Another Friday is here so what R U Doing this weekend ?

If a grandparent is willing hopefully take my wife out on a date tonight, and this weekend i'm hopeing to get started on the router table now that the babys room has the light installed.
 
Yeah the lousy weather means we gave up our plans for going to the beach today. :( So instead were abandoning our kids (hey, give them a movie and some frozen pizza in the oven and they're happy) and getting out for a real date night tonight.

Tomorrow, I'm off to the u-haul dealer to buy a hitch for our van. (keep me in your thoughts, last time I went to the uhaul dealer for a hitch, this happened. :eek: Well my wife is coming this time, so we'll have an extra set of eyes.)

And hopefully I can make good progress on finishing the chair rail that is going into our kitchen nook. Last weekend was clean, patch, prime and 3 coats of paint on the walls, and two coats on the wainscotting. The chair rail and baseboard remain. Though the baseboard will wait until we do the whole floor. Oh yeah, put up the new kitchen blinds also.

So most of my shop time will be DIY-house time, and not "pure" woodworking. Still got a nightstand to finish and a fishtank stand to build.
 
Its been so hot and humid up here for the past 4 or 5 days that I don't really have the desire to do anything. Ive had to run my room air conditioner for a total of 8 days so far this summer. :eek:
Probably a few cook-outs for family and hopefully some shop time. I've been working on replacing my exterior window trim all summer. What a chore.

cook-out = BBQ for you non yankees:rofl::rofl:
 
I'll be working on the never-ending Viking furniture project with my BIL. He's coming over Saturday and spending the night, so we can work both days. Oh joy. :rolleyes: Just kill me now. Please.

I also need to fit a one-piece oak entertainment center into our guest bedroom. In order to get it through the door, I first need to make it into two pieces, then come up with a way to put it back together. It's made with oak ply and solid oak, with brads and glue holding it together. No screws. I will be literally cutting it in half. I'll end up with upper and lower sections, but I think I have a workable way figured out to put the two halves back together.

And in my spare time I'm working on some website things for a friend. I'm learning that online stores are not quite as easy to set up as they seem.
 
What are you doing - outfitting all of medieval Norway with chairs?...

Pretty much. Lemme see...one storage chest, eight 3-legged stools, four 4-legged benches (with one more to make, I believe), and five tables ranging from 4' to 8' long. His re-enactment group recently lost a member (they kicked him out...long story), and he owned much of the furniture they had been using. So I'm scrambling to get a bunch of it remade in time for a big event next month. (Danish Days in Solvang CA, and the Viking Encampment is one of the centerpieces of the event.) I'm nearly done with my part of the project, but my BIL still has a lot of embellishment to do. He uses a Rotozip to "carve" designs on some of the pieces...stuff like this bed we made about three years ago:

DSC_0661 800.jpg
 
I'm not sure I should say, because last weekend, I ended up spending most of it in bed on a hot water bottle, and it spilled over into the first 2 days of the work week. Still don't know what I did, but I've never had a pain that would drop me to my knees before. But the wonder of modern medicine has me at least up and around, though not normal.
If possible, I'd like to go get a new pair of walking shoes and retire my current ones to shop and yard duty, and throw away the shop/yard shoes. I'd like to also put the vapor barrier up in the finishing room so that I can beg enough money for a few sheets of OSB to get that room finished off. Guess we'll see what the LOML has planned for me instead! :D Jim.
 
Just finished helping my dad put together a new white tool....he'll have to fill you all in...

Shop time tomorrow, need to finish up some oak bowls.
 
Dad had this Saturday off so I went down to help out. Sometimes it takes two of us little fellers to get things done so he kinda keeps a list of stuff to do when I visit.

He has his dad's Delta jointer, bought new before I was born. I helped him put a "new" set of knives in; the extra set of knives were bought the same time the jointer was :thumb:. We used a method that I read about from Steve Clardy IIRC; a piece of plate glass with rare earth magnets along the edge to hold the the knife while you tighten them in (one at t time of course). The magnets sit on top and the knife is pulled from below and hits the glass for alignment. Worked great.

We then did some tuning on his DW735 tables to cure some snipe. Once that was done we grabbed some scrap and went through the process of turning rough lumber into stock so he could practice a bit. He recently bought a lathe and its up to me to see that he doesn't get dizzy from all that spinning and forget everything he's learned about flatwork :rofl:.

He and mom and I went out for breakfast AND lunch and had a nice visit in and out of the shop.
 
Hey Glenn, I think I understand what you mean by Steve's method, but would you provide some "staged" pictures of the process? Were the magnets strong enough to counter the natural tendency of the tightening process to move the knives, or did you just figure that in the procedure somehow? Did you just lay the float glass down on the outfeed table and let it hang over the cutterhead or did you secure it somehow?
 
Hi Bill, I did a search for Steve and this method and didn't find it. My apologies to Steve if I mis-remembered and to All for not taking pics of the process while in San Diego at dads.

We figure at my dad's rate of use, he may not change knives until 2012 so we knew we didn't need to make anything permanent (although we talked about it, that's just how we are :rolleyes:). Anyway, here's what I did (remember this was my first time doing anything other than reading about this so don't beat me up too bad . . .

- I dropped a knife into the head all the way.
- I set the outfeed table to a height well above this but below what would be a maximum height that I wanted to secure the knife.
- With a knife and the gib in place, I tighten the screws to where the knife is tight enough to stay where I put it, but loose enough to move around with my fingers
- I took a piece of 1/4" glass that was wide enough to span the knives and long enough to set well onto the outfeed table.
- I taped three 3/4" magnets so that they were near the edge of the glass that would protrude past the outfeed table and over the TDC of the head. It can't protrude too far or you can't reach the gib screws.
- I set a few other magnets at the rear of the glass to hold it in place on the outfeed table.
- I loosened the screws a smidgen and the magnets draw the knife up to the glass with a satisfying 'tick' sound.
- I tighten the screws very gently while applying a slight pressure on the glass with my free hand. This seems to have solved the small movement of the knives whilst tightening.
- I continue this tightening until I get to the final pressure I am after.

I did the same procedure with the other two knives and all three ended up even with the outfeed to a degree beyond what my digital gauge would read. I believe there was a large volume of beginners luck involved. I have spent 4 times as much effort aligning a newer Delta jointer that used guide pins on the knives and should have been almost automatic . . . it wasn't. I did not use the glass method on that one but, used a gauge only. Very frustrating.

P.s. did I mention that I LOVE my carbide insert head.
 
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About 11:00 on Saturday I decided to take a long ride on my Suzuki 500. The general idea was to do THIS RIDE in reverse. I spent some time calling 3 or 4 different guys to see if they wanted to come, but no dice. I got most of my stuff together, then ... oops ... had to take 11 books back to the city library before they "went overdue".

I finally took off at 1:11. Everything went as expected, until I got to point 5 on the map of the 2005 trip above. That's where I decided to take a detour up Hwy 87 and beyond. I ended up doing 290 miles total, and now I can mark off a couple of "new" roads on my Utah state map.

I filled up in Duchesne on my way home. Don't ask me how, but my 10-year-old bike with 40,000 miles is now getting its best mileage ever. (73 mpg? Incredible!)

I got home about 7:45, took a shower, and then took my wife on one of our "separate togetherness" dates at the bookstore. :rolleyes:

PS - The "contraption" that the horses aren't standing under in my previous trip pics isn't there anymore - all that's left is a set of concrete blocks in the ground.
 
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