Creeker's Weekend Accomplishments

[Dennis Peacock]

25 Sep 2017

Good Morning/Evening,
A friend of mine and I are still working on the king sized bed project. The bed, when finished, will go into his home for his wife. It's taking longer than planned due to me teaching him about woodworking as we go. It's all his design with my tips for joinery. It's been tasking for me to teach him because he asks a lot of questions and I have to do a lot of thinking and then explain as clearly as I can. Teaching him the dictionary of woodworking terms as we go slows us down a bit but I feel like my time is well spent in teaching someone younger than me about woodworking. I know that he's ready for this to be done, as well as I, but we are getting closer and the next 2 weeks will tell us how much longer it's going to be. We're only working on this project 2 nights a week, for about 3 hours each time. I'm enjoying the teaching part as well as showing how the machines work and how to cut the wood to the size / length you truly need.

I start oncall duty again this week and I'm not looking forward to that, but it is what it is.

Well, that's it for me....so what did YOU do this past weekend?

Best of weeks to you all.

[Bill Berklich]

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?258040-Finished-the-workbench

Finished my bench this weekend and it's fully operational.

[John K Jordan]

It was dark when I went out to feed the horses but changing as I walked up the hill to the house:


The baby peacocks started flying up on the roost this weekend - a milestone!

Rebuilt the starter on one of my old 4-wheelers. Now it starts without pulling the rope! I accidentally waited until the evening of the day my wife went out and bought a new one for her to ride since the electric start on this one didn't work. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

A fellow woodturner came to the shop Saturday for help with turning finials, skew chisel lessons, and sharpening instructions. (And to see the llamas and peacocks!) We spent over six hours in the shop - good fun. I forgot to take a picture.


Finished my third and largest threaded box. These are my first three tries at threading. I found it tricky to figure the dimensions but very easy to thread. Ebony and ebony. No finish, just polished.


Made a handle last night for a carbide burnisher rod I got from the incredible Sir Robo the Hippy. This is for burnishing the burr on turning, hand, and cabinet scrapers. Osage Orange.


JKJ

[Chris Hachet]

Incredible turning work, John!

I spent 4 days at Arnfest in Chrystal lake Illinois, but came home and polished the tops on several pieces of equipment and cleaned up the shop a bit before going to bed at 11:30 last night.

[Bill Berklich]

Sweet turnings!

[Brian Lefort]

Made new tops for two old workmates out of maple cutoffs lefotver from the big boy workbench I recently finished.

I'll snap some pics of them.

[Jim Becker]

Dennis, even though the teaching prolongs the bed project, in the end...it's win-win. The dude's spouse gets a new bed (hopefully he gets to enjoy it, too. LOL), a new woodworker is born and you likely are teaching yourself a few things (or reminding yourself of something you may have mentally misplaced...) through the teaching process.

I had the usual eclectic weekend. A good chunk of Saturday was spent installing a hanging lamp in our great room...I bought the fixture in 2008 when our addition was built and just failed to install it until now. It matches one in the stairway. To mount it I had a choice of using a piece of unistrut like I did for the dining table lighting, but I didn't prefer that idea since this fixture would be relatively close to one of the transverse barn beams that span the room. So I built a "box" that contains a couple of sturdy steel brackets capable of handling the fixture's weight that would position it the desired 12" or so off the beam to center over the seating area. That was the easy part. The most difficult and frustrating part of this project was determining what circuit the pre-installed switch(s) are on and as it turned out, the electrician who did the pre-wiring put that particular switch on a circuit in the original house panel, rather than on the addition's sub-panel. But all is well and we finally have that lighting over our "conversation" area.

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The remainder of Saturday included food shopping with Professor Dr. SWMBO at Wegman's, cooking a delicious meal with pork country ribs braised in porter beer and watching a nail-biting Penn State vs Iowa football game. (I'm not a TV watcher, but I felt like chilling that evening)

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Sunday, I worked outside cleaning up the massive amounts of bark off the front lawn that remained from a big, long-dead walnut tree that was taken down by the road last weekend and then mowed said lawn. I then spent a couple hours in the shop finally dealing with my shorts and cut-offs storage situation. Many years ago, I had planned on putting a cabinet under my Adjust-A-Bench, but after constructing the carcass, I decided not to implement it for whatever reasons that were in my brain at the time. That carcass has been in storage upstairs in my shop for years. So I brought it down, put on a set of casters I had lying about and fabricated it into a more organized storage solution. The casters mean I can move it if I use the lathe. It's ultimately a much better solution that multiple metal trash cans and other containers! I'm almost done with this round of shop re-jiggering in anticipation of getting going on some actual furniture projects post-retirement...which is...at the end of this week.

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[Jim Becker]

John, those turnings are exquisite!!

[John K Jordan]

...A good chunk of Saturday was spent installing a hanging lamp in our great room......

That looks great! The "great" room and the great light! Lighting in a room like that can be "fun!" Our house is timberframe with 8x8 beams against the ceiling in the kitchen/dining area on the lower level. To add new lights took some figurin', including drilling one hole for wiring about 30" at an angle through a beam to put it where Lovely Bride SWMBO wanted it in the kitchen.

Hope your bees are well. People around here are losing some. I lost one out of my six - there one day, gone the next.

JKJ

[Jim Becker]

Yes, creativity is sometimes required. Our kitchen originally had "fake" beams on the ceiling as well as a textured "sand" finish on the drywall...given it's a 6'10" ceiling, that meant constant bloody knuckles, so when I renovated the kitchen in 2003, that all went away. There previously was ZERO overhead lighting, too...you may or may not be able to see the implication of that from this old photo taken just before complete demolition:

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Yea...throw-up worthy. There is now great overhead, recessed lighting...major difference. And a smooth ceiling for knuckle protection.



For the new fixture, I did take advantage of an old mortise just behind that mounting box to bring the wire out on top of the beam invisibly by drilling a hole down from the top and threading the cable through. I used 16-3 rubber coated (black) cable from the fixture over to the j-box at the juncture of the beam and the ceiling and it completely disappears visually.

Bees are good, but Professor Dr. SWMBO did have to do a combine last weekend with one that suddenly went queenless...our steadfast "donor NUC" was available for that and we'll be going into winter with four colonies. At the height of the early season, we had five full size colonies plus three NUCs. A tree took out one as you know, and the NUCs were used to provide brood and/or rejuvenation. Ali is considering taking a queen-rearing course next summer when she's done teaching as there is often a lot of need later in the season for queens in the local area.

[Mike Ontko]

Stunning work, John!

I'm finally getting back into my shop now that we've taken our house off the market and I'm able to make sawdust freely. I've started building a box joint jig based on a couple of different videos I found online (courtesy of William Ng and Laney Shaughnessy) and plan to use it for a few small kitchen and shop storage projects. Pictures to follow, of course. I also spent time cleaning my blades and have a new Freud box joint set on its way via UPS.

[Jay Larson]

Hmmm, a weekend with no real woodworking. How did that happen?

Saturday was a beastly hot day in the upper Midwest with the high around here at 89*. So the afternoon was spent indoors fixing a short in the vacuum cleaner. And I did a little research on the power steering set up of our truck. We had a small leak that needed to be fixed on Sunday morning. Saturday night my fiancee had a birthday party to attend, so I grabbed a beer and a glass of scotch and went down to the stereo room and listened to some albums. Something I hadn't done since, way too long. I also went through a stack of woodworking articles to clear some out. Articles that may be duplicate ideas, items I had already built, or interests changed.

Sunday I fixed the steering on the truck. UV marker dye made that job stupid simple to find the leak. Then we decided to go purchase some trees for the back yard. Decided on a couple of quaking aspens, and a river birch. Planted one, and decided to wait to plant the others, as it was still 87*. Sat down to watch the Packer game, phew. Then we went to a friend's house for a bonfire. He had four or five trees that he had taken down and wanted to know if I wanted some of the wood for lumber. Some ash and a couple of hickory. Of course I said yeah, I was interested. Unfortunately, there were no pieces that were usable. If it was longer, it was only 5-6" in diameter. if it was larger in diameter, it was twisted pretty bad, or had quite a few knots. Oh well, I certainly did appreciate the offer.

Nice turnings, John. And a nice sunrise, too.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Saturday morning, made biscuits, then went to work on pull out tray on pig cooker. Power washed and sanded pig cooker prior to prime painting on Sunday after church. While primer was drying, reinstalled carpet and side panels in van. Carpet had gotten wet from window leak, which I fixed last weekend. No more rotten fish smell, as I had treated both carpet and padding for odors while it was out. Vinegar works wonders on odor. Listed my three Civics on CL,and got a CASH buyer coming tomorrow to pick them up. Wife's been on me to get this done, so she is HAPPY!