Milling

I did have a day of milling at the beach last week, Port Orford cedar and some crappy cherry.

Progress and a Visit

I completed the conversion of my printer's tablesaw to inches. The last step was to trim and drill an off-the-shelf ruler to fit where the old one was. Since I didn't want to cut any aluminum in the house, I clamped the ruler between a couple blocks of wood and trimmed it out in the lane using a sawzall, followed by an end mill in a router to clean it up. Worked very well.

Next, a psuedo-success.  I got all the insulation installed in my dust cyclone baffle. I used acoustic tiles, along with some eggcrate foam. Unexpectedly, or more properly due to lack of foresight on my part, the acoustic tile made the thing too heavy for me to manage. Luckily my son was home from school one weekend and I recruited him to help me maneuver it into place. Here is a shot of it before I sealed it up and put it in place.

The square hole at the top left is where the cyclone exhausts into the baffle. I was disappointed that noise level was not significantly reduced with the addition of the insulating material. I am pretty sure that I  made an error with my previous measurement which showed the baffle without any insulation causing a 20 dB drop from the unmuffled noise level. I found that adding the insulated baffle only yielded a 5 dB drop from the unmuffled! So I'm scratching my head on that one, but really, there isn't much more I can do, other than maybe seal up a few cracks.

Also made some decent progress on the long delayed Japanese style lamp. I got the base pieces cut out and did a first test fitting on it. Still a bit of tweaking to go to close up the cracks, then onto the posts. Hard to envision the finished piece from this I know! It will be about 3' high and a foot square, shoji style.

Also managed to get out and mill up some cherry. You can see the full report here, but this is what we cut by the end of the day. Not huge logs, but it was very nice material, I have high hopes for it.

Finally, I managed a trip to Los Angeles for the first time in many years. The highlight for me was the Gamble House in Pasadena. What a stunning monument to the Craftsman style. And what a shame that Vancouver cannot find the willpower to preserve its heritage houses.

Moving Along . . .

Got out and did some milling with a buddy yesterday. It was out in Chilliwack, a lot of work for not a huge amount of wood. Some nice maple with a bit of stain on it. It turns out that milling on the beach is a lot easier than milling in the middle of a freshly logged lot covered in mud and hills and slash where you have to carry everything to and from the car!

Also finally got started on a muffler/baffle for the cyclone. I tested it this morning, just with the plywood box, and wow did it ever make a huge difference. It dropped the noise from around 90 dB to 70 dB. I am hopeful that once I get the box properly sealed and insulated with acoustic tile and eggcrate foam that it will drop even further.

Have been working on a small table out of an oak slab. The slab is a bit rustic, but I intend to use it for kneeling on when I am at my comptuer rather than using a chair. We'll see how that goes!

The slab had some cup in it, but I have it flat enough for what I need. I am just making up some legs for it. Ooops, first set was too short. That was quite a bit of time wasted, but a good chance to discuss the old adage 'measure twice and cut once' with my daughter. She found the saying quite amusing, either than or she found my mistake totaly amusing.

My Hammond Glider table saw is rocking now. The conversion of the unit from pica to inches is complete, other than fitting the new ruler. I also decided to buy a new blade for it, and wow did that make a huge diference, even though I had the old blade sharpened locally, it was like night and day.

Things are Starting to Happen

Finally getting a few things done around the shop.

House nearby being torn down and McMansion-ized, I managed to mill up some of the big beech that was in the back yard. This was the biggest tree in the neighbourhood by far, such a shame it was mowed down.

Couple weeks later down to the local log dump, scored some more beech, and some cherry.

Beech is one of the few local woods that I had not seem much of to mill (the other notable one being ash), now I have bucket  loads of it! Well, I will have in a few years after it dries.  Funny how I have gone years with little beech, then twice in a row - beech!

48x48x3" slab of beech

The cyclone silencing project continues slowly. Next step will be to finish insulatng the inside of the shed it is in with acoustic tile, and then to build a muffler for it.

In the shop, I have finally started on a long desired upgrade to my Hammond Glider sliding table saw. Since it was orignally built to be used in the printing industry, it is set up to measure cuts in units called 'pica', which are annoyingly not related to either Imperial or Metric units of measurement! So basically I need to replace an Acme rod, the nut it runs in, and the ruler scale. Seems easy, but of course these things never are.

The picture might be a bit confusing if you are not familiar with a Hammond Glider tablesaw, but basically it only does crosscutting, and the portion of the table to the left of the blade slides. The piece being cut is held against a built in crosscut fence, which contains a threaded Acme rod used to locate a crosscut stop. Picture form the bottom up shows the new threaded rod in place in the crosscut fence, the old ruler, the old rod, and the future new ruler. Note the blade at the top with its unique holding arrangement! The hard part of this project will be making a new Acme nut for the crosscut stop, I am hoping I can simply modify the old one.

Of course while I was at it I thought it would be a good time to address the fact that the blade is not straight to the table, and there is a bit more wobble in it than I would like to see. So, the start of another project while many others are already on the go!

Still Dusting!

A couple photos here showing some of the measures I am taking to try and reduce the noise from my cyclone.

I purchased several large pieces of acoustic foam at a local shop, my plan is to line the enclsoure with it to try and absorb some of the sound. You can see it in the photos, it has an egg crate texture.

I also decided to apply some sound absorbing material directly to the cyclone itself, to try and reduce the noise at its source. I'm using Dynamat, and have it on the upper part of the cylcone. It's nice since it is a peel and stick product, easy to apply.

I bought some acoustic tile, 3/4" thick with a high sound blocking rating, and plan to line the enclosure with it first, the acoustic foam will then go over the acoustic tile.

Lastly, and the thing I think will have the greatest effect, I plan to build an external baffle/muffler, rather just direct exhausting the cylcone.

Getting a Bit Less Dusty

It was a long and excellent summer, which unfortunately did not include any woodworking.

However, I have been back at it in recent weeks, and have managed to make some progress on the  dust collection system upgrades I started in the spring. I ran all the 6" PVC tubing from outside into the house and routed it to each of the four machines.

I built an insulated box around the cyclone, but I still have to install either a muffler or the dust filter as the noise of the exhaust blasting straight out the impeller is way too loud. Before I built the box/shed the noise was 84 dB at the property line. With the shed it is 80 dB. I was pretty disappointed in the minimal reduction, and there is no way the new neighbours are going to stand for that! Plus the box is extremely ugly. Too late to paint it now though, it'll have to wait for spring.

I do not have a filter on the cyclone though, it just exhausts straight out. I will build a muffler for it with some baffles and hope that takes it down to an acceptable level.

As part of the upgrade from the 4" system to a 6" systerm I had to upgrade the shrouds on most of my tools. This turned into more work than installing the cyclone and PVC ducting!

Only the jointer already had a 6" input on it. I had a 6"-4" reducer on it for the old 4" system, so it was a simple matter to remove that and connect up the 6" hose.

For the planer I just constructed a new shroud out of 1/8" plywood and a repurposed 6" furnace duct. It is ugly and not well sealed but does the job. I may take it to the sheet metal shop and get them to make a nicer one for me.

For the bandsaw, I had to perform some major surgery to get it done. The original 4" pickup was was impossible to modify to 6", instead I had to close it off and cut a corner off the door to install a slighlty modified 6" furnace duct. I was able to mount it such that the saw blade actually runs right through it so the collection is pretty good.

The tablesaw was the biggest headache, my Hammond Glider. It is a design from the 30's or so and was never designed for dust collection. The opening where the blade fits is fairly tight and it would not support the volume of air required by a 6" port. So I decided to utilize a 4" lower collection port under the table in this opening, and a 4" upper collection port over the blade. I had to get a custom pickup for under the table made at a sheet metal shop, then modified it extensively as I installed it.

Not much to see in the photo below, the custom duct is temporarily taped into place on the Glider.

 I did a couple test cuts and discovered that the slot the blade comes up through table in the normal cutting position (below) is way too small to allow any significant airflow, so the dust/chips on top of the saw are not effectively collected. If I lift up the part of the table to the right (as shown in the above picture) the dust collection is fantastic. I was hoping that the undertable collection would be enough, but it looks like I will need to add upper collection as well.

The 6" system moves a lot more air than the older 4" system did. The first thing I noticed when I fired it up on the jointer (same thing happens on the planer too) is that since there is so much air moving over the blades, it actually creates a noise similar to when you were a kid and you clothes pinned a baseball card to your bike frame so it would make a noise as the spokes hit it!

Knocking Down the Dust

Work continued apace on the installation of the 6" dust collection system for the basement shop. Despite being out of commission for the better part of a week due to a trip to Seattle followed by a cold bug, I managed to get the main lines run to all the machines. I used 6" PVC. Only my jointer has a 6" dust port on it, unfortunately the rest of the machines will require some kind of custom dust hoods/ports on them. I did fire it up and run a test board through the jointer, it worked really well!

Also managed to do a bit more milling a couple weeks ago. I have milled up most of hte bigger logs that were available and am now down to kind of dreggy stuff.

Small Stuff

Two More Cherry Logs

Some Crappy Cherry

This time of year there can be some pretty nice scenery in the milling area!