Woodworking

This is a very simple to build router table made from half a sheet of 3/4” plywood and a 1/4 sheet of 1/2” plywood.

Custom hand turned solid hard maple newel posts. They are 9 1/4” diameter x 48” tall Thanks for looking!

During my daily craigslist browsing I came across this saw. I have seen them before but never in this good of condition. I can not find any info on it. Is anyone familiar with it? Thanks in advance. http://losangeles.craigslist.org/sgv/tls/3805301985.html

I made this Jewelry Box for my wife for her Birthday. Its made from Maple with Midnight Blue Velvet, the drawers are also lined with Velvet. She can hang Necklaces in the door and bracelets in the back of the cabinet and there is also a 3 inch ring bar. For a finish I used 3 coats of Tung Oil.

Hey folks….another upgrade for the old Performax ST (22×44) drum sander. This is the original drum sander that Performax made and it bolts onto a RAS. You can see previous mods here: http://lumberjocks.com/JL7/blog/19321 http://lumberjocks.com/JL7/blog/19348 http://lumberjocks.com/JL7/blog/21269 The sander has always worked great for me, until the other day when I tried to sand a 21×36 solid Maple desk top. I don’t usually use the full width of the sander. The problem was the cheesy plastic paper holding things just didn’t keep there grip and the paper would overlap and burn... (That’s the photo after I drilled out the rivets holding them in….) I called SuperMax, which is the original company that built the early Performax stuff, before Jet bought them…...and they are still in the Twin Cities, so close to home…... The young lady was so pleasant, I called right after she shut her computer down for the day, but she processed the order anyways, from memory…...works for me. The parts showed up today in the mail. Only gripes…..no instructions….and no counter weights….I wouldn’t have even considered the counter weights until I Google’d the directions, which I found in an obscure re-scanned document not on the SuperMax site. Thankfully, it described the correct weight for the counterbalances…... Here are the new grips: The outbound: The inbound…..this one uses some heavy spring pressure to keep the paper tight and is easy to load: I didn’t take photos, but without the counterweights, the drum was a disaster…..vibrating all over the place…...Panic ensued…. Luckily, a few day ago I bought a HF scale for weighing out finishes….....$16 with coupon. Good call, because I could weigh out enough washers to balance each end of the drum…...used super glue and hot glue to attach. Runs nice and smooth now. Oh yea…... Got a perfectly smooth solid Maple top (from old gym floor) on the sander….no burn:

I have a project that calls for making 3/4” x 3/4” edging and I’ve been wanting to make one of these jigs for the longest time so I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to finally make it. I actually bought the bearing about six months ago on eBay for something like $4 from China (yeah, whatever…) and the nylon bushings from McMaster Carr (I had a really hard time finding these anywhere else and now I have a pack of them, McM is like 30 mins away from my house so I just went and picked them up). Anyway, this was based on the Woodsmith Shop table saw ripping jig with a few modifications. I had the Rockler miter hardware kit laying around for a while now from a sale so I modified the base to use that. I cut the whole bottom piece on the bandsaw and rounded over the corners and made the holes for the knobs to go through. I somehow messed up the position of one of the holes but it really doesn’t matter in the long run. I had some leftover UHMW strip from a failed jig I had previously made so I repurposed it for the “runners” of the arm rather than using hardboard. Lastly, i purchased a 6” steel rule (a couple of them actually) from Harbor Freight and because my base differs from that of the plans I just cut roughly an inch off the steel rule and made a very shallow dado on the top piece so it doesn’t catch. I epoxied the rule to the base and it works like a charm. I zeroed the rule by first putting the bearing against the tooth of the blade and then making a mark on the base. Then i aligned the rule to that mark with epoxy on it and it worked out great. You can see the last two pictures on a test piece. The rule is set to 3/4” cut and the piece came out exactly 3/4” from two different calipers (the fractional caliper and the digital caliper whose batteries are obviously dying, which is why I just picked up the non-digital one today). All in all I’m calling this a great success. Very precise and should serve me well.

well, when it's springtime in vermont, you can't expect tooooo much writing from me ... i do have a couple of good posts coming up, but i haven't quite gotten around to getting them together just yet. soon, i suspect, like maybe tomorrow. maybe. if it rains or something. maybe ... here's a sampler of what it's like outside here now ... like i said. spring. click the pictures to enlarge them ... you got your grass to mow ... nice change from the snow ... you got your hoseshoes to set up you got your magnolias .. and your phoebe nest ... and your fishin'... sam with a big one from the mettawee .. your tulips ...and your wood to stack ... all done now ..your big fat 800+ page book to read ... 400 years of natural history, well written.your golf to play ... been out a bunch of times ... and so much more.and oh yeah, we still have to work ... we've been working on the new designs. heading into it big time on monday ... more soon ... dan

Once we had a decent working opening to the basement, I made my fourth and last iteration of the plan for the staircase with the actual opening dimensions. This is where the parents saw it starting to pay-off: we bought for 250€ worth of nice heart pine boards (five 2m40 by 60 cm) to build the whole thing, and I got the sister involved in helping me out to cut the lumber into the needed parts. crazy sist kept seeing funny critters in the boards’ patterns ;) we aren’t a family of artists for nothing! I made the stairs in blocks of two, using the grain direction to add extreme strength where I needed it to be and keep the vertical walls/supports to a useful minimum. The steps are 20 cm deep each, and once the dados and endgrain supporting portions are taken out we remain with ~35 cm wide cabinets for the shelves, which has proved to be perfect. I used glue, screws and dowels to secure each pair of steps to the connecting things which name I don’t know in EN (“contre-marche” en français, baby) You can see that all the horizontal rails are supported on the endgrain of the vertical separators. Those are heavily screwed in place and don’t move at all. This last picture shows the last two steps, which form a 90 degree angle to the right while keeping a 60 cm wide step size. This block will also be used to hold the ventilation system and the control computer (I’ll use one of our old laptops with a USB sensors and control board). The staircase is installed in the left side of the basement, and the right side wall is fitted with wooden shelves with plywood backing boards, and to prevent moisture from developping I installed computer fans between the wall and the backs to move the air, and it works great. Here you can see all the finished parts ready to be installed in their home. I’ll take pictures of the finished basement this summer when going back there. TBC!

This week’s Project is a horizontal Murphy Bed. The bed I built is a twin size bed using the Create-A-Bed Hardware kit from Rockler Woodworking and Supply. The finished look of the bed can be trimmed and finished to match your homes decor, really the limit on the final look is only limited by your imagination. These videos just tell you about the use of the hardware kit and the general construction of the project. I hope you enjoy it.

So at my local pub having dinner went I ask about there very sticky tables. The girl serving us said, yes the table need to be refinished. So I did some quick sale / talking and landed my first Wood Working job refinishing there 20 bar table. Over the course of this last month I have brought home 3 table at a time and redid each one. Here is how I did: 1. Strip down to BARE wood / remove everything! Clean up shop :) 2. Starting with 100 or (120 if there not total dented up) up to 220 vacuum between step. 3.Using STEEL WOOL to get into every pore of the wood as this was Oak, again vacuum up. I used solvent to clean the wood and let dry to see if you got everything off the table top. 4 Start with Wipe On Poly where fill in the wood. However the out come wasn’t what the customer want for a shine. So step 5 three brush coasts of Varathane Professional Semi Gloss now we just about there. To add a little extra I wax each table down before deliver back to the pub