idling

Well, before using the veneer press, I did a test on my compressor a week or so ago. Short story is that the switch that controls the compressor allows it to discharge too far, so it doesn't work with the veneer press. The good news is that I found a cheap one the right size on eBay, the bad news is that it hasn't arrived yet.

Took the family to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics Opening Ceremonies last night. Wow. Great show.

Slabbed up a walnut last weekend with a couple friends. One of the guys is going to store it, luckily for me, I have almost no space left now on the side of my house.

Bought a new chainsaw (4th Husqvarna 2100) this one with a 42" bar, looks like it's a good one. Just waiting for a couple new chains to arrive and I'll be in business again.

3 Husky Brothers Waiting for Work. The 4th Brother is an Organ Donor.

Cleaned up a bunch of yellow cedar that I had in my garage. It was pretty rough, some still in 1/4 log sections still. A lot of it was junk so I managed to clear up some space in the garage, and in the process discovered some other pieces that I had forgotten!

Also sold off one of my four shapers. Now I am down to three - that's a much more reasonable number!