The Project: Get yourself some walnut logs

The Drink: Mr. Boston's Lumberjack

The Pairing: After a cool day full of small, two-cycle engines revving and ropes flying limbs safely (mostly) to the ground you might as well mix up a refreshing Lumberjack.  Its appley-sweetness is offset well by the bourbon.

Project

Here's a scenario: Your buddy, the arborist, shoots you a text on a brisk Saturday morning, "Are you interested in some walnut?" There's only one answer, even before you get more details, "YES!"

I don't have a pick-em-up truck. I didn't know at the time the size of the logs I might be getting. But, it was free walnut. You just let your future self deal with that. And so my future self did!

Turns out the job was bigger than expected. I got to run ropes for my first time while he ran like a monkey out on limbs and dropped branches for me to fly. It's surprising how a simple port-a-wrap lets me carry loads multiple times my own mass. Some of the logs I flew down I could barely roll out of the way once they were safely on the ground.

Two days after starting limbing the canopy, we pulled the final log down and were hit with the realization that there were logs we needed to get out of the yard. We procured a trailer then pushed, pulled, lifted, and finally winched a few logs onto a trailer. The most fun problem? The winch was on the front of the vehicle that was towing the trailer. How do you use the winch backwards? We did it by unhooking the trailer, turning the vehicle around, and wedging the trailer tongue under the front rock plate. We winched upwards of 10ft long, 34in diameter logs up on that trailer which surprisingly held under the weight. Eventually i had 6 logs of various sizes sitting in my driveway – all for two days of work when there wasn't much else to do anyway.

Life gets in the way sometimes, so I grabbed some old samples of paint from the house and painted the end grain of the logs not knowing when I'd be able to mill them. There was a very red paint and a light green one.  The number of people that stopped to ask me what the story of the logs on the driveway was and why they had been painted was astounding! Sure, there are better products for slowing the wetness release through end grain and thus causing checks and cracks such as Anchorseal or Rockler's Green Wood End Sealer, but I do like using up the left over paint samples of colors we've decided not to use. And apparently that means people stop by and ask, "Is this an art installment?"

The time came to actually mill. Is there much better than milling up a log on your driveway full of branch crotches? You just never know what you're going to find when you take that board off the log for the first time. Luckily for me, these logs had many branches coming off them providing some exceptional grain.

Chainsaw milling is slow. Incredibly slow. It took me 6 hours to mill up this stack, and another 4 hours to mill up the bottom stack here.  And then you wait.  I went with two thicknesses, a 5/4 and and 8/4 hoping to end up with 3/4" and 1.5" stock after hitting the jointer and planer.  But I have to wait, like I said, for this wood to fully dry. They say it's about 1 year per inch to air dry and at 1.25" and 2" thick, that's going to put me into next summer/fall. I guess that gives me a lot of time to figure out what to do with it all?

The Project:
A bartop, made from a bowling lane.

The Drink:
Bob Ross Did It (Barrel Aged Scotch Ale)

The Pairing:
No longer in production, you might be able to find one at a small, hometown bar somewhere in ... Illinois?

Project

A buddy had this bar and it was a good bar, just not a terribly happy bar. It' didn't shine. You couldn't slide a beer down it in a cold, frosty mug. If too many people leaned on it, the top may have snapped. So we set out to right this wrong!

A local bowling alley had recently sold and was in the process of becoming a church. No need to for the bowling lanes anymore. Win for us! We snatched up two 8ft sections of Maple lane (we'd thought) and stowed them for a few months so the snow could melt and the days could get longer and warmer.

There's a problem with bowling lanes: After you take them off the floor and remove the iron support pieces, they get all wibbly wobbly.  Try leaning on that overhang after a few Bob Ross's and you'll no doubt find yourself trying to drink your beer while on the floor. To fix this problem? Glue.  Lots and lots of glue. Titebond 3 to be exactly, cause it's the most water proof of the Titebonds and this is a bar top afterall – people will spill. Turns out that good idea is not as easy as it sounds. In order to get glue in, you need to get the wood slats apart, but these look like someone went all nutso on the nail gun and had huge nails every few inches that are long enough to go through 2 and 1/4 slats.  You can just pry them apart, remove the nails, and glue them back together.  We found it easiest to pound a flat utility bar in between the slats and force some glue in there. Then clamp the crap out of them so they glue up nice and flat again.

Another thing that's great for bowling but not so great for a bar top is the wax and plastic sheath from the lane. Sanding's a no-go.  It'll gum up your sand paper so fast you'll be out a whole bunch of sandpaper. A power hand planer would work amazingly well but I don't have one of those.  Luckily, I did have a 12.5" lunchbox planer and had planned accordingly. During the glue up, we separated everything into 10-11" slabs so they could be run through the planer.  Once we had a nice, flat top to work with, we tossed in some domino floating tenons and got our full width.

We had to cut next. And you can imagine that the cuts were easy, 90 deg cuts we could do with a square, straight edge, and circular saw. I broke out the Festool track saw which made short work out of all the cuts, almost. Turns out that this particular bowling lane was thicker than the max depth of the track saw. But only just barely! There was less than 1/4" still attached after the cut – nothing a quick buzz with the sawzall and then sander couldn't fix.

A shiny finish was requested, and we went with a sprayed on lacquer since it's super easy.

Since these chunks of lane weigh a metric crap ton, we carried them to the bar in 3 pieces. Slapped some more glue on the seams and lined up the tenons, clamped it with some blue tape and cracked open a bottle of suds. That's a wrap!

The Project:
Woodworker's Fighting Cancer Kid's Table and Chair Set

The Drink:
Shirley Temple (Kiddie Cocktail)

The Pairing:
It's a kid's project. Best NA drink? Kiddie Cocktail. Hands down.

Project

This was a project made for Woodworker's fighting cancer build - a charity that has woodworkers build a somewhat simple project, share a picture, and have some money donated in their name to a cancer charity chosen each year by The Wood Whisperer, wood working extraordinaire and teacher.

This plan was worked out to be able to build a table and 2 chairs out of one sheet of ¾" plywood. Since usually there'll be friends over using the table, 2 seats wasn't enough.  With an extra sheet of plywood, I was able to get 4 more chairs, making 8 total with 2 tables. Pretty neat!

The table's pretty easy - it's just a butt-jointed box with a cover.  Square. No problems there — the table saw is your friend. The legs are a different story as they're curved. But they've thought of that and gave you templates to cut them out with!  I created a template from the paper template on ¼" hardboard.  Spay-adhesive helped stick the paper template to the hardboard before I cut it out on the bandsaw keeping close to the line. I refined the template on the oscilating spindle/belt sander and finished it up with hand rasps and sand paper. Need those curves looking amazing, right?

Since the chairs were all curved, too, I had to make another hardboard template. Getting those cut out involved travin the template, some bandsawing, and some jigsawing before going to the router table with a template bit to match the template.  Just be super-duper extra careful to use that router in the correct direction. When you don't, it wants to rip the plywood apart or, even worse, throw the wood out of your hands!

All the chairs were assembled using metal screwin connector bolts and those little things that screw into the wood and then have threads on the inside to capture a bolt. Pretty neat, huh?  And those chairs can hold a lot of weight. I often use it as a step stool - no breaks yet!

Even though there was a lot of time on the router with the pattern bit, the project was still fun and went quickly.  I even had time at the end to add my neice's name to one of the chairs with a stencil kit. More router work, hooray!

Toss on a coat of color paint to keep the kids happy, and you've got yourself a play table they're sure to enjoy for years to come (until they outgrow it.)

Check out Woodworkers Fighting Cancer for other plans and yearly projects.  Typically they run starting in October.

The Project:
Build your own apple cider press. Also known as a fruit press.

The Drink:
Whiskey Cider (reserved).

The Pairing:
It's a chill day. You get dressed up in your best flannel shit, work pants, and some warm boots.  Grab a jug of whiskey like the old lumberjacks did and head out to assemble your apple press. Shred some apples through the grinder, toss them in some cheesecloth that's in the press barrel, and pump up that jack and get the juices flowing. Pour a shot or three (how cold is it!?) in a glass and stick it under the stream until its filled to a reasonable level. Take a glug and feel like the hardworking person you are while enjoying the fruits of your labor.

Project

Inspiration for this project came from finding out how damn expensive having apples pressed into cider is. A few searches online found Dempsey Woodworking and the plans for a fantastic apple cider press. I made some changes to it, like using pine instead of 6/4 red oak (expensive!), and 4/4 hard maple instead of his 6/4 red oak thicknessed to 1" for the basket and trivet.

I found other options, such as making a press basket out of 2 non-food-safe buckets, but thought as a woodworker, I could do better. I believe that happened.

Building the Basket

A buddy of mine came over to check out the process and ended up staying for about 6 hours as we built the basket apparatus. Pretty straight forward, just incredibly time consuming. First, we jointed 1 face and 1 edge of a few rough stocked maple boards, then ripped them to strips of 1" wide, being extra careful and using Microjig's GRR-Ripper to keep our hands clear of the sawstop's blade. Sure, it's not supposed to grotesquely chop a finger off, but those brakes and new blades are expensive! Next we rounded over all the edges of top of each strip using a 1/8" round over on the router table. Since there were a lot of the same size pieces, I rigged up my larger-than-life crosscut sled with a stop block and buzzed through the strips to make them the same size.

Over at the drill press, we drilled and countersunk all the holes for the trivet and drilled pilot holes for the basket. Sure was a lot of holes. The basket is held together by flat aluminum, which needed to be cut to size. I though it'd be a great idea to do that cut on the table saw, so I took out the manual and remembered how to bypass the safety mechanisms (since aluminum is conductive) and ran it through the saw. Not the best idea I've ever had, but it worked none-the-less. Wasn't a real straight cut, though nothing a little sanding wouldn't fix. Next time, I decided to use the band saw for cutting.

Since we didn't follow the sizing 100% correctly when building the juice holder tray portion, our trivet was larger than the plans called for, meaning we had to make up our own spacing of the slats. Luckily, 1/8" was perfect, and we had those few 1/8" thick aluminum straps left. So sticking them between each slat as we drilled and screwed worked great.

Building the structure

Now that we had the basket, trivet, and juice tray done, I could move on to the frame. I got most of the wood for the frame from my local Habitat Restore for a fraction of the price of purchasing at a big box store, but they pieces weren't all the same thickness. No worries, that's what they make thicknessers for! Running those through the thicknesser was easy and soon they were all equal-enough sized to cut them to length.  The uprights needed some dados cut in them for the bridal/half-lap/whatever you want to call them joints. I stuck in a 3/4" dado stack to the table saw and cut away the waste. And cut.  And cut. And cut. It sure took forever and made a lot of sawdust.

Assembly was easy with some glue and some carriage bolts and lag screws. If I build another, I'll be sure to use the drill press to get the holes drilled straighter. As it is now, the feet only go on one side in one direction. Don't see why they couldn't go on either side if the holes were all drilled perfectly.

By this time, the wood was done being laminated (read that as the glue finally dried) and I could cut the corners off on the band saw and then use the router with a circle jig to get the pressure plate for squishing the apples. Pretty straight forward here, turned out great.

Finally, I needed a way to get the juice out of the tray after we pressed it. Using a funnel, I drilled a few holes of different diameters (from larger to smaller) through the tray so the funnel would fit down in there flush.  Then I taped the top of the funnel and flipped the tray over so that I could dump some epoxy in there to secure the funnel.

With that, all that was left was to build a riser on the pressure plate to get the jack close enough to the top bar so it could have enough squish distance.

Things to do differently

As the article said, using an aluminum plate on the top bar for the jack to register against was not strong enough. After the first press, I had deflected the plate 1/8" into the top bar. We found a piece of steel that worked way better and didn't deflect at all.

Putting a small piece of shim under one side of the legs helped direct the juice to the funnel. I know the plans said to raise one end up the tray and then slice the basket's bottom to keep it plumb, but that seemed like way too much work. Making the whole structure lean meant that the pressure could still be perpendicular to the top bar and the trivet. Definitely easier this way.

What to do with the juice

Our plan was to make 5-6 gallons of hard cider. Here in the US, we call it hard simply because it's been fermented and now has some alcohol in it. It's my understanding that the rest of the world just calls it "Cider".  With the 4 couples there, we ended up pressing out 17.5 gallons of cider and having enough apple pieces left over to fill a 55-gallon plastic drum. We had the equivalent of 7 13-gallon totes full of apples (I have no idea how that correlates to a bushel.) If you're interested in making your own hard cider, check out this guys post on making hard cider.

The juice we're not turning into hard cider was put in washed-out gallon milk jugs and stored in the freezer. A little mulling spice and a crock-pot would make a lovely thanksgiving beverage. If you're freezing, be sure to leave enough head room in the jug for the expansion during freezing.

The Project:
Dust collection plumbing

The Drink:
Miller Lite

The Pairing:
Nothing like a cheap, lite, American, mass-produced beer to choke down while doing some plumbing. Plumbers butt optional.

I added a Dust Collection (DC) system to my shop this month. WoodCraft was running a special on their Rikon 2HP DC units with 5-micron filter bag, so I picked on up because I was quite annoyed with moving the shopvac/dust deputy around the shop to every tool. And the whine of the shopvac running for long is enough to drive anyone crazy.

Project

Let's get started. Crack open that miller lite that sucks perhaps even more than the DC itself. Grab your needed tools, some pipe, fittings, spraypaint, and electrical tools because we're going to ground the shit out of these pipes.

I went all out. The DC unit is actually outside my basement shop in the storage area. Less noise for me, right? It's plumbed through the wall, into a wanna-be vortex seperator, then continued to be plumbed throughout the shop. I used 4" Sewer and Drain piping, home-made blast gates, and a variety of pvc-to-flexible-hose connectors to get everything connected. I even took the time to spray paint the PVC so it looks all pretty like. Well for now, until it gets covered in a layer of dust.

Process

Cutting the PVC

Seems you can only find 10ft lengths of pipe at the store. So they need to be cut. I found out that I have no control over a hacksaw when attempting to cut straight through a piece of PVC. Luckily, a quick setup on the table saw with a stopblock on my mitre gauge worked perfectly. Just spin the pipe along the gauge while keeping it's end tight against the stop block and you've got a nice, straight cut. Unfortunately, it makes a ton of PVC chips/dust, which I couldn't suck up because I didn't have the DC installed yet.

Attaching Fittings

For junctions, I used an assortment of 90°, 45°, and 22.5° elbows, and Wyes. I skipped the pvc cement on these joints, thinking it will be easier should I ever need to change things. Also, I have no ventilation in my shop so I probably would have keeled over dead if the Miller Lite didn't do the job already. So I just press-fitted them, and then shot some #8x5/8" sheet metal screws through the joints. They seemed to fit the thickness of the pvc and join perfectly.

Grounding

Even though mythbuster's busted the whole shop-explosion from static electricity sparking and blowing up your pvc dust collection system, I still felt like the $20 to ground the system was worth it. Got myself some 18guage stranded bare copper wire from Home Depot (since I couldn't find it anywhere else!) and some #8 ring terminals. Tried to have more Miller Lite at this point — still sucked and couldn't finish it.

To ground, I ran the wire on the inside of the long, straight runs. Then I drilled an angled hole at the end to pull the wire out, put a ring terminal on the end and used one of the sheet metal screws to attach it at the joint. Then at the end of the run, I have it grounded to the DC, and to each tool that it's constantly hooked up to. That part actually took longer than I expected, getting the wire pulled and putting in the screws. One of the articles I found mentioned having wire wrapped around the outside of the PVC in addition to running it inside. Perhaps that will be a future project I choke some more Miller down to should the static charge not dissipate quickly or fully enough.

SoundLevels

But what I really wanted to talk about today was noise level. I set up my handy-dandy iPhone with the dB Meter Pro app to measure sound levels in the shop by where I stand mostly: behind the table saw. I took a few readings, listed below.

Interesting, isn't it?  But for the most part, the pitch of the DC is much less annoying than the ShopVac, which means less grumpiness when I'm done building for the night and head upstairs.

Finishing

Now that it's all done, pull up your favorite shop stool (or get some wood together to make one), hit the remote on your dust collector, suck some stuff up, kick back, and suck down some of that award-winning Miller Lite!

The Project:
Beer Caddy and Beer Flight gifts

The Drink:
Spotted Cow

The Pairing:
It'd be pretty dumb to pair a beer caddy with anything but a nice, tasty beer, right? Only available in Wisconsin, the Spotted cow is a "naturally cloudy farmhouse ale" with a "fun, fruity and satisfying" flavor.

Christmas is tomorrow. Being a woodworker, it only made sense to build a few presents this year. My wife's boss had mentioned wanting a beer caddy with bottle opener for taking his suds out on the boat. We set out to make one for him, then added a beer flight to his gift and I made another caddy for my brother.

Project

Let's get started. First things first: search around for a bottle opener to pop that top off your Spotted Cow. Always a pain to find one of those. Just don't use your newly-completed work bench as a bottle opener as it's sure to get dented.

We need a plan.  Youtube has plenty of ideas. But the one that stuck out as being most like what we wanted came from The Drunken Woodworker. I didn't really like the look of the plywood edges, so we opted for some hardwood. Actually, it was some 4/4 cherry and some 4/4 walnut.

Process

Here we go! First, cut some pieces of the wood down to a more manageable size on the mitre saw. Then take them to the jointer and joint 1 face and 1 edge.  Over to the table saw to made the other edge parallel to the jointed one, and finally a few trips through the thickness planer to get all the pieces the same thickness.

The plans call for a side piece that's 6-1/2 inches wide. But the wood we had was at most 6". Time to get creative. We edge-glued-up 3 pieces of the cherry so the wife could later cut 2 pieces of the correct width. I decided to line the sides of my pieces with 1 inch of walnut.

For the front/back pieces, we did a combination of cherry and walnut strips.  The wife decided that the sides weren't tall enough, so she changed the pattern and added an inch to the height there. Glued everything up using alomst all the clamps I have in the shop and called it a night.

It'd be pretty dumb to pair a beer caddy with anything but a nice, tasty beer, right?

The next day, we transfered the pattern onto our newly-glued pannels so we could cut the sides. My bandsaw is sort of a piece of shit, so the wife decided to cut her sides down with the jigsaw. I opted for the band saw and only messed up once. Since the shop lacks any sort of sanding aparatus, we tuned the hand-held belt sander upside down and clamped it in the vise. One side of each of our caddies got sanded down to the template line. I set the router table up with a flush-trim bit and taped the two side pieces together. That made quick work for getting both pieces identical and the router dust is a lot easier to deal with than the belter sander dust.

Once that was done, we made sure the pieces were cut down exactly to the size we needed. I put an 1/8 inch straight bit into the router and put a few dados in at the bottom of the pieces to accept the 1/8 inch plywood bottom. The plans didn't call for this, but I thought it would be a bit stronger and also help us during the glue-up.

I hate sharp edges, and am not a big fan of the chamfer, either, so I went out and got an 1/8" roundover bit to run around each edge. If I'd had a trim router, this part would have been done after assembly not before. But that's the way it works. There's no way I'm going to be holding a huge router with a tiny bit on a tiny piece of wood trying to clean up an edge. Good thing I grabbed a palm router for my next project!

Time for a glue-up.  This was quite a bit harder than I had expected, trying to keep everything square and tight. Perhaps on the next go-round, I'll do the glue-up in stages with corner blocks to help with keeping things square.

For the finish, I grabbed a can of spray lacquer and put on two coats. Amazing how fast this stuff dries! And also how nasty it makes the house smell. I may only use that outdoors from now on, provided it's not the dead of winter.

Next Time

If I ever make these again, in addition to a better final glue-up clamp, I'd like to box-joint the corners, or maybe even dovetail them with my dovetail jig. And perhaps give myself more than 2 weeks to complete this project, or at least 2 weeks without 4 evenings a week filled with playing sports!

There's this idea in my head that'll end up being a desk for my home office. It'll support an iMac and a 22" external monitor, have room for the keyboard, have drawers and file drawers, and have enough room for the mobile devices that a web developer needs in order to do enough testing. Yeah, in real life, I'm actually a full-stack web developer. Enough geekery!

Today's drink: Cherry Southern Comfort and Pepsi. Damn, it's sweet, but thought it was a good idea with the cherry wood. Hell, I even added a few extra maraschino cherries to it since a gallon of them showed up on my porch one day.

Wood Workers Source was running a fantastic sale in early May, 2014. 25% off! I settled on some cherry since I knew I'd want a thicker than 3/4" top and they had 6/4 cherry. I purchased 35 bdft of 6/4 and another 10 bdft of 4/4 to use as drawer fronts. Still have to choose a different wood for the drawer carcases, but I'm leaning toward a hard maple. I think the color differences between the two woods will look great together.

After my online order, I got the confirmation email saying they'd ship my order in 3 days. Well that didn't happen. I ordered on a Sunday, and they didn't ship until 8 days later. Direct from their email, "Within 3 business days, our team will carefully select, package, and ship your order.
If you ordered lumber and made size specifications, it may take longer but we will let you know." That sure makes it sound like they were going to email me if it didn't ship within 3 days. I ordered on a Sunday night, so I expected a Wednesday/Thursday shipment. I even contacted them by email to see what the hold up was. Still waiting on an answer to that email, 12 days later. Doubt I'll ever get an explination.

Finally, the wood arrived by UPS. I tried finding out how WWS packs and ships wood from their website, but the page never worked, regardless of what type of computer and browser I was using.

I came back from dropping my road bike off at the bike shop so it could get its hydraulic disc brakes installed again after the recall from SRAM, and there were the two packages of wood at the top of my driveway. Perhaps the 60lb each weight was too much for the UPS drier to handle? Also, just a tip, WWS, but after the 50lb package weight, shipment prices jump excessively high. Maybe 3 - 40lb packages would have been cheaper to ship than 2 - 60lb ones!?

My wood was split into two packages, half the 6/4 and 4/4 in one package, then the rest in the other package. It was wrapped with corrugate paper (like what's INSIDE a corrugated cardbox box), then wrapped in a few pieces of plastic. One of the packages had the cardboard completely ripped and I could see the wood inside. A few pieces were damaged at the edges, but not so much that the piece is ruined. Pretty sure I'll end up removing that material on the jointer anyway.

Moral here, I was less than impressed with the service and packaging from WWS and will continue to attempt to source my wood from a local saywer so I don't have to pay shipping and don't have to wait as long. The wood's currently acclimating to the shop as I attempt to design a desk that'll fit in the space I have and fit my personality.

So make yourself a nice big Cherry So-Co and Pepsi and get in your shop!

I was in the market for a new table saw, as the contractor saw I had just wasn't cutting the mustard anymore.  The fence on it was crap and the table wasn't sturdy. It was perfect for a job-site saw, but was causing more problems and taking more time than I wanted to deal with.

My wife is a Phsician's Assistant specializing in hand and upper-extremety injuries. Basically, she sees the aftermath of injuries caused by table saws and other tools.  I brought up the idea of a sawstop to her as a joke figuring it would be out of the price range we were going to spend.  After all, I was looking mostly at the Grizzly G0175P.  Turns out, she was 100% on board for the SawStop and its ability to stop the blade and move it into the cabinet and you barely, if at all, bleed.

You can check out all kinds of sawstop reviews around the web, including this video review from Matt's Basement Workshop if you're not familiar with how they work. One of my favorite ones includes some fried chicken.

I ended up grabbing the 3HP single-phase 230v Professional Cabinet Saw. They were running a special where I could get a free mobile base with purchase. Sounded like a good idea since the saw weighs over 700lbs.

I had to run a 230v line in the shop to get this to work. Luckily, I had left-over conduit from a basement remodel and an unused 230v breaker from the old well before the house was annexed onto city water. All I needed to get was a 20amp 230v outlet and some 12x2 awg wire. After I wired that up, I flipped the switch on the saw and it went through its startup procedure. Successfully!  I took a few pictures during the setup, which was incredibly easy with the instructions and parts being well labeled, numbered, and in bubble packs.