Creeker's Past Week's Accomplishments

[Dennis Peacock]

5 Jul 2021

Greetings,
I started oncall duty for the day job this morning. So it is...what it is.
Been working on a project in the shop this past week for a red cedar twin-bed sized porch swing for a customer of mine. I had hoped to have it done today, but due to a couple of set-backs, I'm delayed another day or so. I'm still teaching my woodworking student on a weekly basis and he is doing well and learning machines, safety, and finally learning about wood and adhesives. My #2 son closed on a house this past week and I'm also spending what free time I have to help him with things that need fixing on his house. The house was built in 1953, all brick, but it needs some TLC inside as well as a kitchen overhaul. The really long days and no relax time is really getting to me. I'm sleeping about 4-5 hours a night and working about 18 hour days between the day job, the shop work for customer orders and helping my son with his house repairs. I'm exhausted and I truly need some rest but I guess sleep and rest come highly overrated - right?

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

Best of week to you all.

[Paul F Franklin]

Wow Dennis, you have a lot on your plate...guess you don't need me to tell you that!

Didn't do much in the shop this week beyond a little cleaning and straightening. After finishing the office cabinets I am focusing on finishing up our kitchen design and so I can get stuff ordered. Getting pretty close on a preliminary design, once that's done will run it by a local kitchen designer for feedback and help getting a cabinet take-off prepared with all the cabinet options and misc fillers, panels, and trim pieces. Once the cabinets and appliances and sink and flooring are ordered, there will be a lull waiting for stuff, so I'll start on another furniture project then. With lead times being so uncertain, LOML has convinced me to wait until most everything has arrived before doing demo. I think that makes sense in terms of minimizing the disruption. We are not moving any walls or doing any structural changes so there won't be a long period between demo and reinstall. Running the vent stack for the new hood and the makeup air inlet is probably the biggest job that has to be done after demo and before reinstall. I'll be replacing one window, which I can do whenever it gets here, and a couple of closet doors that aren't in the kitchen but are in the area where flooring will be replaced. So I can do those while waiting for stuff to arrive.

The HVAC contractor came as scheduled on Thursday and Friday to install the new furnace and A/C. They did a marvelous job, really top notch. As luck would have it, we had a cool front those two days with highs around 70. By Saturday it was back in the 90's. Couldn't have picked a better two days to be without A/C if I tried. And the new equipment is lovely...so much quieter and maintains a much more even temperature and does a better job of keeping the humidity down.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Got to relax a bit. Went to friend's place with wife and another friend from SS class. It was a festiville of good eating, with me doing the cooking for the ladies. Got home before storms Thursday night. Our 16 year old Brindle Pit bull, can't hear, except for thunder, which she is terrified of. Power went out around 9:45 PM, and didn't come back on till a little after 1:30 AM. No shower, so I slept in recliner. Had family over for burgers on Saturday night, and SS group for hot dogs on Sunday. Baked a total of four apple pies for these two meals. (FYI, Walmart Apple Pie Filling has more apples and less stuff than any other brand I have used over the years.) Worked helping neighbor to get temp water hooked up, as his bladder tank has a hole in it. Tomorrow get to replace it. Storm brought down a lot of debris, including a 125' tall pine that snapped off at the ten foot level, which landed on electric fence. Wound up with a little over two inches of rain for the second week in a row, with even more predicted later this week. Went to church on Sunday, as usual. No wood working this week.

[Derek Cohen]

10 years ago I completed a set of Campaign Chests for our living room. These were styled to remain simple and minimalistic, and built in Jarrah. Storage was one reason (12 deep drawers), but a big motive was something upon which to place the TV.

This photo was taken at the time ...



Originally, however, the design was this ... with the empty sections designed to hold the hifi ..



My dear wife "convinced" me that it would be better like this ...



And so it was. The hifi was not a big factor anyway. Big dogs (Golden Retrievers with wooshing large tails that took out all it their path) did not inspire the confidence to leave out a turntable within reach. So the turntable and all the vinyl was relegated to the family room, where it was not used. Most of my listening took place in the workshop.

This past weekend saw a re-kindling of interest in hifi and listening to music. I discovered that 10 years had seen the emergence of new equipment and more modern ways of getting to listen to everyone one could ever wish to listen to. The younger guys here will smile when I say that I had no idea about streaming and its potential. And for you reading on who are as unknowing as I was, this is a splendid opportunity to start a new obsession!

After some research, I purchased a Cambridge Audio CXN (2) streamer/DAC. This streams high resolution music - some 7 million songs ... any album I could wish to listen to!!! - from Tidal to the hifi. This is better-than CD quality. I never knew this existed!

To get the hifi into the living room, it was necessary to add on to the campaign chests. A small cabinet in Jarrah was built to match. This is it now ....



The eagle eyes will note that the large Bowers and Wilking DM7 mk2 speakers have been replaced by small KEFs. My wife again "convinced" me to get rid of the eyesore coffins, as she called them. That's okay. There is a matching subwoofer on its way!!

The addition is this cabinet ...





This has become a modern music centre, with an old MacBook Pro put into service as a music source for Flac files. These are streamed through the Cambridge to the amp (by-passing the internal DAC in the laptop). A sliding shelf houses the MBP ...





(And, yes, the computer continues to play with the lid down. It uses a simple app to permit this).

The sound is excellent.

At present I have completely stripped the turntable (a 45 year-old Thorens TD150 with Rega arm), and am rebuilding both the plinth and upgrading the arm. Such fun!

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Charles Taylor]

Derek, that's a very nice addition to your living room.

One of the projects on my long "sooner or later" list is an upgrade to our entertainment center. Similar to Derek's situation, our current A/V setup predates streaming services and even the now-ubiquitous HDMI by many years. Also like Derek, my boss will not approve large speaker cabinets, but due to age and being undersized to begin with, what we have sounds quite anemic, so we'll have to come up with some kind of compromise.

But all that is for later.

Earlier last week I applied the final stain coats to the doors of my kitchen buffet project. There are still a number of corrections and touch-ups to make, and I hope this is the last time for a long while that I choose to use gel stain on a project. Maybe some of you like it, but I don't.

I made a four-day weekend out of the Independence Day holiday. Using part of the day Friday and then Saturday morning, I made a pair of low (~20") sawhorses from a few expensive 2x4s. I used these to get my kitchen buffet project elevated some for the finishing work that is to come soon.

After that I turned to some overdue sharpening of the iron in my #4 plane and my most often used chisels. This included doing a more thorough job of flattening the backs of many of them than the I had done some time prior (when I tried to accomplish the feat using only Arkansas stones), re-establishing primary bevels, and lapping the top surface of the plane's frog once I realized how badly it was needed. I didn't avail myself of any electrons for assistance on this task (aside from lighting), so it did not go quickly.

Sunday morning I heard my church's new senior pastor preach for the first time. Sunday evening I went to a birthday party for a friend and former coworker, which of course coincided with the entire neighborhood's fireworks bonanza. During the time in between, I replaced the wheel on our wheelbarrow ahead of Monday's planned activites and undertook a little more of the flattening and sharpening job in the workshop.

Monday morning, several of us distributed two pickup truck loads and two trailer loads of mulch around my father-in-law's yard. After showers and well-earned afternoon naps, we returned to my FIL's for a dinner of the barbecued ribs of a quadruped and their customary accompaniments.

[Jim Becker]

Dennis...don't kill yourself through lack of sleep.

Last week saw the air and most of the dust collection installed in the "temporary shop". I have to order a few more small components for the latter and hopefully will get the inspector out next week to sign off on the electrica. I didn't press because of the holiday, etc. I have guests here this week, so zero shop related activity other than ordering the aforementioned duct components from Blastgate Company.

[Lisa Starr]

Chuck and Derek-- Should I count myself lucky? We have a pair of PSB Gold speakers sitting in our living room. Yes, it limits the arrangement of the room, but neither my husband or I would even consider giving them up. We still need to upgrade to streaming, but just haven't gotten around to it.

Nothing in the shop this weekend, as my slider is due to arrive.