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The wood shop.

I’m working under the blue tarp again and it’s a beautiful day in the 80s here.

As I started throwing away the bits of the old dog house I realized that there was about $300 of unchewed shiplap cedar wood siding & dimensional Cedar S4S, (were I forced to go purchase it new) I am such a cheapskate that this broke my heart, so of course I had to build something out of it.

My wife was trying to use a plastic bucket as a plant stand & it took me only a little while to explain to her that the plastic would rot from UV, and her beautiful ceramic pots would wind up broken.

Clearly I was trying to make work for myself because now I’m building a cedar plant stand.
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And it’s all going to have stainless steel screws because that’s what the dog house was built of.
 
I was trying to figure out what you’ve been smoking for a couple minutes there...

Then I remembered about the black light.

It’s not really as blue in real life, as it looks in the iPhone photographs.

It’s just the way this camera picks up the light I guess.
 
Here I am putting some epoxy filler on a new shelf for my desk.
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This is a beautiful piece of wood but it had a serious flaw in one corner that was revealed when I routed the edge and trimmed the board. Here you’re looking from the bottom.

The underside of these bar tops is not really designed to be seen but this one is pretty clear.

There are a few little scars and divots that I will build up with either filler or polyurethane and sand it all out.

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And here I thought I was doing well making a wooden gun crate/case.

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Today I am squaring up the legs...I have them clamped to the table of the miter saw.

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It was 110F by 3PM, when I gave up.
I don't run the power tools before 8am, though most of my work is getting done between 5am and 2pm.
 
OK I got these boards squared up pretty good and I broke out the router.

I call this photograph DIY still life.
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You can see my cheap Chinese Jackplane. Actually works OK after a modification to the blade and a really good hone. Out of the box it was totally useless and I’ll bet a whole lot of these wound up thrown in a drawer.

The thing is it’s a very attractive plane and appears to be very well-made. But it has some manufacturing shortcomings that the engineers didn’t bother to correct.

At least the steel takes a nice edge and it has real wood handles, that I had to modify so they wouldn’t be loose.
 
Legs to my hutch have been Squared and beveled.

Now I have some sanding And varnishing to do.
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The outsides look pretty clean but the backs look like they have a few gnarly knots.
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I have filled those all up with polyurethane and they are curing now.
 
I have noticed that your wood working skills have gotten a lot better. I see a lot of attention to detail there. Especially with how straight and true the joints of all of the various pieces of wood are to each other. No big gaps. Everything is fitting like it grew like that.

I know that's not by accident and how much work it takes to do that.

Well done cadd.
 
Awww, You’re being way too impressed John. I haven’t assembled anything up here.

Those are just factory laminated planks. My worst nightmare was just trying to cut everything really square.

Instead I did lots of planing and sanding by hand, with a square.

Also I had to sand out all the surface defects.
Now I got to figure out how to dowel the legs to the top and put the back on (which is easy.)

I still haven’t made the small shelves for the hutch.
 
Well the main assembly is done but there still are no small shelves.

The epoxy cures & varnish dries fast when it’s this warm out.

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Now that I have it assembled, I think that the design of the legs looks silly but I’m not going to change it. I beveled all the edges thinking that this would make things appear to “float”. Sort of an optical illusion. But now I think it was a stupid idea & I’m sorry I did it this way.

But the glue is cured and it’s not going to change.


Except that it’s going to have some small shelves. To design them I need to get it in on the desk and mock it up with the two monitors that it will house, because I intend this hutch to actually support the monitors rather than have them sit on the desk.
 
This is a large coaster that I made from a leftover piece of my new Baltic Birch desk top. I didn’t have any felt so the bottom is a piece of suede leather saved from an old jacket.
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I’ve only done a little lathe work over the years, and Wood and precision metal, but this is the first time I’ve ever owned a lathe.

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It’s also the first time I’ve ever built one. This is all built from various junk I have been saving for years. It is pretty light duty at only 1/3 hp, but it is fine for the kind of small non-precision stuff that I want to do now.

There is so much clutter in the boat yard right now that it’s hard to take a picture of this.

The headstock is made from some salvaged oilite bearings and 1.5” cyclone fence top rail. I bought a brand new shaft for this but all I could get was hot-rolled in so I had to polish it down. The pillows are comprised of brand new U bolts from Lowe’s and connecting rod caps for my dad’s old lawn tractor.
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The headstock shaft and jack shaft and motor shaft are only 5/8 inch dia. You could Swing about a 10” work piece on this, but you’re not going to hog wood with a 1 inch gouge at 1000 RPM with this gear.
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The frame is basically built out of leftover cyclone fence parts and tubing. The lumber is nice clear Douglas fir, and the pieces that are painted black served as the rails of my boat trailer for about 10 years.

The motor carriage and the lathe bed are both suspended in this frame. The motor carriage allows for vertical adjustment which allows me to quickly change the belt speed. The bed is made from the welded steel frame parts of a Danish kneeling chair.

3/4” threaded rods with nuts and washers are threaded through 1.5 inch cyclone fence tube, & hold the metal frame to the wood base, and to the rails which mount & stabilize the bed. This is also used to hold a jack shaft support tube.

It has three speeds, calculated from the motor speed to be about 430, 277, & 139 RPM. It only has a 2 inch pulley on the motor and it could use a larger one as the speeds are rather slow.
 
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