Fringe Benefits

One of the benefits of working at a church...

... free leftover poinsettias after Christmas!

Christmas 2015 Recap

It's hard to believe that Christmas has come and gone. Here's what ours looked like.

We attended a lovely candlelight Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols.

Allie was anxiously awaiting Santa Paws on Christmas Eve.

Her waiting paid off! Santa Paws brought a new chew toy, a bag of treats, and a box of Greenies!

After opening our stockings and having cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, we headed to the gym. It was surprisingly crowded, but we logged a combined 10 miles on the treadmills.

The rest of our Christmas was spent with framily (friends who are family to us), including a delicious turkey with stuffing.

Merry Christmas!

Shop things

From J:

New clamp storage is finished. French cleats made with 2x4s with custom holders for my different clamps. It works beautifully compared to my old system.

The holders are all movable and I can easily replace them if I get more clamps.

I also got my new dust separator hooked up. It cyclones out the heavier sawdust (99% of what's generated) and only the super fine particulates go to the shop vac itself. This will easily pay for itself over time now that I won't be filling up my expensive German shop vacuum filter bags. It works great until you discover that your expensive German shop vac is too powerful and it collapses the 5 gallon bucket you had it mounted to. Back to the drawing board...

I've now ruined two buckets this way.

In more major shop renovation news, I'm rebuilding my workbenches this winter. I've realized that having one large workbench/saw stand/assembly bench isn't ideal. It tends to get cluttered, it's cumbersome to move around the shop to make cuts on large pieces (like breaking down plywood), and though it's 6 feet long, in practice it functions as a much smaller bench. Time for a change!

New workbench #1: use the big torsion box base of my current workbench as a top for the new workbench. This will be flat and very stable, a great work surface. For the new base, I'm using construction lumber - 2x4s and 2x6s. I milled the lumber up to its final dimensions using my new planer and the table saw, then cut out "mortises" to accept the "tenoned" rails. The legs are actually laminated pieces that are glued around another piece that forms the rail. Not a typical mortise and tenon joint, but it seems pretty strong. Due to my new clamp acquisitions, I was able to glue up both sets of legs at once. 24 clamps in use in this photo. Justification for my insatiable desire for clamps.

I buy glue by the gallon now, by the way.

Something something more clamps something something.

The back stretchers are also cut down construction lumber. I half-lapped the ends and put in a mating dado along the back legs, then it's just glue and clamp. I also added some dowel pins through the leg tenons for extra support against pull-out. The awesome thing about this entire method of assembly is that everything ends up square. Very little room for error when every cut is just repeated on each leg.

These new clamps are sweet. Note the dowel pins at each joint.

Total cost for the new base was about $15, but it took $700 worth of tools to get the $15 of lumber into usable shape. C'est la vie. I still need to unmount the torsion box from the old bench and attach it to this one, but 95% of the work is done. I'll definitely be using this method of assembly again in the future.

A far easier project was to move the table saw to its own stand for maximum mobility. I made a new torsion box for the base out of 3/4" plywood and filled it with 50 pounds of gravel to give it additional mass for stability. I added wheels and then unscrewed the middle "box" of my current workbench, slid it onto the new base, and screwed it in. Voila! If only everything could be so simple.

"Hey, A, come in here and take a photo of me pouring rocks on my project."

I might add some foldaway wings for extra work surface when I want it. Just have to figure out how...

Up next: mobile sharpening station, planer cart, router table, and a drill press stand.

Update 12/22/2015: Torsion box workbench is complete! Mmmm, that glorious, glorious work surface.

Christmas Decorations

Now that the house is decorated, we're ready for Christmas!

By running splitters to more splitters, we were able to add outdoor lights
even though we're only working with one outlet on our front porch. All of
the lights on the bushes are multi-colored even though the ones on the left
side photograph as more of an orange/red.

I made this tree over the weekend at a church workshop. It's holly
trimmings stuck into a foam form, plus some pine cone and
berry embellishments. By keeping the foam moist, it should last
well into the new year (last year's was still around into Feb/March).

Allie is ready for Santa Paws to come visit her!

It happened. We created a Schnauzer tree.
We are nuts.

Black Friday, Woodworking Edition

From J:

Big shop upgrades for me this Black Friday! First up: clamps. Jet has a huge parallel clamp sale, 50% off, every Black Friday. It's a mad scramble. I got up at 5:00 on Friday and found one website that still had them in stock. Four 24", two 31", and two 40". Clamps: check!

Allie approves.

Next, I was browsing ads online. Turns out that Harbor Freight had one of the gems of their collection on sale, a benchtop drill press, for $50. One 20% off coupon later, I'm walking out with a $40 drill press. Crazy.

$40. I know it's not the best one on the market or anything, but come on. $40.

Now, even crazier: I've wanted to get a planer for some time now, as it will let me buy rough stock and dimension it up myself when I need it rather than paying to have it done all at once. I can also do some neat things with glueups for cutting boards and other projects now that I can easily flatten things. The unit that looks like the best combination of price, performance, and size was a Ridgid benchtop unit at Home Depot. They theoretically match competitors' coupons, so I wanted to see what they would do with a 20% Harbor Freight coupon. Not exactly a competitor for an item like this...but they took it. The cashier was shocked. The manager had to come over and authorize it since the discount was so large. I paid and felt like I'd gotten away with something.

Welcome to the tool family.

Merry Christmas, J. I'll be working the next few months on redoing my shop. I've got plans for two new workbenches, a smaller table saw stand, a planer cart, a drill press stand, a new router table, and new clamp storage. Phew!