Creeker's Weekend Accomplishments....

[Dennis Peacock]

Good Morning Everyone,

Well, it's that time of year for us, severe storms rolled through this weekend, but the visiting In-Laws were able to make it back to Alabama before further storm or even rain on Sunday.

Had a very nice visit with the In-Laws last week. The sad thing is, is that my father-in-law is loosing his sight ever so slowly due to Macular Degeneration. He's worked hard all his life and since he's retired, he's been slowly loosing his sight. I love this man as he's been kind, generous and helpful to me since we met. I just feel saddened by this as there is nothing I can do to restore his sight. :( :( :(

On a happier note, I finished up a few bowls this weekend, the primary one I finished was for my In-Laws and it's posted in the turners forum.

Roughed out a couple of bowls, moved some stacks of wood around in my shop for my current flat projects. I have an Oval Kitchen Table to make (never done that, so I guess I'll learn on this one) out of Red Oak (did I mention that I greatly dislike Red Oak?, Kids Model Train Table with folding legs our of White Oak, and the final flatwork project is this Computer Desk for a guy at work out of Walnut, Ash and Birch Plywood.

So, with all this in mind? I guess the new planer and jointer are about to get a good work out. :rolleyes:

Back at work today, so life is back to normal.

OH!!!! I forgot......A buddy at work and I went to look at a brush pile pushed up by one of his relatives. I poked around the pile and what did I find? An old barn that was pushed over made out of White Oak!!!!!!!!!!!!! :eek: :D Pretty stuff, so we have to go back and round up all the boards we can find. :D :D

So what did YOU do this weekend?

Best of weeks to you all.

[Joe Meazle]

Dennis left a little out. He and Mark Cothern graciously helped me move a very large piano Sat. morning. If you ever have doubts about a friendship ask someone to move a piano, these guys did not even hesitate when asked. I only hope that i can return the favor. Thanks again guys.
Joe

[Ted Jay]

Dennis left a little out. He and Mark Cothern graciously helped me move a very large piano Sat. morning. If you ever have doubts about a friendship ask someone to move a piano, these guys did not even hesitate when asked. I only hope that i can return the favor. Thanks again guys.
Joe

Maybe they were just wanting to check out the wood on the piano, probably lucky it's still there! LOL

I spent some money at the Woodworking show on Saturday, http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=34068, and cleaned out half of the garage yesterday. I haven't even opened the box yet, no room to put it, that's why I had to straighten out the garage... errr... shop!!:D
Had to come to work to get some rest.
Ted

[Chip Charnley]

Wanted to spend a the whole weekend working on the shelves for our pantry. Got 2 of 5 sheets of 3/4" MDF cut into pieces but couldn't keep my helper for the rest so I finished up mounting my router table as a table saw wing, new router lift and M12V router instead. Getting the wing to be even wtih the table saw without and 'catches' sliding from one to the other was a b*tch.

Then spent the rest of the weekend on my other hobby (playing Dungeons and Dragons On-line) with a short break to take LOML to the movies (saw a sneak preview of Take the Lead; a really good movie by the way).

[Matt Meiser]

Finished up and hung a mirror for our bedroom (see my project thread). Spent several hours using SketchUp to work on a concept for remodeling our master bath which will probably a long, phased project over the next year. Did some shopping with LOML and my daughter and went to dinner at my parents' last night.

[John Miliunas]

Worked Fri. night and Saturday, so scratch two shop days! :mad: Well, not completely. I did manage a little prep work in preparing for the final assembly of project posted here: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=34111
Sat. evening, took some time out to spend w/family and watched a DVD; "The Legend of Zoro". Not nearly as good as the first Zoro remake a few years back. Sunday got the above project finished and made a very minimal attempt at putting some shop tools/supplies away. :o Hope everyone has a super week! :) :cool:

[Julio Navarro]

Worked on my cyclone project, made alot of progress this weekend. It all fits together, is half assembled and needs only a few more welds trhen painting. I'll post pics on my project thread.

Bought an old Craftsman/Companion wood lathe. Its not a real serious tool but it caught my eye at a flea market and at 40 bucks what can you loose. I also bought a 1/4 HP motor for it. runs great and very quiet for an old motor. Also picked up an OLD hand cranked grinding wheel, an amazing tool. I'll have pics as soon as I get it cleaned up.

[Scott Coffelt]

I had grand plans to work in the shop most of the weekend, then the weather decided to be nice. So I spent most of the day on Saturday and a good part of Sunday doing outdoor chores. I got leaves picked up, fert down, some grass seed, installed a paver pad area for an arbor area, trimmed trees and bushes, worked on the sprinkler system (though this morning I see it was not entirely fixed), ummm I think that's it. I am now a true redneck (sunburn).

Watched the movie Stealth and also King Kong.

Finally, got all messed up cause of the time change.

[Greg Koch]

Took some paint and other "hazardous" stuff to the free pick-up service in our local HD parking lot. While I was there, I had to go inside and look for some goodies... Missed the Metoba made Rigid orbital sanders...all they had were the new "made in China" ones. Apparently, the local contractors got the word and cleaned them out...according to the Pro Checkout cashier. I did pick up the last 2 Herc-U-Lift stands they had. They contractors got a bunch of them too! Got some plywood for a couple of Honey Do projects.

Found out my neighbor has a bunch of woodworking tools he no longer uses, and is willing to part with them...including a Craftsman contractor TS! (I just got my Delta 36-680). I'll see what else he has. Got a nice note from the previous owner of my "new" RAS saying it was a gift to the husband from his Dad when their first son was born...23 years ago! It's a 1983 model. Ordered an Delta AP400 CD for the shop to give me some dust protection. Small starter unit, but should work, one piece of equipment at a time.

All in all a busy weekend.

G

[Jim O'Dell]

Well, my priorities got changed for me!!:D I only got to cut and dry fit one 14" section of my "tunnel" for my PVC duct work. I did have a few minutes to scope out the next few pieces as it goes over the first horizontal branch wye. Sat was chewed up with chores. Sunday I painted a corner desk, and saw the little foster pup we had for the last 2.5 weeks go to her new home. It sure was hard to see that one go. It is probably the first one in 5 years of doing rescue work that my wife and I agreed we would have kept for ourselves!! She is a special girl.
Maybe this next weekend will go a little more smoothly. Jim

[Dave Richards]

Weekende accomplishment? Well, I found a can of spar varnish locally which was pretty impressive considering the limited sources here in Mayoville. It's hard to believe, I know. Spar urethane is everywhere. Spar varnish is a rarity it seems.

After finding it, I got a couple of coats on the new gaff for my sailboat. (The middle stick) I also varnished the bowsprit.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v506/weekender410/DSC02847.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v506/weekender410/DSC02845.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v506/weekender410/DSC02846.jpg

I also made a custom switch plate out of pine for a guy at work (sorry no pictures, Tyler), put the reef and foot pendants on the new mainsail for the boat and got to play with Ian which was the best part.

[Michael Adelong]

I never replied to one of these before, but I had a very productive weekend which included a little excitement in the shop.

I spent all day Saturday doing something that I very much enjoy, but rarely have time for. Turning wrenches and getting greasy. I have a 94 GMC Sonoma pickup (S10) that has 305,000+ miles on it. Yep. You read that right. I'm the only guy who's ever put a wrench to it not counting tires and a the 3.5 years of free oil changes that I got from the dealer where I bought it. I removed everything from the intake up and installed new fuel injectors, throttle position sensor, idle air control valve, EGR valve, and every gasket I could find. Took 2 whole cans of Gumout (with the extra 25%) to get it all nice and shiny again. I also threw a new oxygen sensor on as well. Spent about $300, or less than 1 average car payment. I must say that being in the computer business, when they went to computers in cars I was skeptical. After all, I was a computer technician back then. EVERY computer that I saw was broken. There's usually nowhere to plug a soldering iron in on the side of the road, so I wasn't so sure that it was a good idea. I admit, I was wrong. I put all of this brand spanking new stuff on there, reached in the open driver side window and turned the key. Fired right up. Ran rough for a bit until the Gumout was gone, but smooth as the day I bought it 13 years ago after that. No way you could do that after rebuilding a carburetor. I guess I'm going to be driving this old truck for a while longer. I can't wait to see what the new gas mileage will be. It was 20 MPG, and running so rich you could literally smell the unburned fuel.

On Sunday I tackled big job #2 that's been on hold forever. New plumbing to the (future) kitchen and to the double utility tub in the workshop. I need to move the shop sink about 4 feet to the left. My house was build in 1956, and over the past 50 years there have apparently been some changes to the plumbing, all of which were accompanied by many poorly soldered splices and connections. Unfortunately, none of those changes include the addition of valves to allow turning off water to portions of the house instead of the whole house. I hate that. My kitcken is in that limbo state between demolition and reconstruction. Walls and ceilings are primered, subfloor and backerboard are down, and the sink is temporarily sitting on a 2x4 frame so I can make coffee in the morning. Hence the problem. No valves to the kitchen so I have to shut off the water to the whole house every time I work in the kitchen and have to move the sink. By 4pm, I have all of the old stuff cut out, all of the new copper cut, fit, cleaned, fluxed, and put together. All I need to do is the actual soldering, which I enjoy very much, and am usually very good at. I finished all 10 or 12 of the joints I had to solder, and all of them seemed to go extremely well. As you know, there's always one that leaks. This time it was the connection to the old plumbing, right at the hot water heater. It was a short, 4" piece of the new 1/2" tubing coming out of a 90 going into the brass 90 of the original plumbing. I disconected the old tubing that I was replacing by desoldering it from this very brass 90. It had a good tinning of solder already in it from the original connection, so I figured that this one would be the easiest of the lot. Wrong again - it leaked. I opened up the newly installed valves at the far end of the new tubing to drain the water out of the tubing in preparation for take 2. I cut the tubing and desoldered the connections. I then cleaned out both 90s, and installed a fresh 4" piece of tubing. I used the last of the solder redoing the joint. When I turned the water back on, I quickly found that I had forgotten to close the cold water valve on the new run of tubing after I drained it. A 1/2" diameter stream of water at 75 psi went shooting 10 feet across my shop! :eek: Now, If you look across my shop from the side there is about a 10" wide line of site between my table saw and jointer, both of which were plugged in. The stream of water went right down that corridor. Missed both by inches. To make matters worse, the darn thing leaked again. Shoot. I wanted to take a shower. Walked to Dad's house and borrowed some solder. Good thing he had some because the BORG and blue box were already closed. Desoldered everything again. New 4" tubing - this time pre tinned before I put it back in the brass 90. Took a few taps with the wrench to get it to seat all the way. Attempt #3 was succesful. I never got the run to the utility sink done, but at least the house has water, and I can complete the sink this week now that my 2 new valves are in place and doing their jobs.

Sorry to be so long. I just hadn't accomplished anything on a weekend in so long that I had to report such monumental events. Maybe next week I can get some woodworking done. :cool:

Michael

[Mark Pruitt]

Dennis, I'm sorry to hear about your father in law. A lot of people can't brag about their in-law relatives. Glad you (and I) can.

This weekend I rounded up all the junk in my garage (shipping packaging for the new Unisaw among a buch of other clutter) and headed to the dump. There's always something cleansing about throwing stuff out. Spent some time at church; other than that, I got a new clamp rack mostly built. Shop's coming along!

Mark

[Mark Pruitt]

Wanted to spend a the whole weekend working on the shelves for our pantry. Got 2 of 5 sheets of 3/4" MDF cut into pieces but couldn't keep my helper for the rest so I finished up mounting my router table as a table saw wing, new router lift and M12V router instead.

Chip,
While setting up my Unisaw recently, I stumbled onto a neat trick. I have a cheap camera tripod with a rack and pinion lift. I used the tripod to hold up one end of a wing while I adjusted the other. Used the same trick for getting the 7' rails "just right."
Mark

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Saturday......Spent the day doing household chores as the wife's recovering from surgery....went grocery shopping. Saturday evening did find time to rough turn my first bowl.

Sunday.....more household chores......planted some plants for the LOML and swept out the shavings from around my lathe. Sunday afternoon began my next goblet and worked with my skew! Granddaughter and hubby came over to visit.

[Bill Webber]

...If you ever have doubts about a friendship ask someone to move a piano...
Joe

I don't have many friends...'least none I could risk/trust with that kind of effort. LOML and I did it ourselves. :p

It was raining on and off most of the day. In between showers we got it on the trailer, padded and wrapped with that stretch plastic. Caught a couple downpours on the way to PA. I parked under a bridge for a couple minutes but realized I couldn't tell if it was raining or not. Biggest problem moving this thing was lifting it to make the wheels go where they needed to go. Anyway, no water damage. Got to play it for my grand daughter this week end. :) Two more trips and the shop move will be completed!

[Pete Harbin]

Lots of time playing with our little man, Ty :) , and lamenting the back to back losses by our beloved Stars :( I did advance to the Stanley Cup Finals in my Fantasy Hockey League though! :)

I did remove my Ridgid sander from it's legset, rebuilt the leg configuration, installed a Herc-U-Lift, and mounted the new Jet mini-lathe to the stand. Now it glides around the shop wherever I want it too. :) I'll snap a photo tonight when I'm back home.


Bill and Joe, About 10 years ago, some co-workers and I started an investment club, and on the evening of our first meeting, our buddy Doug announced that the club was all a ruse to get us over to his house to help him move a piano from the neighbor's house to his house. He was joking, of course, but we did help him move the piano...and decided to name our investment club The Piano Movers Society. We all loved telling our wives that we had PMS once a month! :D

Pete

[Vaughn McMillan]

Saturday started out for me laughing, as I saw some of the responses to my Kitchen Project Finished (http://sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=34008) post that I'd posted late Friday night. (It was a April Fool's joke, kids.) The rest of Saturday was mostly consumed running errands with LOML, including a trip to downtown Los Angeles into the Jewelry District. Fortunately, LOML was on a mission for a single item, and once we found it we left, but man, there's a lot of bling in the area. Later, we had her brother over for dinner and a surprise gift -- a couple of collectable sword replicas from the Lord of the Rings movies. He's a complete LOTR fan, and very into collectible junk, so he was a happy camper. We also discussed a woodworking project that I'm going to be helping him with in the near future. (Helping him with really means building it for him because I don't think he's smart enough to use power tools, and regardless, he's not using mine.)

Sunday I did a lot of Susy Homemaker stuff...by the time LOML had returned from the gym, I'd vaccuumed, mopped, baked, cooked, laundered, and dish-washed about everything I could get my hands on. I keep telling LOML I'm gonna be a good wife for some lucky girl someday. ;)

In between all this domesticity, I did the initial glue up for a pair of boxes I'm making, figured out how to attach my Jim Tolpin style aux fence to the new Incra TS setup (for the vertical sled), built a jig for doing mitered keys and dovetail keys the router table, and started putting together a router fence/vacuum port to attach the the Incra TS fence.

All in all, a pretty productive weekend, even if I did get robbed for an extra hour.

- Vaughn

[Von Bickley]

We recently had a pole building put up and now we are building a small living area inside that we can live in while we build a small house next to the building. The living area will be about 450 sq.ft. A 10X16 bedroom, a 12X16 kitchen area, and a 8X12 bathroom with the washer & dryer in it.
The walls are framed up, the electrical is roughted in, and we have started on the plumbing. Things go kind of slow when you have a bad heart but we'll get there.:) :) :)

[Fred Voorhees]

Here is what took up pretty much most of my weekend. I was hawking souvenir programs at the First annual Mid-Atlantic Rod and Custom Car exposition at the Ft. Washington, PA Expo center. Pretty decent weekend. I got to chat a bit with drag racing legend “Big Daddy” Don Garlits who was making a personal appearance. Working at the show, I got to enter much earlier than the paying customers since we need to set up before the show opens each day. Don was there early and he was a pretty easy target for a conversation and was very gracious with his time.



On the way to and back from the show each day, I also got to reacquaint myself with an old friend of mine – the music of the Electric Light Orchestra. I had purchased their albums back when they were popular - before CD’s were the norm and just recently have begun to pick up their CD equivalent. Man, Jeff Lynne was a freaking musical genious!

[David Duke]

Saturday morning met up with fellow Creekers Cecil Arnold and Ernie Nyvall at the Houston WWing show, super nice guys. Cecil and Ernie spent the biggest part of the day trying to lure me over to the "dark side" but I was strong and resisted :D :D !! Saturday evening the LOML and I went to the Prom again had a great time as usual, its always nice to see tll the kids dressed up.

Sunday was spent working in the yard helping SHMBO clean the flower beds and putting out mulch....can't talk her into pulling out the flowers and letting grass grow up to the house, that way all I have to do is mow and trim:rolleyes: :rolleyes: .

[Roger Los]

Let's see...spent Saturday driving all over the place, bought (with his money) my dad a new used Ranger truck, sat through three excruciating hours of a meeting so that I could spend five minutes talking to people who didn't care about a project of mine (how I got suckered into that, I don't know), and then drove some more to get home.

Sunday, I got about half-way done with the aquarium stand, which I think will look OK but I will never show up-close to another woodworker. I'm building it without any stationary tools and it shows. It will be plenty strong enough but, man, some of the joinery is ugggleee when you examine it closely.

[Don Orr]

Saturday I finally got around to installing the riser block on my bandsaw and got a coat of poly on the new bedroom door.

Sunday I cleaned up in the shop a little and did some turning. Cleaned up outside the shop as well. Real nice day. Also worked on a new mailbox post for out front. Made it out of a PT 6x6 so maybe the snowplow won't smash it again. Moved it back from the road a bit and will have a longer arm for the box.

Had a good weekend, hope y'all did too.

[Tyler Howell]

Most of the weekend was spent at the hospice. My sibs and I are doing the round the clock watch. Trying to utilize a few work tools to manage or resources.
Royce Merit stopped bye for a creeker visit.
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?p=335763#post335763 (http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?p=335763#post335763)
Clearly the highlight of the weekend.
Thanks folks,
Come again;) .

[Jim Becker]

Friday evening, after a trip to the playground, we went out to a local Mexican eatery after I confirmed by phone that they also served Chicken Fingers. It was a nice meal, although it would have been better with a nice draft of Dos Equis...unfortunately, the girls are very sensitive to adults drinking alcoholic beverages. At any rate, for the last month we've been able to transition from Perkins to "real" restauants for our Friday night's out and that's a good thing.

I got in the shop for about a half hour on Saturday and only got to clean up a little and change the abrasive on the drum sander. Then I had to retire to the house due to a little, umm...behavior issue...with one of the kids after we terminated a visit to a local park early. (One of the girls kept disappearing from our view on our walk and needed to learn about safety...and listening to mama and papa)

Sunday, we attended the open house for the YMCA summer camp program that our girls will be attending this summer and had the first steaks off the outside grill of the season. I also got some needed early season gardening tasks completed, including chopping off the ornamental grasses, relocating what appears to be a cherry tree sapling and taking down some scrappy non-native maples from one area of the property. I ended the day (before cooking said steaks) by taking a walk up the hill/cliff behind the house...something I had never done in the 6 years we have lived on this property. Very kewel...and some magnificent old white oaks and other trees were wonderful to touch and enjoy.

[Pete Harbin]

Here's the promised photo of the, now mobile, Jet mini Lathe. Can't wait to start making some shavings! :D

Pete