So... What are YOU doing? - Part 5

Nothing much today, ran a couple of errands and fiddled a little in the wood shop. I don't have a dado stack and I've been trying to figure out if I can cut dadoes without a stack. The answer is yes, but it's a bit of a hassle. I want to be able to cut box joints, ideally without running things back and forth multiple times through the table saw.

I'm going to need to build a jig to cut the box joints, so will need another piece of plywood. The only plywood I have available is a nicer grade that I'd use to make boxes, rather than build jigs for cutting things up. So I need a sheet of cheaper grade plywood, and most likely a dado stack. Perhaps as an interim measure I'll botch together a couple of smaller offcuts to make a jig that will kinda-sorta do - I already cut a couple of sleds to go in the grooves of my table saw out of a couple of offcuts I had floating about. Maybe I'll make a couple more of them, so I can throw together a few jigs to do fun stuff. Before long I need to make a jig to cut picture frames - I'd really like to make some frames that match the woodwork in the house.

The aftermath of my niece's birthday party...
"gutted and sacrificed Unicorn"


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Need to rethink my jig for making box joints. I cobbled something together but it wasn't as stable as I need it to be. I'd tried to use too many offcuts, what I need is a base that's the complete length of the jig, rather than trying to cut corners with small sleds supporting a long jig. I also cut new sleds, because the old ones had too much wiggle room in the channels (that was part of the problem, as well as nothing else being up to the job). Part of the problem was that I was trying to make precise cuts based on pushing things through the table saw with a sacrificial rod, and sadly it doesn't make for a precise cut. The wood has too much scope to wiggle a little, which means it ends up getting cut just very slightly narrower than I want it to be. And when a tight fit is important, if it's meant to be 3/4" thick and is actually 23/32" thick it wiggles enough to be unfit for purpose.

Rather annoyingly I've got a pile of offcuts I salvaged from a local woodworking store's trash pile, and every single one of them is just a whisker too thick to be suitable, yet not big enough (they are offcuts, after all!) to be suited for feeding through the table saw to trim off the excess. Maybe I'll ask a friend if I can use his planer, that would do the job nicely.

Lämmchen said:

Strav, is it humid where you live? Humidity will play a factor in the rising.

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Yes, humid atm, but I use air conditioning and have experienced the problem even when it is dry. Now I'm getting half or unrisen loaves every time. They actually rise further on the initial rise as can be seen from the cooked dough stuck around the perimeter higher up the pan, but the finished product is below that. My bread maker recipes don't call for active yeast, but unless I activate it first by putting it in luke-warm sugar water, the bread doesn't rise at all. It seems I might need another bread maker or opt for making it another way.

This is my second week of going to a new church. I find it interesting that even though they are a non denominational they have communion every week. It is a smaller church that where I was before.

My latest attempt at a larger cyclonic separator is thwarted, for a time at least.

I measured the diameter of the large garbage can and found it was about 20 3/4" so set about cutting a circle out of a new piece of plywood. Usually what I'll do for something like this is cut it a little large, then see just how much needs to come off, and shave a little off at a time until it's a very snug fit. And that was when the problem came to light. The can isn't quite round. It's not badly off - at the widest the diameter is a whisker under 21" and at the narrowest it's a little under 20", but it's off enough that a circle of wood won't fit. And it's solid enough that it's not a trivial process to try and make it a perfect circle either. I put the thing on its side and sat on it, and it barely moved. So I lifted my legs off the ground so my entire body weight was pressing on it, and it barely moved. I cut a piece of plywood 20 1/4" long (this is about four inches wide and 3/4" thick) with a view to pressing it into place to try and force the thing into a more round shape, but getting it into place was tricky. I held it as close as I could to where I wanted it, then bounced my entire body weight on the edge of the can, and just about managed to wedge it in there.

This could prove to be more difficult than I first thought. If I can't get it close enough to round I may have to resume my search for a 55 gallon burn barrel, which should be much closer to round.

On a more positive note, having bought another sheet of plywood I can press on with my jig to cut picture frames and, hopefully, a jig to cut box joints will be close behind it. But I think I'm going to need to get a dado stack before that can happen.

Watching the NFL Championship games. As this will determine who goes to SB LII!

Another episode of Fun With Saws.

Today's excitement was trying to figure out how to cut a box joint using only a table saw with no dado stack. Starting out with an offcut of whatever width it happened to be, many fine adjustments to the fence and a little jiggery pokery making a very makeshift jig I eventually managed to make cuts 3/8" wide and more or less the exact depth of the wood. They weren't quite how I wanted them - I'll need to look more closely to see just where the variations came from, but I ended up with a joint that is snug. The surplus width, over and above a nice multiple of the cut width, overhung on either end. It was interesting trying to get that cut off but with a little fiddling with offcuts and clamps I cut it pretty much smooth.

The joints are ever so slightly proud but nothing a bit of sandpaper couldn't fix (not that I'd bother, given it's an experimental joint using offcuts that has no practical purpose). For a first effort I'm reasonably pleased with it. The next step is to source some nice red oak to make a real box and see how it turns out.

Reading posts on here what has happened to everyone.. why have they gone or left what happened...?...

~Jo~ said:

Reading posts on here what has happened to everyone.. why have they gone or left what happened...?...

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disappearing ink maybe?

The rapture happened already?

Not sure.

Nah I doubt that about the rapture MC would have warned us first..lol I think he had first hand info on that front

I'm still here and still tinkering with stuff.

This afternoon I sourced myself a couple of nice pieces of red oak and a hefty slab of white oak. I don't know what I'll do with the white oak yet but the price was such it seemed stupid to turn it down. The red oak is earmarked for a box. My dado stack isn't here yet, so I left the oak to one side and spent time turning a load of spruce into sawdust as I tried to turn a slightly not-straight piece of 2x4 into something with four good edges all at right angles, with a 45-degree taper on the end. Having made two of those, the next step was to cut a sled to make the miters for picture frames. So far it looks good, although I think I may need to slide the fences back a little so the wood being cut doesn't overhang the sled. I don't want any more chip-out than is absolutely unavoidable. The first piece I cut, out of an offcut of 3/4" plywood, looked like the angle was more or less perfect. The next step is to put pegs in the fences, to make it easy to cut standard size frames. Then all I need is to find a reliable, and sensibly priced, source of plexiglass.

Fun With Cement (again)

Waiting for my dado stack to arrive I decided to press on with some wall repair work. One of the rooms has a lot of gaps in the walls - they are made of concrete blocks. The outer face is mostly fine but the inner face had lots of gaps between the blocks, some of them anything up to 4" wide. I guess whoever built the house used the blocks on hand, and some of them left big gaps. Needless to say I want better insulation than a single 1/2" thickness of concrete between indoors and outdoors, so I've started to fill the gaps. Having filled a lot of the narrower gaps it's remarkable just how much mortar it takes to fill a gap that's barely an inch wide.

The larger gaps will wait, I've got a concrete block to cut into strips so I can cement a strip into place, rather than trying to fill a 4x8" gap with cement a little at a time.

tango said:

Fun With Cement (again)

Waiting for my dado stack to arrive I decided to press on with some wall repair work. One of the rooms has a lot of gaps in the walls - they are made of concrete blocks. The outer face is mostly fine but the inner face had lots of gaps between the blocks, some of them anything up to 4" wide. I guess whoever built the house used the blocks on hand, and some of them left big gaps. Needless to say I want better insulation than a single 1/2" thickness of concrete between indoors and outdoors, so I've started to fill the gaps. Having filled a lot of the narrower gaps it's remarkable just how much mortar it takes to fill a gap that's barely an inch wide.

The larger gaps will wait, I've got a concrete block to cut into strips so I can cement a strip into place, rather than trying to fill a 4x8" gap with cement a little at a time.

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You are Mr.Tool time. We picked out some tile to replace our kitchen floor with this last weekend. I think we both agreed on which one we like and now have to go back and buy the tile and mortar. I'm not actually doing the work though because we want it done right.