What I Did Last Summer

If you’re going to take 4 months off, one thing’s for certain, you’re gonna think a lot about what you want to do with the time before you get it. Lots of folks would be drawn to the idea of travel or some other big adventure. That’s not me. Sure, there are a few things I thought about along those lines when staring out the office window, but I knew that I just wanted the time.

Years ago, I was at a post-work happy hour with the usual suspects. One of our number, Greg, was about to experience a life-changing event of a certain fashion: His wife was going to Europe for work for six weeks. “Greg! Whatever will you do??” was the question, where the askers were mainly thinking that Greg was going to get, well, how to say it… Lonely? Anyway, Greg’s mind was somewhere else entirely. His response was “I’m gonna do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it!” That struck me as sagely words at the time, and when I thought about the core plan for the summer, that was it.

That’s not to say I had no plan at all. No, I had a long list of stuff that I could do, some of which being really should do. But no particular order to it. Having a list like that is, I think a pretty important thing to have if you’ve got a bunch of unstructured time coming at you – else you can easily slip into habits like playing too many computer games, sleeping too much… It’s better to have that menu of things you could do at the ready. That’s not to say the only things I did were on that list – far from it, as it turns out, but the list was a good thing and I checked off most of the stuff on that list.

Let’s talk about what I didn’t do

So before we start – I think I really have to reaffirm that I didn’t travel. Had no plans to do it. I don’t enjoy airports even a little bit, and that downer kinda ruins long-distance travel for me. Further, I feel like if ever I want to see something new, I just have to look a little closer at something familiar. So there’s no draw there.

And alas, I wanted to spend more time hiking in the mountains than I did, but my wife has had some problems with hip bursitis that kept her from being able to go, and that pretty much ruined it for me. There’ll be other opportunities.

I also thought about flying quite a bit. Funny, though, I knew that I wasn’t in a position yet to commit to renewing my pilot’s license. That meant that if I went flying, it’d basically just be a joy ride, and that would probably be more bitter than sweet. What I enjoy about flying is the whole package – the technical challenge of it, the experience of doing it, and the utility of being able to travel without the unpleasantness of airlines. If I can’t have the package, well, it’s just not going to be the same.

So I thought instead to give glider-flying a try. That could serve more of a purpose as I’d get a chance to see if I liked it enough to pursue it more seriously later. But alas, the local glider club (for various reasons including the pandemic and runway repairs) couldn’t accommodate me this summer. Again, there’ll be other chances for that, so no tears.

Fixing Stuff Around the House

I really enjoy home-improvement work. I enjoy the challenge and the learnings and I get a lot of satisfaction out of it when I’m done, so it’s not surprising that it’s the biggest line-item.

The first thing I did was clean up and organize the garage shop. It’s funny that if you look at videos from people who make furniture like I do, it seems like almost half of them are for making stuff that’s just for the shop. Be it work benches, storage, whatever. I view that as a bit pathological – you want to be making furniture, not making stuff to make furniture. The trouble is, there’s a lot of inefficiencies built into my workspace that I never addressed because I always felt like I needed to focus what time I had on actually getting stuff done. Now that I got the time, I figured it was worth it to get after it.

So the first thing was just plain building up some shelves and such, reorganizing stuff around the shop and getting rid of some extra stuff.

One of the more amusing things I did was fully commit to labeling drawers and such with their content. My Dad was an absolute fiend for that kind of thing. I thought it was something he picked up in his old age or something, but when I was visiting the old homestead, my cousin showed me a piece of pegboard that came from the workshop that my Dad had carved out of Grandad’s garage when he was a kid. He had outlined the shape of all the tools and where they should go on the pegboard. I think that was a common thing back in the day. Still a pretty good idea, as least so long as the toolset you use stays constant, because, well, it turns out that paint can hang around a while.

Inside the house, my wife and I fixed up our front entryway. That involved taking down a popcorn ceiling treatment, fixing drywall, cleaning and painting. In this I found a way to like the setting type of drywall compound. It has these qualities that make it good for small jobs:

• It dries quicker, allowing you to be done with drywall within a day.
• The premixed stuff, if you open and close the bag a lot, tends to get little flakes of hardened drywall in it that cause mayhem. I definitely wish you could get it in smaller quantities.
• I wish you could get the setting compound in smaller batches as well, because it seems to have a shelf-life. The several-years-old bag SilverSet 40 now takes a couple hours to dry. Still faster than the boxed stuff, but it’s noticeable.
• The fast dry time enforces a certain cadence to your work, which is a good thing. When it comes to drywall, trying to fix a coat of it while it’s still wet is often counterproductive. Better to just let a mistake dry, sand it, and do better on the next coat.
• 40 minute set time is a good minimum, but what it does mean is that you have to clean your tools on every batch, and that’s a big cost.

We also got after the children’s bathroom, although we limited our ambitions there and didn’t touch the tub surround, which is definitely not great, but not seriously broken either. We also didn’t re-tile the floor, but my wife did put on some kind of dye for the grout. It was a very fussy job, but way, way less work than peeling off and re-tiling, and the tile wasn’t bad, it was just grungy grout.

I built a new vanity, medicine cabinet, and mirror frame out of my dwindling stock of Walnut that I bought several years ago. Here I had some trouble with some Varathane poly. It didn’t dry properly and didn’t color the wood uniformly. For polyurethane, the accepted way to get rid of a can is to leave the lid off and let it harden. That can’s been sitting for weeks and has just barely even skinned over. I’m going back to Minwax.

We also did a lot of drywall fixes and Dianne had an adventure in wallpaper. Hopefully that stays looking nice, we’ll see how we do.

In my final week off, I redid the garage-side of the garage-to-house door. It’s always been pretty hi-howyadoin because the wall is pretty wonky and Bear, our house-monster, clawed the crap out of the trim and door frame.

I crafted up some custom molding from MDF and it looks, well, it’s okay. Nothing magical. But I did learn a new trick for MDF – if you just prime and paint the cut-end of MDF, you’ll get a texture like 60 grit sandpaper. You can beat this by a variety of ways – apparently oil-based primers help. Some say that Shellac-based primers work, but I’ve not had good results with that. What I tried this time was smearing a layer of wood glue. I used Titebond II, full strength. Some say you can thin it and paint it on. In any case, one coat of glue plus some sanding, plus priming, plus light sanding again made a good surface.

The other fun thing was fishing the control wire for the garage door opener behind the wall. It was made more challenging because the wall is insulated. We achieved success by using a craptastic endoscope that we bought last year. Dianne fitted the end with a hook and was able to guide it through, spot the fish tape and snag it with the hook.

Self-Improvement and the like

I’ve actually taken long breaks like this several times before. One of the hallmarks of them was that the first few weeks were often, to my mind, wasted because I’d just completely vegetate on video games or books or whatever. That didn’t happen this time. There are a couple reasons for that, one being that I didn’t finish my time at work in a mad rush to get something done and the other being the list of stuff to do that I had made. That list seemed to make it a lot easier to jump in and I wasn’t just spent from the last week of work so I was able to dive in.

But one thing that I hadn’t reckoned on was that I was never quite disconnected from work – I’d lurk on Teams and a little bit on e-mail. As the time came to an end, I felt like I had to pick projects that wouldn’t poke into the time after I started work again. I had intended this break to be something of a practice session for actual retirement, and the way I ended up behaving spoiled that objective, I think.

The other thing that I knew I wanted to focus on during this time was my weight and fitness. I figured with hiking and such it’d be easy to get more exercise in during this time off and that it’d be easier to force myself to budget some time for yoga or something. But that didn’t end up happening at all. Part of that was my wife’s bursitis and part of that was the “well, in a few months/weeks you’ll be biking to work again, so…” It’s a thing I still need to work on.

But early in the summer I was learning about intermittent fasting and the research around changing your body’s physiology to delay the onset of age-related diseases. I saw that exposure to cold (particularly showering in cold water) was one of the things thought to have that effect, and that weight loss was a by-product of that physiologic change. Somehow, I managed to talk myself into it by saying “Okay, if you do this, and you start losing weight without doing anything else, then you have to keep doing it”. And I did start losing weight, so I kept it up.

For me, the key to weight loss has always been to just step on the scale every morning. It seems that just being conscious of it has a way of keeping me on the straight and narrow. When it comes to the weight loss in this summer, it could be the cold showers, but it could also be the reduced stress of not having work and it could also be just part of a long-term cycle for me that I’m not aware of. So really, the only effect that I’m sure that cold showers have is this: they save on water.

Yard Work

I’ve never been much for gardening. I think it was a reaction to my youth, when my parents would constantly make me do yard work. I think maybe it’s like fishing. When I was a kid, I wanted fishing to move faster. Now that I’m older, fishing is one of the few things that happens slow enough. Maybe the same is true for gardening and I’m just now coming to it.

I spent a lot of time pulling weeds out of the back yard (which was pretty seriously infested). I found that I could enjoy a bit of weeding and the results were pretty satisfying. Some areas of the yard were so overgrown with buttercup that all the grass was gone. In these areas and some other areas, I re-seeded. I was surprised in the variety of results I got. In one large area, the grass did tremendously well. I’ve mowed it several times. In other areas, it’s just limping along. I’m really not sure what’s bad about the bad patches, but I suspect the soil. I’ll probably have to revisit those areas next year with some better soil. The area where it did the worst is a peculiar area, because there appears to be a void under it. If I stick a piece of rebar into that part of the yard, the bar will just go right down and, in some places, literally just drop for a foot or so.

I also worked on a drainage problem in our yard. There was a pipe that takes water away from the front of the house and sends it… Well we didn’t know where it went. The pipe would generally work, but when the chips were down, it often backed up. I ended up buying what amounts to a wire on a wheel with an emitter at the end of the wire and a sensor to find it. It was more than a bit fussy as the signal didn’t penetrate the soil enough, but we were able to find it from time to time and ultimately located the “blockage”.

When I dug down to where the signal was pointing, I found a couple of concrete block-slabs – you know the kind about 9×18″ or something like that. After I dug out the top of the slabs I figured it was gonna be like opening Tuts tomb. Well, something like that. The treasure was a couple of slugs. Anyway, what I found was that the pipe was just butting into a pile of rocks. I guess the rocks were somewhat porous and allowed the water to drain into groundwater unless the ground was thoroughly saturated. So anyway I extended the pipe so that it could daylight. Hopefully that, plus some cleanup on the front end will improve the drainage in that area.

Coding

My son and a friend’s son had both expressed an interest in learning Python, and I had an interest myself so I undertook a number of projects to bring myself up to speed. First I wrote a Wordle assistant – it can play Wordle, of course, but the main mode is to rate word choices so you can do a post-game analysis. The big takeaway from the wordle experiment was that it’s a fantastic interview question. The first part, just writing an algorithm to take a user’s guess and provide the hint, is (or should be) trivially easy if you discount words with more than one of the same letter in them. (E.g. the correct hint for “enter” when the user enters “tarot” is to mark the first ‘t’ in yellow and the last ‘t’ in the word as a miss, because the answer only has one ‘t’). I suspect most candidates will struggle to come up with an elegant solution in 30 minutes. Even if they absolutely crush it, there are a lot of avenues for exploring what constitutes a “good” word to fill out the time.

After that I made up a ball-sort clone (like this) to teach myself pygame and then I started on an asteroids clone that a managed (barely) to get my son to contribute to. Sigh.

A much meatier project was revising something I wrote a couple years ago to teach myself React, a logic gate simulator for a game called Scrap Mechanic. Now, at this point, that game is pretty old and not seeming to go anywhere fast. Further, the simulator is going to be interesting to a vanishingly small number of players. Still, it’s linked from the main wiki and gets some use, and it was in a state that didn’t reflect well on me. (The UX was clunky and difficult).

My work on that project of that was colored very much by my conversations with my son in making the Asteroids game. Whenever I started talking about more beautiful ways to do something he’d just look at me like he had no idea what I was doing. “Dad, the thing works. What are you changing it for?” “Oh son, it’s more maintainable!” “Dad, you’re never going to come back to this and nobody else is going to care enough either.” “But maybe…” “Almost certainly not. It works the way it is, Dad, let’s get on with the next thing.”

Our conversations didn’t go exactly that way, but that was the spirit of a *lot* of conversations and, well, it got me to thinking that when I was in 9th grade, I thought about it pretty much the same way, and I got a lot of stuff done back then.

So the changes I made in the logic gate simulator are definitely not good examples of React. They work, and that’s good enough. When it came to that, I didn’t care that the code was nice, I wanted the UX to be nice, and I wanted to move on to the next thing.

Teaching the Kids!

First off, my daughter is not so keen on coding but is learning to drive! So we had a number of driving adventures together. My oft-neglected truck got some exercise. The funny thing to learn there was the realization that my daughter has no idea how to get anywhere. Even to visit a friend’s house that she’s been to a million times…

My son expressed an interest in learning Python and one of my friends kids did too. My son has coded in Scratch for quite some time and is somewhat proficient with it. The other boy hadn’t coded at all.

It was a miserable failure, on both fronts, I think. The boy who hadn’t coded at all found it quite overwhelming and my son, well… I tell you, I had a great advantage when I learned to code. There was no internet.

If I wanted to play a game, I pretty much had to write it myself. Now, massive distraction is just one click away, and you can’t hardly program without the internet anymore. (Because you always have to look stuff up, and that’s the only way to do it.)

I also feel that Python is a horrible language for a first-time learner of coding. But I wonder if that’s because of how I think of coding. For me, it’s all about understanding each bit of code in complete detail. For others, I think they understand it at a larger granularity. Perhaps that has its place. It’s something I really want to explore once I get back to work.

In Total…

I know a fellow who’s pushing 70 and has no interest at all in retiring. He says “I got a million hobbies and not one I want to do full time. I don’t know what I’d do with myself”. I never struggled with that. I did all million of those hobbies.

I do worry that a lot of those hobbies are best done when the weather is nice. However, I think if I had taken this break in the depths of winter, I’d still have filled my days just fine.

Finishing

I look at wood finishing as mainly the business of taking a perfectly good project and adding a layer of disappointment to it.  I’ve tried several products and a bunch of techniques, and, up until now, hadn’t hit on something that worked for me.  I’m not saying this is the perfect technique or is good for all woods, but i was able to take several projects made out of Walnut and get some good results with Polyurethane.

Polyurethane has its limits.  It’s a film finish, so the wood doesn’t feel like wood when you’re done.  If you want that effect, this isn’t going to work for you.  What you can get is:

• A mirror finish — if you’re willing to work for it.
• A flat, non-shiny, but impervious finish
• A perfectly smooth finish with no visible bubbles

The other thing about this technique is that, except for fine abrasives, you don’t need any fancy brushes, spray booths, sprayers, or high-end polyurethane.

Stuff You’ll Need

• Sandpaper up to 400 grit
• Abrasives up to 4000 grit (I used these)
• 0000 Steel Wool
• Foam Brushes
• Minwax semi-gloss Polyurethane – that’s the brand I used.  I presume any oil-based poly would work for this.  Maybe water based poly would too, but I didn’t use it.

Abrasives are a big deal in the later stages, and different kinds will do the job than the ones listed here.  The  thing about steel wool is that it will go around corners without cutting all the way to the wood, like you can easily do with sandpaper.  However, sandpaper can do better on flat surfaces, particularly in the early, rough stages.

I found this chart, which is good to know.  The hand-pads listed here seem to be well thought of, but I didn’t try them.

Prep

• For best results and best ease, finish each part separately and glue after you’ve finished.  You’re going to be doing a lot of sanding, so best to make that as easy as you can, and pre-finishing does that.
• Sand to 150 grit – only sand to finer grains if you’re working on end-grain or something where the scratches show or you just decide you’ve got extra time on your hands.  The rule is this, if you see scratches, you’ve got more work to do.  If you don’t, you’re done.
• Vacuum the area around where you’ll be finishing and vacuum the piece.
• Wipe the piece off with a dry cloth, and then again with a cloth made slightly damp with mineral spirits.

Glop and Sand

Normally this is the part where the processes tell you to get all careful and fancy.  But not here.  No.  Get the polyurethane onto the pieces any old way you can.  Bubbles are not a concern.  Dust is not particularly a concern.  The only thing that should be a concern is pools and runs.  (Spots where the poly is much thicker relative to the surrounds).  Let that dry until it’s not tacky, at the least.  It’s probably better to let it dry longer, but I don’t think it’s critical.

There will be gloops and globs and runs.  There just will.  To fix them, carefully shave them off with a sharp chisel.  These spots will look terrible, but don’t worry, it’s not a thing at this stage.  Just make sure the surface is even with no bumps & lumps.  You’ll probably want to let it dry again after the shaving, as you might have exposed less-dry material.

Violently sand the whole thing with 220 grit.  The goal of this first coat isn’t to build a coat on the top surface, but rather to get the poly into the pores of the wood.  If you feel you’re taking most of the first coat of poly back off with the sanding, you’re doing it right.  You can tell when you’re done when after you’re done sanding you see hardly any shiny spots.

Clean with vacuum, dry cloth and damp cloth and make sure you didn’t miss anything with sanding.  The more thorough you are with the sanding, the fewer coats you’ll need.

Repeat.  At least twice.

Getting Serious

Once the pores get filled, you’ll notice that the light doesn’t catch on the pores like it did before.  You’ll also notice that when sanding, you get a uniform surface.  Once you have this all around, it’s time to be more careful to avoid runs and pools, as they’ll take more care to make disappear now.

Now we’re ready to put the final film on the piece.  Carefully put a really thin coat on – you’ll notice that it has practically no penetration at this point so a little bit of finish will go a long way.

Let that dry as much as your patience will allow.  Some say that it’s vital that it cures completely, but I don’t.

Are We Done Yet?

Maybe so!  At this stage, the finish will stand up to abuse and looks good from a distance.  Close inspection will probably reveal dust nibs, brush marks and other imperfections, but it’s a pretty good finish that you could walk away from.

But if you want to jack with a good thing, you can press on!

Rub the whole thing with 0000 steel wool until nothing is shiny, anywhere.  This will leave you with a piece that is very nice but with no shine at all.  You might like this finish.  It doesn’t look like wood covered in plastic, but it certainly will feel like it.  It’s pretty time-consuming to get an even, flat finish, but the result looks good.

So again, it’s a great finish that stands up to close inspection.  You can leave it there, but, if you want a mirror shine, you can press on!

I used a set of sandpapers that go up to an extremely high grit.  There are a bunch of brands for this and I imagine they all work.  The one thing they’ll all share is that you need to work from the coarsest grit up to the finest.  I find that the only way to do this mind-numbing work is to be absolutely certain that you’re done with a grit before progressing to the next.  The way you can do that is by sanding one part of the project and looking at the reflection of a point-source light.  You should be able to see a visible difference between the part that you’ve sanded and the part that you haven’t.  When the whole piece looks consistent, you’re ready to move to the next grit.  If no amount of sanding seems to change a particular section, that means you didn’t sand it enough at some coarser grit level.  Back up and do it again.  Fun times.

The net effect of this treatment is a surface that looks like wood under a microscopic coating of glass.

Shop Stereo 2.0

Can you really count yourself among the mighty if you have not built something up around a Raspberry Pi?

At work I’ve been asked to do something that really requires a hacker, rather than an engineer.  I don’t really like to think of myself as a hacker, but I suppose I’m a dab hand.  I suppose that got my juices flowing or something, because I felt like I just had to have me on of those Raspberry Pi things, but only if I could make a proper use of it.  Anything less than that seems like posing.

The music in my shop comes from a laptop running Pandora pumped through a kit-build amplifier.  I definitely think no woodshop is complete without a SketchUp-capable laptop, but there are problems:  My kids go running off with the laptop sometimes.  The laptop gets in the way, and all the dangling wires for the music and power are a big hassle…

What if I got a Raspberry Pi to be a Pandora player?  That’d be cool, but it doesn’t require any GPIO…  But what if it could detect the ambient noise in the shop and adjust accordingly?  Yeah, now there’s something…

Maybe this’ll do it:

It’s pretty simple, really.  Well…  no.  I suppose not.

Okay, so it took a while to get to that hairball.  It works.  Not real well, but it works.  Let me take you through the adventure of how it got to this point…

We need some tools – software

My Dad’s not a TV repairman, but I minored in Computer Engineering in college, so I had a few things lying around, and I can watch some Youtube.  That’s when I found out about LTSpice.  What an amazing thing that is – if I’d’a had this in my Embedded Systems lab I would’a burned up way fewer IC’s, I’m pretty sure.  One thing, though, the tutorials on the LTSpice site itself are flat out incomprehensible.

The guy you want to watch is Afrotechmods, not only for LTSpice, but for basic analog circuits in general.

So off I went to Vetco (more on this in upcoming episodes) and got an LM324 OpAmp and set to work creating this circuit:

This should work, right?

We need some tools – a scope

Nope.  I just couldn’t get it to work with any of the crappy old headset microphones I dragged out.  None seemed to work at all, even when I yelled at the mic.

There’s these things called Oscilloscopes; I’ve never used one but they sure seem like the thing to have for a time like this, and there’s some at work I can use.

So one evening I went into the lab and I fussed, and I fiddled, and I got some help fussing and fiddling from a more experienced hand, but no dice.  It sure seemed like my two microphones were dead.  But that seemed unlikely.

Then I found this craigslist posting for an oscilloscope for cheap.  The seller makes no claims to whether it works or not beyond the fact that when he flips it on things light up and there’s a satisfying whirring sound.   That’s the limit of his expertise.  I felt that the force was strong with this craigslist post, and I just bought the thing.

It was manufactured before I was born, but indeed the force was strong; it does work.  The microphones, both of them, don’t seem to work.  I can tell that, because I found something that does work.  More on that later.

I looked around for a little while for a manual for this thing, had no luck at all.  My neighbor came by and said he knew a guy who knew a guy…  What he knew was the Boat Anchor Manual Archive.  I got me a manual!  Thanks Keith!  Now if I can just use it to get those angry looking orange “Uncal” lights to turn off.

A Proper Enclosure

Then the ripples in the force were amplified by my wife, who declared that another piece of 1960’s high technology just had to be removed from the kitchen so that she could install something in its place to pile crap into.

I admit I didn’t understand it at first.  No, I thought this was just another random chore in the way of true enlightenment.  Fortunately, patching drywall is a meditative process, so I was able to understand the true nature of it all.

I could repurpose this 1968 Internet of Things, highest of techno-bling for your house to be the case for the pi…  And the knobs and dials.  Surely they could be made to work.

For more bonus material, take a look around back:

That’s a speaker…  Or a Microphone, depending on your point of view.  When I wired that speaker up to my oscilloscope, sure enough, I got waveforms at ~20mv.  Got my amplifier together and made that into waveforms around a volt, and a little more tinkering to get a boolean +3v/0v signal into the Raspberry Pi.

Basically, all it is is this:  sound hits the speaker, pressure moves the paper back and forth, that moves the magnet in the back of the speaker against a coil of wire.  The moving magnet induces a current in the speaker coil, which I detect with a voltage comparitor circuit (as above) and that feeds into a GPIO pin on the PI.  All I needed to do was use a potentiometer in series with a large resistor to create a comparison voltage down in the millivolts.  The potentiometers (the blue wheelie thingies in my picture), allow me to fine tune the trigger voltage, so that I find just the volume that will trigger when a noise source is on (e.g. my filter), and not when it’s off.

What’s Done?  What’s Next?

So with that speaker wired up like that, if I sample the pin at ~100 times per second, when there’s stuff making noise in the shop, I get 20-40 positive signals.  When nothing is running and things are quiet, I get none.

I’ve also got the Pi’s audio out going to my amplifier and that’s actually split so that the audio output also goes into another comparitor so I can tell if the music might be responsible for the signals on the microphone.

I’m a little bit mystified by my result there – although there’s a good correlation between lots of ones on the signal being sent to the speakers and lots of ones coming in from the Microphone, they don’t happen at exactly the same time…  I can think up a handful of reasons why that might be so, so I’ve got some work to do there.  I don’t know that it necessarily matters – I think I can get a pretty good prediction of whether there’s noise or not over 10 second intervals.

The bigger problem is that the sound quality from the Pi is just terrible.  Or perhaps it’s just weak – the voltage levels coming out of it are about a tenth the strength of map laptop’s.

I used my mad analog circuit skills to create a pre-amplifier, but the sound quality isn’t what you could hope for.  There’s lots of possible reasons for that – certainly with wires roping around a breadboard, there’s RF a-go-go, weak connections, and all manner of electrical mayhem.

My man at Afrotechmods has a couple of amplifier circuits to try, and maybe I’ll go to Fry’s and pick up one of their audio amp kits.

I also want to wire up some of the switches and such from the old house intercom.  I’m particularly interested in seeing if I can make the AM/FM knobs work to switch Pandora stations.

Lots of Legos

Between us, my son and I have a lot of Lego’s.  A lot.  And I’m too old to sit on the floor and build with them.  My knees hurt.

Then I saw my neighbors had tossed a couple of closet doors to the curb and I remember that my parents had built a couple project tables out of some old closet doors like that.  But I remember them being bigger than what my neighbors were parting with.  Maybe my parents closets were bigger; maybe I was smaller.  In any case, whatever I built needed to fit across the king-sized bed we have in our spare bedroom, which is where most of the Lego work gets done.

So I got a 4×8 sheet of plywood, some assorted lumber for reinforcements, and some folding table legs.

One might think that 32 square feet would be enough to spread out the Lego’s and play with them, but no…  Maybe 64 would be, but not 32.

Turns out they’ve got more than just one sheet of plywood down there at Dunn Lumber, so I set out to build a cabinet:

I built it so that the front and the back of the cabinet are the same – you can open drawers to the back as well.

In hindsight, I wonder if it would have been better to make every other drawer open in the other direction, so that you could have more to look at.

But perhaps the way I did it is good enough, as the drawers are built to come out and be put back in easily.  The drawers don’t have sub-dividers in them.  We’ll see how that works out.  My feeling is that I don’t want to have to have a card-catalog for Lego’s, and splitting things up 8 ways is already likely to be more than my son is likely to do.

 

I built it with all the parts exposed, and it’s built out of whatever wood I had laying around – some pine, lots of maple and some poplar.  I figured that was appropriate for the purpose.  The drawers are made out of ~5/16ths inch stock with 1/8” plywood bottoms.

I haven’t put any varnish on it, as it’s too cold to do that now.  I don’t know that I’ll ever varnish it.

I don’t know that I was entirely sensible here, but I built a mechanism to hold the drawers shut (or prevent them from opening on the back side if it’s up against the wall or something.  Here’s a shot of the cabinet with the drawers locked:

You can pull up on the dowel, spin them 180 degrees and drop them back down to unlock.

 

I tried to hand-plane as much as I could, rather than sanding.  I feel like I’m still struggling with basic stuff – particularly sharpening.  Still, from time to time, I can put an amazing edge on my tools.

Click here for the full gallery, including some shots that illustrate the fact that it might have been easier building this thing than sorting the Lego’s.

Small Kitchen Cabinet

I have resolved to make furniture that is distinctive.  That is, not like what you can get in the furniture store.  This is the first piece I’ve made in a while that fulfills that requirement.

It was built for a corner of our kitchen counter, here it is in plan view:

Opposing Drawers

The counter adjoins the family room as well as the kitchen.  I decided it’d be fun to create drawers that appear to contradict the Pauli Exclusion Principal.

The front drawers are only a quarter size and the side drawers are three quarters, like so:

The quarter size drawers face onto our kitchen countertop, where a lot of real life happens, so it’s just as well that they only come out 8 inches or so, because that’s about as far as you want to push junk out of the way anyway.

These run on simple dovetailed maple drawer runners.  I’ve lost all interest in metal drawer slides.  I haven’t found anything that works as well as hardwood on hardwood.

It’s not that these runners are just as good as expensive bearing slides – it’s that they’re better.  Far better, and they look better  too.

Secret Compartment

I didn’t know I was making a secret compartment until my wife looked at it.  I was puzzling about how to make a pull for it, then she came and fiddled with it and bubbled about it being a secret compartment.  So it is!  It’s a spot for pens and pencils.  Secret pencils.  Invisible ink.  Spy stuff even.  Sure.

It’s a carved block of the red elm, hacked out bandsaw-box style and swiveling on dowels.

 

Drawer Pulls

I like making drawer pulls so much I made a whole post about them.  I made them out of walnut, where I tried to catch a little bit of sapwood in each pull.  I didn’t manage to carry that off.  The walnut that I made this out of was from a tree in a residential neighborhood that was cut down because it was dying.  The sapwood in the pieces I was working with was eaten up by worms, so there wasn’t much.  You can see in the top small drawer pull a worm trail in the sapwood.

 

Top

This is a small piece, so I didn’t want it burdened by some whacking thick board on top of it.  The piece is wide enough that I couldn’t just use a solid piece either, and I certainly didn’t want plywood.

What I did was a bit off-beat.  I built up a frame, cut a rabbet, and then cut out some wacky curvy bits and glued them in the center, but they’re not glued to each other, and they’ve got a little expansion room between them.

I had originally planned to screw into the top from the bottom, but that would have been more than a little tricky to get screws into all those places.  Plus the screws would have very little bite to them.  I decided as long as I was at it, I might as well go full on crazy, so I just routed out more daffy shapes to hide the screws under.  Now I can have easy access to drive the screws and can use some screws with real holding power.  With thin wood, you have to worry about things bowing over time more than with thicker wood.  Or maybe it’s just more apparent.  Whatever, I’ve got screws that say that won’t happen here.

So this is what it ended up like.  Again, I tried to get some sap wood in the mix.  I ended up using one piece that was really eaten up by the worms, but what the heck…

The Back

I’ve never worked with Red Elm before.  I heard some good words about it, but that’s all I had to go on.  Most of my stack of elm is quarter-sawn – probably not on purpose, but that’s how it arrived.  I only had a little plain-sawn stock, and it sort of selected itself for the back.  I’m now a bit bummed that I didn’t have enough for the rest of the piece, as I think it’s just stunning.  The back is just resawn red elm, again, cut down to about 3/8” thickness.  Beautiful grain, for sure.

In All

This was a fun project to build.  It did all the things I wanted it to do – it’s got curves all over the place, dovetails, well fit drawers, just the right amount of weight to the pieces, and it was cheap to build.

There are some regrets too – I could stand to re-do the secret compartment – there’s a glue line that just won’t disappear.  And wow do I wish the grain that’s on the back was on the drawer fronts.

But so it goes.  The family really likes it and guests do boggle at its funky drawer design.  On to next year’s project, whatever it is.

Resources

Here’s a link to the sketchup – it’s not a terribly accurate rendition of what finally got built, but it’s a start.

Here’s the full bank of pictures.

So class, what have we learned?

Every Winter I pack up the shop and shove all my tools into a useless heap in the back of the garage so I can pull my car in.  Until I get much more serious about insulating the place (and bumping up my heating bill a few notches), it’s the best use I can make of the space.

I really enjoy the hobby, but I wonder if packing it up for 4 or 5 months out of the year isn’t actually a boon to my enjoyment and possibly even my skill.  I’ve picked up a lot of new moves in the past few years.  A huge portion of that has to be attributed to YouTube, and another big batch to a few folks that I’ve met in the hobby these past few years.

But the fact that it’s unavailable for a few months out of the year might actually be an advantage – an opportunity to really think through what I want to do the next year.  Not that I actually do that when the time comes, but the ideas come through nonetheless.  Last winter, I sketched up this sideboard:

But I never built it.  The intention of it was to feature a lot of curved cuts, and generally mix the colors of the walnut and red elm that I have.

When push came to shove, though, we don’t really have a place to put a piece like that in our house right now.  Our dining room table is always covered in spattered watercolors, scraps of paper, rubber bands, glitter, popsicle sticks, glue, spirograph…  What would we really do with a formal sideboard right now?  We’re also thinking of remodeling the space, so who knows whether it’d even fit right in the final space?

But I got a bur in my bonnet to build my own band saw, and then I did a couple of little things, did our usual array of summer camping trips to enjoy the perfection of the Washington summer.  I felt like the next thing should be smaller, so I got to building a small chest of drawers.

I spent a lot of time building it.  In fact, one of my lessons learned is that size has very little to do with how much time it’s going to take to create a project.  E.g. the cabinet above has 6 drawers to do, which means it probably nets out to fewer dovetails to cut than the little cabinet I made.

 

I’ve really learned a lot about woodworking, but more than that, I think I’ve discovered a number of things about how I want to woodwork.  I want to use more hand tools.  I want to work with smaller pieces more often.  I want to find a way to be in the shop with my kids.  I learned with hand tools, and I made my share of crappy bird-houses and CD cases with hand-tools before I was allowed to work with the table saw.  When I think about my shop right now – particularly the near complete lack of functioning hand-saws, I truly wonder if I can actually pass on my skills to my kids before they’re too cool to care about me and my fuddly old ways.

There’s gotta be something better than what I can do now, which is little better than lectures on why they shouldn’t touch anything.  This is just not where I want to be.

 

In terms of the practical, I bought this cheap HPLV spray gun and tried it out with some Shellac.  The reviews are all along the lines of “omg this is awesome for the money!”  I think they’re spot on.  I used it and got good results.  Without a paint booth or a properly sized compressor, there’s only so much spraying I can really do.  But it’s there for when I want to put some finish on some intricate stuff.

That said, I think I want to find an oil-based finish that I like.  While there are times when a hard shell really matters, I really want to make stuff that actually feels like wood.  I don’t really think I can get that out of any finish that builds a shine.

 

But probably the biggest improvement to my woodworking over the past few years is in sharpening.  I’ve got a couple of diamond stones and the Very Super Cool Tools “Ultimate Sharpening Jig”.  I set up a little station for it this year, and I’m reasonably happy with it.

But the big improvement isn’t so much from the tools, but rather in my attitude towards.  I still seem to be  convinced that sharpening tools is hard.  In fact, I was sure I didn’t have the means to sharpen planer blades myself and was just going to take the set down to Eastside Saw and have them do the work.  Happily my children torpedoed my plan for the morning and by the time I could actually head down there, they were closed, so I had to man up and figure it out for myself.

Sharpening doesn’t have to be so scary or difficult.  Check out these two videos I found on planer blade sharpening.  Here’s a guy who has a finely crafted jig, an expensive granite stone, and wet-dry sandpaper for sharpening his blades, one at a time.  Here’s another guy who’s got a 2×4 scrap, a random piece of sandpaper from his collection, and the bed of his jointer.  His technique can do two at once.

Happily, I saw that scrap 2×4 one first (my fear still lingers); that 2×4 maneuver works a treat.  I got a nice edge on both of my blades with hardly any effort at all.  I kept the jig; it’s now clipped to the stand that holds my planer.  Next time I want to sharpen the planer blades I know it’s really easy to do; no need to fear.

In each of the past two years I’ve made an order-of-magnitude improvement in my sharpening.  The first one was just getting some basic techniques.  This year was about extending those techniques and getting a system that I could conveniently follow.  There’s always more improvement to be made, but I think the gains will be harder to come by now.

I’m not saying I’m fully over fear of sharpening, exactly; I now can confidently say that I can make my stuff somewhat sharp.  When my lay friends come over and touch my chisel’s edge they pull away from it like it was a loaded Luger, but when I watch the wise-eggs on YouTube, I’m convinced their stuff is sharper.

Maybe it is.  But there’s one other thing I’ve learned while watching YouTube:  I know more about woodworking than a lot of those folks.  But I watch their channel and they don’t read my blog.  Who’s more clever?

I think the winners are the ones having fun.

Hand-Made Drawer Pulls

I’ve got a thing for hand-made drawer pulls.  I really enjoy working with small fiddly things I guess.  Or maybe it’s because when I wholly wreck one it’s only a little scrap of wood that’s up in smoke.  Hard to say.

I like to think I’ve acquired a certain amount of wisdom on the matter, but lest I forget it, I want write down the process so that you and me both can remember to do it right next time.

The Project

It’s hard to see from the picture, but the drawer fronts are concave on the left and convex on the right.  I decided to make drawer pulls to match.

Planning

I think when it comes to construction, drilling the holes is far and away the most critical step.  You want to make sure to include the holes in your sketchup plans for both the drawers and the pulls (if you take your Sketchup that far).

Making smooth, 3d curving shapes in Sketchup is hard work, and I don’t know that it’s worth the effort to make full-fidelity drawer pulls in Sketchup.  This is the plan I used for my pulls – just a block shape with a sketch on it:

I made a printout of the visible faces here, and that was good enough.  One more thing – make your plan such that it’s actually about 1/8” of an inch or so taller than you actually intend.  As you’re carving, there’s just no avoiding nicking a corner of the stands, so just build in the idea of sanding off that bad 1/8” after you’re all done with final sanding.

Before you start, make sure you’ve got the screws you’re going to use in the final piece, so you know exactly how big to make your screw holes.  If you’re using brass screws, be sure and have steel copies of the exact same size as well – brass is soft, and stripping a screw would be a tragedy here.  (The idea is to drive in the steel screws to ease the way for the softer brass screws.)

Drilling

So, getting back to the plan, the next thing to do is to cut out some blanks.  While you’re at it, cut an extra scrap to the same base dimensions (though maybe not as thick) and precisely drill the holes at the drill press.  (Use a punch or something to help your drill bit start dead on your hole.)

Next you want to drill the holes in the blanks – before you do any kind of shaping.  Clamp the template to each blank and drill to depth with a hand-drill or with the drill press.  Just make sure that the holes are a dead match for the template.

Next you want to use that template to drill the holes in your drawer fronts.  You want to place the template on the outside of the drawer, just in case the bit wanders a bit inside.  You really cannot count on a drill bit tracking straight through wood.

Carefully measure out the position of the template on the drawer front, clamp it down tightly, and measure one more time.  Then drill just little starter holes on both sides and then drill on through – again, to counter any wandering in the bit.

It’s a really good idea at this point to double check that you can screw through the drawer front into the blanks at this point.  At this point, a lot of work has gone into ensuring that everything will go together neatly, but if they don’t, you want to find out now, before you sink even more work into it.

It’s also a good idea to go ahead and drive the screws into the blank to the correct depth now (while they still have plenty of wood around them to keep it from splitting).

Roughing It Out

I took my SketchUp model and printed it out – in several copies, and then glued them on to my blanks.  Printing in Sketchup is tricky.  Here’s my tips on the matter:

1. Make sure the thing you’re printing is square to the axis of the model – e.g. it needs to be right on the plane formed by the colored lines.  That’s pretty easy to achieve.
2. Set the camera to a “Standard View” with “Parallel Projection” clicked on.
3. The size of your on-screen viewpoint determines how much paper it’s going to try to use, so try to get your window sized down just enough to see the thing you’re trying to print.  (If you have your view at full screen and the thing you’re trying to print is a tiny pinprick, Sketchup will attempt to print a sheaf of blank paper.)
4. File->Print Preview…   NEVER go for File-Print.  That’s a recipe for pain.
5. Clear the “fit to page” and “use model extents” checkboxes.
6. Make sure the boxes say “In the print out 1 inches / In SketchUp 1 inches”  If they don’t, jack with it until they do.

Phase 2 is sticking the paper onto your blank and whacking it out.  I use spray adhesive, because it’s what I’ve got handy.  Izzy Swan has some strong arguments for using Glue Stick.  And a lot of good ideas on carving too.

I chopped this out with the band saw:

Next I whacked some more off with a coping saw:

(Here’s where we lament not having a better vice.)

Then I got after it with a rasp:

as you can see, I broke it a bit.  That’s because I failed to rasp in the direction of the grain on one stroke.  Bad.  That’s what that extra 1/8” is for.

I also made a sketchup of the oval shape of the top, I tacked that on and hacked it off with a coping saw:

Smoothing

I rounded it out through a combination of stationary sander, hand-held sander, and hand-sanding.  I’m sure there’s a better set of tools, but in real life, the best tools are the ones you’ve actually got.  Some are faster than others, but some of those fast ones might also be great at chewing away wood that you would rather have kept.  Whatever gets it done.

Here’s this one after an encounter with the belt sander:

and after progressing through the grits to 150:

Again I don’t need to be concerned about the rounded tips because I’m going to belt-sand that off anyway.

I think the biggest deal when making one of these is the “Sand the sequence” mantra.  You need to make sure that each tool has removed all the scratches from the previous tool before you move on.

In Summation

I guess it took me about an hour per pull.  I enjoyed it too.  I guess the only regret I have is not using some nicer wood for this.  Like I said in the beginning, one of the charms is that if you completely wreck a piece, you’ve blown around 4/100ths of a board foot of lumber.  It’s a good excuse to pick up a few gems out of Woodcraft’s scrap bucket.

Perfect Results, Every Time!

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of The New Yankee Workshop.  When I was younger, that was as good as you could get for Woodworking knowhow.  If you’re just starting out in Woodworking, you can do much much worse than watch those old shows.  But I got a beef with one part of it.  Whenever Norm had to cut a dovetail, he’d whip out a router jig, and show about 12 seconds of setup, 30 seconds of the router whirring back and forth, and 5 seconds of fitting together accompanied by “Perfect results, every time!”

Screw you, Norm!

I don’t get perfect results, ever….  Well, maybe on the practice boards, but usually I’m happy if I can just get it close.  If you look at any of my projects, you’ll never find two drawers of identical length – that’s because I wrecked one or the other and had to try again.  This was after cutting lots of practice pieces…

Then one day I saw a used Leigh D4R for sale – a top-quality Dovetail jig.  I thought maybe I could get that thing to replace the old Craftsman my Dad gave me.  Surely a quality tool would fix it.

Nope.  Not really.

 

This last project I did has 7 little drawers to do:

I dovetailed them all, front and back.  I did some of them with the jig and the router, and the rest by hand.  I couldn’t tell you which was done with what method right now.  I don’t think you can either.  If you look close, you’ll find I’ve had to touch most of them up to one extent or the other.

 

Who knows how many videos are out there on YouTube with guys telling you their method for cutting dovetails.  There’s guys out there with clever bandsaw setups, table saw blades with beveled grinds, and I don’t know what all.  That’s not to mention the hand-tool crowd.

I never was much of one for the hand-tool guys.  I started out on the wrong foot with Roy Underhill.  Sure, the guy’s a master and all that, but I never felt like his work was approachable.  When Norm built a lowboy, I felt like I could get out there and make one too; but how many of us would go and boil a dead horse for some of Roy’s hide glue?

I saw Rob Cosman with his 3 1/2 minute dovetail and Frank Klausz with his 3 minute job and I felt like it was more of the same.  I mean, that’s good for Rob and Frank and the rest that they can do this.  I’m not surprised they can – they do this all day long.  I get maybe an hour a day.  When exactly am I going to find the time to build that level of skill?  I got a job, yaknow…

But Marc Spagnuolo, he understands me.  I watched his video and, I don’t know, for whatever reason, I sharpened my chisels and gave it a go.  It took me more than 3 minutes, but if it’s okay with Marc that it takes longer and needs a share of touching up at the end, then who’s to say I’m doin’ wrong?  (On the touching up front, Charles Niel has some good tips for fixing dovetails, around the 30 minute mark).

 

I should say that I’ve also been heavily influenced by Paul Sellers lately.  I find that kind of strange because I saw some of his work a few years ago, and I felt he was yet another of these pompous hand-tool apostles who thought anything made by machine tools was somehow a lesser form of art just because of the machine touching the wood.  I don’t know that it’s his attitude or mine that changed, but watching his excellent Wall Clock series really got me thinking.

Paul makes a lot of good points, and it’s the same as a lot of other fellows – that hand tools make less dust and are just plain more pleasant and more satisfying to work with than power tools.  Sure, if I was going to batch out 16 of these little cabinets, I probably should have taken the time to work out the kinks in my dovetail jig.  I mean, I get it, it’s a skill thing – the jig’s just a hunk of metal, it isn’t the problem here.

I can tell you, though, I felt nervous, pissed off and angry with the jig.  Not so with the chisels and the gauges.  I felt like that was something I could master and understand; moreover, I can enjoy the process.

 

All that said, I was also taking stock of the piece and observed that almost every board saw a cut from my newly built band saw.  (Umm, err…  including the tails on the dovetails.)  I’m not giving up power tools.  I can enjoy working with them too.  But I think it’s time to consider getting myself a good #4 plane, a dovetail saw, and some files to keep it sharp.

Boom.

Yup, it’s finally done.

I’m too boggled to festoon this post with much of my usual literary flare, so if that’s why you read my blog for, sorry.  This is just a pile of random observations.  Starting with the most random of all…

My 6-year-old son selected the color.  His decision was based on the safety lectures I give him when he’s in the shop.  It’s just as well that he picked out the color.  If it was up to me I’d probably have picked battleship grey or something boring like that.

I decided to make my youtube debut with this movie I mashed up with Windows Live Movie Maker.  Cool app, so long as you don’t mind staying within the lines.  I’d never done anything with movie editing and hardly done any photo editing, and it came out alright.

 

Working By The Numbers

Peter Passuello (CNCnutz) built one of these bandsaws too, and in his project wrap-up video he says that he made a few “improvements” to the design, then later figured out that he was screwing things up, not making things better, and reverted back to the design for greater happiness.

I took that to heart, in spite of my natural proclivities to the contrary.  I did make one addition to the plan that’s solid.  Here it is:

It’s the little blue-gray block butted up against the lower guide block assembly.  Without it, my lower blade guide assembly has a fair bit of play in it.  Of course, I should say that with the zero-clearance insert recommended in the design, the play in the lower guide blocks hardly matters at all.  But this is what I got.  Yup.

Sure I did a few other things differently, but it’s really just different, not better.

Loosen Up

One other thing I saw in other videos was something I deemed silly from the beginning – a fixation with making things perfectly square, flat and plumb.  Now, I’m pretty tight with my tolerances, don’t get me wrong, but wood is a natural product.  If you have seasons where you live, it’s going to move some.

If you look at the design, you’ll see that there’s a way to shim out every axis.  Sure, I worked at making things square and flat and all, but I didn’t kill myself over it.  As it is right now, there are a few bits of blue-tape and cardboard here and there.  I’ve varnished and painted all the parts, but I’m sure that next spring things will have moved.  I’m not tense.  There’s plenty more cardboard and tape.

Dumpster Diving

I said I wasn’t going to work hard at scavenging parts, but I’m really a cheapskate at heart.  I spent way too many times finding the perfect piece of scrap wood for each bit.  As a result, we’ve got a mix of pine, oak, walnut, bubinga, maple, poplar, one piece of cedar and assorted pieces of plywood including some that’s been laying around against the side of the house for who knows how many years and some bits of laminated MDF from an ancient dresser I bashed up a year ago.

There’s also a fancy drawer pull I made as an experiment a long time ago and never incorporated into anything.  The chest for the blades is a little overdone, but it’s a technique I was thinking of applying in some real project sometime.  It worked out pretty well, I think.  With a little more care in grain matching and finishing, it’d be a nice piece.

The mobile base I put it on is kinda spendy, but it counts as scrounged too, as I bought it a long time ago with a particular project in mind, but once I got it, I did something else with that equipment.  It’s been sitting in the box for a few years now.  I’m glad it has a home.

I built a blade storage cabinet, as that’s something I need right now.  I fancied it up a bit, mostly because I was using some left-over cherry-veneer plywood, and that seemed the right thing to do.

It looks good and it’s well-proportioned, at least from the perspective of getting blades in and out.  The brass piano hinge needs a little tarnishing to really look right, I think.  It’s a drawer as well as a cabinet, but most of the blades come out without moving the drawer out.  Once again, I claim that wooden drawer slides are just better.  Sanded poly and wax makes it glide smoothly.

I Can Still Sink More Time Into This…

I plunked my saw on a mobile base and made it level with the rest of my tools.  Maybe I’ll decide I want it higher later.  We’ll see.  Anyway, in the base there’s room for stuff.  Matthias built a drawer for passive dust collection.  I reserved space for that, but I really think passive doesn’t really get it done.  Fine dust is what matters and for that, you need to get the air out of the cabinet and blow it through a filter or clear out of the shop.  That’ll take a vacuum port pulling across the blade right after it cuts.  Totally doable with this design.

More likely I’ll be using that space as a place to put my jigsaw and related accessories.  The band saw and the jigsaw are the go-to tools in my shop for breaking down rough lumber.  Might as well have them in one place.

Ace Is The Place

Kids these days; they don’t know.  Knowledge used to be hard to get.  Lots of other stuff was too.

Back in the day, we had Norm Abram to tell us about woodworking.  He was it.  He was the man.  He was what a normal guy in a garage could find out bout woodworking.  When Norm made dovetails he had a dovetail jig – several even – but anyway, that’s how he did it.  That was the way.  That was how it was done.  Today you go on youtube and find half a dozen techniques produced at least as well as NYW.

Years ago I was very interested in growing plants in an aquarium.  That was at the very dawn of the internet revolution.  We had UseNet, which allowed people to build communities, and it was a really powerful thing, if you could find your way around it.  I learned from that community that water with a large amount of dissolved calcium carbonate was terrible for growing plants, unless you could nudge the ratio of CO₂ to CO₄ somehow, in which case it could be absolutely terrific.  The way you nudge it is to slowly dissolve CO₂ into your water.  Where do you get that CO₂?  Well, you can pay through the nose from a fish store for teeny little cylinders that required expensive refills every two jerks, or you could find a welding supply store and a few other odd bits from hydraulic equipment suppliers.

I got the welding stuff really easily – I got a bigass tank of CO₂ and a regulator.  Then I got the drip valve from a specialty hydraulic supply.  I was missing just the adapters to hook them all up.  I was pointed at another hydraulic supply vendor and equipment rental company.  I brought all these parts down there and said I needed adapters for all that.  They looked at me like I was from another planet.  “Whatchaneedthisferr?”  Anyway, got nowhere.  Absolutely stoned.

Then I asked Usenet and somebody said “Ya gotta know the lingo…”  I went back to the place and inquired about a male-to-male 1/4” NPT to 1/8” Hose Barb adapter and bam, I was supplied.

 

I was looking forward to an experience like that again with this band saw:  Showing up at some glass door in row upon row of light industrial buildings with corrugated sides and loading docks.  But it didn’t work out like that.  I suppose it’s all just the modern experience.  I was just too lazy to go driving around and ordered the rod from SpeedyMetals and the bearings from VXB.

By the way, if you care, these are the parts I chose.  I don’t know if they’re good or bad, overkill or what.  They were just the right size, really, and looked not too cheap and not too expensive.  If you are building one of these saws and you want a recommendation, I suppose I can spew these.  They spin smoothly and haven’t failed yet.  That’s what I know.

6205-2RS-16 Sealed Bearing 1"x52x15 Ball Bearings
1606-2RS Sealed Bearing 3/8"x29/32"x5/16" inch Miniature Ball Bearings

The big surprise in sourcing parts for this thing was my neighborhood Ace Hardware.  They had, in-store, almost all the parts needed to build this band saw plus they had people who were capable of helping me find some of the weirder bits.

Ace has become, over the course of this thing, my go-to place for stray parts.  I still hit Home Depot, but honestly, I wonder why anymore.  There are better places for most stuff I want, and closer.

 

But for how much longer will it matter?  I think making stuff out of wood will always have a place, because 3D printers are a ways off from making things that will be as appealing as wood.  People will always be drawn to natural things.  But for a 6” carriage bolt?  If the 3D printer makes it strong enough, I think the 3D printer will own that space.  On the band saw, there are quite a number of fiddly parts (particularly around the riser block assemblies) that would have been better off of a 3D printer than out of wood.

Funny.  I have no longing for the good old days of hard to get knowledge, and I really like it that I can count on getting any weird old thing delivered to my door.  Sometimes being connected to a world of smart people makes me feel small, but I can get over it.  I wonder if I’ll find the coming 3D printing revolution as easy to take.