Creeker's Weekend Accomplishments

[Dennis Peacock]

26 Feb 2018

Greetings,
I'm happy to say that the rain has stopped, the sun is out, and I'm off oncall duty. :)
My weather station recorded 12.28" of rain for the last week. We did need the rain, but we didn't need it all at one time. :) :)
My little granddaughter went into the hospital this weekend so the family was split up with some staying at the hospital and others tending to home necessities and keeping family and friends updated with the status of my granddaughter. I'm thrilled to report that she is now at home and doing well. The problem ended up being Ketotic Hypoglycemia (sp?). Needless to say with oncall duty, work hollering over the weekend and keeping people updated on the status of my granddaughter, it was a long and busy weekend. My hope is to get the last chair repaired for our family fried so I can call these chairs "done".

I'm off work today and taking The LOML and my 2 youngest sons to the new local Red Robin for lunch. All my best hopes for prayers for all of you in the days ahead.

That's it for me, so what did YOU do this past weekend?

Best of weeks to you all.

[mark mcfarlane]

Below is my last 2 weeks of shop work.

Built a clamp holding box for the MFT, and sanded and shellac'd the top.

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Almost finished the miter station: added a third cabinet, built a torsion-box fence and stops, chopped up a butcher block top and dominoed it into 1 long piece for the left side, added the first drawer,... Still need to add the self-adhesive tapes on top for measuring, and build a few more drawers.

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Also received and built the cabinet for an Incra router table. 3 drawer boxes done, still need to do the drawer fronts.

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I've spent a bunch of my retired time over the past 3 months making things to make me more efficient in the shop. Pre-retirement I was always in a rush to finish a project during a vacation, now I am able to take more time to think things through and optimize my workflows and it is really starting to pay off in efficiency.
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[Rod Sheridan]

So what you're saying Mark, is that now that you don't need efficiency, you're working towards it?:D

I'm in the same boat, organizing the shop............Regards, Rod.

[Rod Sheridan]

Hi, I cut the tenons for the face frame on the electric fireplace cabinet I'm building.

The top and bottom openings will have ceramic tile in them.

The wood is from an urban red oak tree that I milled..............Regards, Rod.

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[John K Jordan]

I wrote a 14 page document for a woodturning demo at the Cumberland Woodturners in a couple of days. This included shooting and editing photos and drawing diagrams with circles and arrows and color shading. 'Bout wore me out! All I have to do now is sharpen the tools and not forget to pack up something critical. :)

[Dylan Wyatt]

First time poster (as long as I did things correctly), long time researcher here. I enjoy reading what everyone has done over their weekends as many of you are like myself and have woodworking as your weekend escape.

Like Dennis, NW Ohio saw the sun for the first time in a couple weeks after what seemed to be a never-ending rain storm! Most people here were wondering how long we could take the lack of Vitamin D, welcome to Ohio!

My project this weekend was making some test doors for kitchen cabinets I will be making for my shop-house I am currently building. I am going against everything I have even been taught and applying some paint to them and I am attempting to somewhat match these cabinets I found a picture of on the internet. I am also making the doors with mitered corners, something I normally avoid at all costs! I did however get to test out a new to me technique of cutting a key into the joints, which I think will work out very well!

The wood is some of the most beautiful white oak I have seen, which is why I cringe at the painting idea. I will be sanding enough of the paint off to be able to see some of the color and grain of the wood. Something that makes this special is that I cut the tree down on my parents property, milled the tree on our mini mill, and dried the lumber in our kiln. The tree was approximately 36" diameter and 50' up to the first branch. we are lucky enough to have a woods full of mature white (swamp) oak trees, some of which are about 60" in diameter.

The picture is of my dad the far too small 18" Stihl the day we cut the tree down, then the top 4 logs we got out of the tree, the base log took some persuading and larger equipment to get out of the woods.379868379864379865379867379866

[Jim Becker]

Mark, that was a great idea for the clamp bin for the MFT!

Dennis, I sure hope you get a weekend that is, um...quiet and less exciting...one of these days!

My weekend involved getting started on taxes earlier than anytime in my history of doing taxes as I wanted to get my two daughters' and my parent's returns done and out of the way before tackling ours which involves "donation-a-plaooza" that's going to take a whole lot of time to deal with. The only functional thing I did beyond that was to get the fourth wireless mesh node that's in the "middle" of our home hardwired finally...our house is a bear for anything wireless due to building materials. And, of course, there was the usual trips to Costco and Wegman's for shopping.

Speaking of wireless, etc., I bit the bullet this past week and put in a new conduit to the shop after finding that "Plan B" through an old water pipe wasn't going to work...there's apparently a splice in the black water line somewhere about 10-15' from where it comes into the house which was too narrow to pull through. So "Plan C" involved a 20' trench to the back of our addition, laying in some new black water pipe for the underground part, conduit up the side of the building to the attic area when my network rack for that end of the house lives. Once the weather gets nicer and I clean off the siding, I'll paint the conduit to match and it will almost disappear. But now I have a very reliable network extension to the shop to support both wireless devices (a node on our mesh) and a wired connection for the CNC. The former is really important for phone calls because we live in a dead zone for cellular.

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I also completed the boxes for the new upper cabinets for our kitchen that will replace those I built in 2003 with, um...inadequate...depth. Face frames and doors this week. Starting working on a wide threshold commission today.

[mark mcfarlane]

So what you're saying Mark, is that now that you don't need efficiency, you're working towards it?:D

I'm in the same boat, organizing the shop............Regards, Rod.

That is correct :). I've spent more time setting up the shop over the last 6 months than I spent in my previous lifetime of woodworking.

[Jim Becker]

I've spent a bunch of my retired time over the past 3 months making things to make me more efficient in the shop. Pre-retirement I was always in a rush to finish a project during a vacation, now I am able to take more time to think things through and optimize my workflows and it is really starting to pay off in efficiency.
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Yea, that sounds familiar! Honestly, that was one thing that helped me "transition" from the full time working world over the past four months...being busy in the shop, improving things that I felt that could be better, in addition to taking on a few initial jobs for others. It's paying off, too, with better workflow as you mentioned.

[Jeff Heath]

I spent the entire weekend chipping paint and old body filler off my bandsaw project with a needle scaler, and have started to reapply the new body filler, smoothing and sanding it out, and getting it ready for primer and paint.

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Doesn't look like much, but it's taken about 3 days to get to this point.

I also spent a lot of time at the wire wheel on my pedestal grinder cleaning rust and gunk (a technical term) off all the many parts of the saw.

I will be very happy when this project is completed, but there is still a lot of work to do.

[Jay Larson]

Didn't do anything in the shop this weekend. I got talked into going up to a friend's cottage for a guys weekend. Played some pool, a little poker, and survived a winter 'storm'. About 3" of snow and 35 mph winds. Funny how the weather service called that a storm.

Got back about 12 on Sunday, then went down to the basement and framed up some walls for the remodel.

[mark mcfarlane]

I spent the entire weekend chipping paint and old body filler off my bandsaw project with a needle scaler, ...

Looks like it will be an awesome restoration.

[Mike Ontko]

Continued my Winter sloth by not going out into the rain to prune the fruit trees. Another couple of weeks and they'll probably be budding, so I'll have to get it done soon come rain or shine (and, living in the Pacific Northwest, I'm pretty sure I already know which of the two it's going to be).

On the pallet wood bed project (actually, it's prime red oak, rough cut and stained to look like antiqued pallet wood) I've started gluing up the 3/4" sections to create 4"x4" posts. The miters aren't closing as well as I'd hoped for (I'm using lapped miters along the lengths of 4' to 6' boards that have been rough cut on one side, so some slop was expected), but the small gaps that are there can easily be filled and stained over. After all of the post and rail sections have been completed, I'll insert sections of ash into the voids wherever two pieces (post and rail) will be joined. This should result in a relatively lightweight yet stout and sturdy frame for both the head and foot boards.

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