I didn’t really build anything today, but it was a productive day in the shop.
I did a lot of cleaning and rearranging in the garage. I got all of our house paint cans off the floor, on to a shelf – which allowed me to sort and neatly stack all of my larger scraps of wood. Getting those pieces stacked opened up a space in the front corner of the garage for my new jointer. This in turn gave me enough room to walk around the garage easily, something I haven’t had since the jointer and planer arrived.
Speaking of the planer – now that I had room to maneuver I could attach the infeed and outfeed tables to it. For anyone who has to level cast iron tables, try this method:
1) Joint one side of a 2×4 sized board flat, then cut it in half
2) Clamp the jointed sides to the fixed table
3) Clamp the wing you are attaching to those boards
4) Apply the bolts and set screws
With enough clamping pressure and a flat/jointer surface, you should get the wings perfectly lined up.
With all this free space, I was able to actually vacuum up the floor and provide my aunt with another bag of sawdust for her compost heap. There’s something a little zen about a clean and organized shop – I just need to work on doing this often, instead of a whole lot of work every couple of months.
I didn’t want to leave the shop without creating some sawdust, so on my organization bent I decided to create a simple rack to hold all my recent router bit purchases. I had a piece of 1.5″x1.5″ pine that was part of the crate that housed my planer. I drew a crude center line down the length of one side and set to marking the hole locations. I was going to use a forstner bit to drill the holes, so I used it to lay them out as well. Because I have a varied/piecemeal set of bits, I couldn’t just drill evenly spaced goals if I wanted to maximize the space on the board. I think the results turned out nicely and it was nice to use some of the scrap I had lying around:
After the router bit rack, I wasn’t quite ready to leave the shop, but I didn’t want to work on the candlesticks, because I knew my remaining time in the garage was short. I decided I needed more practice cutting dovetails. I wanted to cut more than one, so I grabed a short piece of 3/4″ plywood that was about 4 inches wide. My previous practice dovetailing was only a single tail, two half-pins and I wanted to cut a couple of tails.
I’ve done a few of these “practice” dovetails and the biggest thing I’ve learned is that I need to take them seriously if I ever plan on improving. Nonetheless, practice is better than no practice. I’ll get there eventually!
Steven,
Sounds like a nice productive day to me. Congrats on getting your jointer and planer into usable positions.
I’m going through shop re-organization myself right now and I know exactly how rewarding it can be. My suggest to accomplish shop organization and make sawdust is to make some shop furniture.
What is it about woodworkers? We’re constantly rearranging and reorganizing our shop stuff. I feel like a dog, spinning around several times before settling in. It feels so good, though, that I keep doing it
Congrats on your reorganization.
I have to say I’ve never seen dovetails cut in plywood. Something unsettling about that (grin).
Cheers — Larry
Hey, that one yellow bit is out of place!
I know how it is to have a small space to work in. I managed to hit up craigslist and picked up the remains of someone’s deck. Now I have some work to do to get the excess hardware out of the wood, but it’s all destined to make “shop furniture on wheels” so it’s much easier to get things how I need them in my somewhat cramped space. The plan is that they’ll all have the same height so they can be used as in/out feed tables as well.
Unfortunately my wife has me painting the house this weekend, so I most likely won’t make much progress there.
Congrats on making progress in your space.
Thanks, everyone.
Dyami – I can’t put into words how great being able to walk around easily is
Larry – I’ve seen some drawers with plywood dovetails, often when the drawers have face separate from the box itself.
Ken – True, the rabbeting bit is away from his other yellow friends. However, the astute observer will notice that the bits on the left have a half-inch shank and the bits on the right have a quarter-inch shank. Therefore – my few Type-A traits are satisfied
I loved this post. I have been practicing dovetails too. It is so much fun. I am still doing the single tails, you are a bit ahead of me. But later this week I will probably move to multi tailed joints. It sort of depends upon the results of my current attempts.
Good job on the clean fest. I need to do a bit of tidying myself.
Thanks, Brian. Check out Fine Woodworking #196. They have an article in that issue called “The 5-minute Dovetail”
The premise of the article is to cut one dovetail joint as a warm-up for every visit to the shop. You might try this in lieu of the repetition heavy, cut 100 in a row regiment you seem to be currently employing.
Looks like you are getting the dovetail down. I saw that you linked back to the video of Robby Pedersen, you should look into taking a class with him some time. My son has been working with him as a shop apprentice for about 2 years now. Not sure if that original video linked to his website… http://www.rvp1875.com He is a very interesting guy with loads of knowledge. Keep up the good work.