My wife's weblog has a weekly post with great deals on Amazon, provided by two friends of ours who work there. Today her posting includes a good price on a Porter Cable Sander of Infinite Wisdom and Joyous Wonder. It meets all my ROS sander requirements and is well reviewed. It also ships for free. If you're in need, pick one up. You'll thank me for it.
(I haven't price checked it against Home Depot etc though; it's possible you might find a better price elsewhere)
The good folks at Feedburner are troubleshooting the missing newlines in the new feed. Thanks for your patience!
I've just converted this site's syndication to a Feedburner-managed smartfeed. I'm now going to explain why you should care, for different levels of geekiness. Read until it stops making sense or you stop caring:
Level 1: Nothing has changed about the web page. Keep reading at www.nothingseveredyet.com. Nothing to see here. We don't need no water.
Level 2: There's this cool way you can keep up on all the blogs you read. You use a newsreader, like Bloglines, which grabs the latest posts from this and other blogs, and puts them all on one handy webpage. I don't get Google ad revenue since you're not visiting my page, but that's OK, 'cause you're my BOY and I LOVE you. Anyway, I am using this thing called Feedburner which makes it all work better. Try it, you'll like it.
Level 3: I changed my syndication format. Let me know (dan -at- danshapiro -dot- com) if you have any problems reading it. It will probably reset you "unread items" count--sorry about that. Please take this moment to verify that your reader is pointing to www.danshapiro.com/blog/index.xml to take advantage of it (and simplify my statistics tracking).
Level 3.14159: index.xml, atom.xml, and index.rdf are all being redirected to http://feeds.feedburner.com/NothingSeveredYet. This is a "smartfeed" that will automatically convert itself to RSS, atom, or whatever format your reader requires. It also lets me aggregate my site statistics so I can see how many readers I have on my feed, thereby feeding my monstrous, out-of-control ego. Please don't point your reader directly at the Feedburner URL. If things don't work out with the good boys at feedburner, I'll just turn off redirection and it should automatically revert to the old method (and reset your unread items again--sorry 'bout that). Should you point to the feedburner URL directly, your feed will break completely if I disable it.
(Yes, I watched Eurotrip, Old School, and Clue while convalescing. Sometimes you just need to give your brain a break. No, I'm not still on vicodin.)
I'm back, typing slowly with a giant bandage on my finger. If you're curious (and haven't had anything to eat recently), check the extended entry for the very gory details on exactly what happened. I recommend against it.
So I spent a lot of time investigating joinery methods for the coffee table and forthcoming dining room table. The challenge is basically this: what is the best way to glue up multiple hardwood boards to make a nice flat tabletop?
Here's what's at stake:
Strength: Elmer's white glue is not what you want here. Solid, strong joinery is easy and necessary.
Ease of use: How long it takes you to work out enough kinks that you can do it reliably, and how fast it is once you've got the knack of it.
Cost: Both up-front (e.g. biscuit joiner) and recurring (e.g. biscuits).
Invisibility: You want the seams between the boards to be invisible; if you do a good job of matching grains (and/or buy lumber that's well matched from the same tree) it can look like one big beautiful panel.
Probability of causing you to bash open your fingernail: I just made this one up.
Alignment: Some systems tend to pull your boards into perfect alignment. Some tend to produce lovely walnut ant stairs. This is the biggest concern of them all: if your alignment is off, you get to spend hours sanding, are likely to wind up with a wavy surface, and/or have to knock down the top and bottom until it's flat again, making the slab thinner than you wanted (and paid for).
And now the contenders:
Straight up glue joints
As you may know, wood glue joints are typically stronger than the wood itself. So why bother strengthening the joint? Isn't plain glue strong enough? My theory is: well, yes and no. Think about your KD8% S2S1E lumber for a moment back in its original state--as a piece of a tree. Now think about where the edges of that board are--they're either near the very center or the very edge... the two places where the wood is weakest. Cutting lumber is like trimming a turkey, and you some times get bits of bone in the meat and vice versa. On top of that, the edge is where the most radical moisture changes occur, further weakening the board. Net-net is that the weakest part of the board is near the edge. So while the glue joint is plenty strong, you'll find that the weakest part is immedately adjacent to the glue joint--you'll notice the wood fracture a few millimeters from the glue line. While it's nice to know your glue didn't fail, it's small compensation when your table is sitting on the floor in two pieces. So the point of a strong joint isn't actually the joint, but rather the areas near the joint.
In any case, the strength of a glue-only joint should be sufficient, even if you don't get any additional reinforcement for the surrounding areas. If you do it right, cost is minimal, and it's invisible as anything.
Time-wise, you're going to spend longer on the glueup phase running around trying to get everything aligned. Which brings us to the biggest problem: it's hard to get a bunch of slightly-curved boards lined up right, producing the antstep scenario. It took me many, many tries to get alignment within an eighth of an inch, and that's bad. It cost me lots of extra time sanding and my surface was wavier and thinner as a result. Verdict: ok, but go for something better.
Biscuits
Aka plates, aka lamellos. Strength-wise, biscuits are great. They're highly engineer compressed disclets of wood fibery goodness specifically designed to strengthen your joints. Plus, when you put them in, they swell up (insert bad joke about biscuits making people swell up too) to lock everything in place, which is cool.
As far as ease-of-use, they're not bad, as long as you use one simple trick. Instead of using the fence that comes with the jointer, set the board and the jointer down on a flat surface and they will naturally be parallel. This gives much better results than the fence, which is tricky to get perfectly square.
Invisibility is usually good, but you can wind up having the biscuit swell such that its outline shows in the surface of the wood. Sanding will fix this of course.
Biscuit joiners and biscuits are a nontrivial cost; that's a major downside for many people considering them.
Alignment is the trick here. I found that the swelling effect of the biscuits can cause your boards to go pretty significantly out of alignment if you don't act fast during glueup. Rushing and woodworking not being my favorite combination, I'm saving biscuits for picture frames and other tasks that require them.
Dowels
Strength: like biscuits, A+. Good little hardwood chunks with the grain running perpendicular to the board's grain. Some small degree of swelling too, which adds strength.
Ease of use: With the right jig, superfast snap.
Cost: Depends on you jig, but can be very high. Be sure to use dowels designed for the purpose; the ridged edges allow glue to squeeze out.
Invisibility: Great.
Alignment: Wow, amazing. With the studly jig I used (the aforementioned Very Expensive one, borrowed from a friend) it was dead on every time with virtually no effort. I'm a convert on this point, the most important one to me.
Splines:
Forget this, my finger hurts. Search the archive for my thoughts on splines.
The bottom line: The Dowelmax rocked my world. Save the money; don't buy a biscuit joiner. Instead buy the good stuff. It's awesome, it's easy, it's effective. You'll thank me for it.
(OUCH MY HAND HURTS!
Major medical gross-out alert. Skip if you're squeamish... for a very broad definition of squeamish.
I smashed my hand two weeks ago and lacerated the nail bed. It happened when a crescent wrench slipped off the clamp I was tightening and my hand slammed into another nearby clamp. My internist gave me painkillers and told me it'd resolve itself. After a few days the tip of my finger was swollen to twice it's normal size, so I went back in. He said it was infected and prescribed an antibiotic, and then referred me to a hand surgeon.
The hand surgeon said that it wasn't infected, but he had to relieve the giant swelling sac of blood that was causing the tip of my finger to swell up. He injected several pints of anesthetic into the base of the finger--more than I possibly thought could have fit in there--and then mooshed around the bubble of fiery-hot pain until some of it had squirted back out the needle hole and the rest had started to go to work on the finger in question. Then he sent me in for xrays, which were thankfully negative.
He proceeded to, without warning, stab a sharp forceps type thingy under the nail, causing a gusher of blood (and who knows, probably some of that leftover anesthetic that mooshed its way up the finger) all over the table. My fingertip deflated as I watched in horror. The, again without warning, he grabbed the nail with his cute little pliers and pulled it off, ripping it out from under the cuticle.
He played around with it for a bit, and I kept prompting him to tell me what he was doing. Why did you pull the nail? So I could stitch the nailbed. Why did you have to do that? Otherwise the nail will grow back in looking all nasty; the nailbed is the template for the nail. Do I have to get the stitches out? No, they're dissolving.
OK, he says, now I'm going to put the nail back on. Hm, where is it? He lost it. I had no idea we'd be needing it again or I would have offered to hold on to it for him. After a minute of searching (including, I am not making this up, LOOKING ON THE FLOOR FOR IT) he noticed it stuck to a piece of used bloody gauze. He cleaned it off, shoved it back in the finger, wiggled it around a little, and started sewing it back on. Let me tell you, needle doesn't go through nail easily, and my whole hand was jerking around. Five giant loopy sutures right through the nail and the cuticle. I stared in horror.
He wrapped up my finger and told me to "change the dressing in a few days". My terrific wife (who was with me through the whole ordeal) asked him if he was going to give us some gauze or something to change it with and he looked at her like she was from mars. Evidently they carry all the goods at drugstores, but I didn't know that. I asked him what symptoms should cause me to
call him back and he told me what to look for. Then he scheduled an appointment to take the stitches out.
Well, the dressing appeared welded to the wound, and it took me till Sunday to figure out how to change the thing (five days). When I did (soaked in it warm water for two hours) it had nasty yellow globules all around the edge. So I called around to try to find a more patient-friendly hand surgeon, failed, and went to see him at 2:00 today.
He immediately whipped out a suture/desuture kit and I had to stop him to find out what he had planned. Long story short ("Too late!") he pulled the stitches, removed the nail, washed the nailbed off, SWABBED IT DRY, and shoved the nail back in. Do you know how much it hurts to have someone roughly swab the bed of your exposed fingernail with a gauze pad? I let out a yell and literally yanked my hand away from him. Fortunately, he did not misplace any significant detached segments of my anatomy this time.
When I emerged from the office the nurses had a sticker and a lollipop for me, plus they were laughing their asses off. I am wearing my sticker now, but holy **** my hand is in pain.
If anyone gets this far, I hope this has served some useful purpose... maybe "at least my day wasn't as bad as Dan's is turning out to be".
Ouch,
--dan)
I was working on our dining room table a few days ago. The table top is made from a glueup, and the whole design is similar to the coffee table and is designed to match it, except in 5/4 stock, 40"x78" big. I was tightening the pipe clamps to draw together the glueup and it was sticking a bit, so I grabbed a big crescent wrench to get some more leverage. As I was tightening it, the wrench slipped off and my fingernail slammed into the neighboring pipe clamp.
As if the hellacious pain wasn't enough, the glue was drying, so I had to finish tightening the other six clamps before I could haul my butt to the doctor's office. To give you some idea how bad this was, when I asked the doctor if I was going to lose the nail, he laughed at me. So I spent the whole weekend taking Vicodin and playing Baldur's Gate (fortunately the ring finger isn't used on the xbox controller). Tomorrow I'm seeing a hand specialist, and the good doctor said something about "drill", so I'm not expecting it to be a pleasant visit.
So the big moral of the story is that you need to be every bit as careful with hand tools as you do with power tools. I can't believe I did all this damage to my hand with a crescent wrench!
(my last entry seems to have conclusively demonstrated that nobody reads the extended entries...)
It arrived yesterday. Here's my thoughts, in chronological order, on the matter.
Wed, 2:21 pm
Mark came over and handed me the magical package. Woohoo!
Wed, 2:21:03 pm
Package open. Hm, the printing on the side of the blade (FORRESTER 40 tooth... etc) is all blurry. For $100, you'd think they could get it printed decently. Oh well, it'll all be rubbed of shortly anyway. Damn, those carbide tips are HUGE.
Wed, 2:23 pm
Hm. It appears they coated the blade with grease. Guess these pants just moved from the "office clothes" pile to the "woodworking clothes" pile. On the plus side, they included a handy booklet on tuning up your table saw. On the minus side, the booklet is now see-through. Did I mention the grease?
Wed, 8:24 pm
Just got home, slapped on the blade, and fired it up. Wow, it's quiet! Much less rattle/scrape than other blades I've used.
Wed, 8:35 pm
Oh, sweet walnut, parts like butter before my WWII.
Wed, 8:38 pm
Hm. The cut isn't quite as clean as I expected. My previous blade (an 80-tooth freud) left a mirror-smooth finish; this one leaves tiny scratches, about 1-2mm spaced, across the entire surface. I guess that's what you get for fewer teeth, and it is probably good enough for a glue-line, but it's not quite as pretty as the last one.
After a few more hours of ripping 5/4 walnut with this blade, I'm happy to say that it's delightful and a joy to use, although not quite as miraculous as I had expected.
(I like to give to my readers. First one to click here gets a free gmail account!)
(Part I is here)
So we luckily show up right around repricing time, and my buddy finds what looks like a great deal on a longbed 8" jointer. This normally sells for about $800 and is marked down to $500.
Now the good news is that the white tags on each items not only list the price, but also a laundry-list of defects. Basically, the techs go over each item with a fine-toothed comb before the event and list exactly what's wrong with it. They'll tell you if the motor's dead (or untested), if there's excessive runout in a drill, if the table is out of true, and anything else. This is very helpful.
But woe betide the one who doesn't inspect it adequately first, or who doesn't read the description carefully! After finally getting the jointer home (and me helping him unload all 600 lbs of it), my friend discovered that it had no blades, no pulley, and that the "cracked base" that the description mentioned referred not to the sheet-metal stand, but rather the actual cast-iron jointer base. Since Grizzly sells all parts for all items, this wasn't a showstopper, but it did add about $200 back to the cost of the jointer--making it a bit less of a bargain.
If this all sounds pretty depressing, he did come out ahead: he picked up a cosmetically-dinged Incra router fence for just $150, a pretty sweet deal. I have one of these too incidentally; that'll be the subject of another post.
I came out gaining nothing but wisdom, but maybe I'll try for a deal on a drum sander next year. If you do decide to hit the tent sale, prepare by printing out the parts diagrams of any machine you're interested in (they're all available online) and do a thorough checkout before you buy. You'll thank me for it.
(I did pick up some tung oil and a pair of tweezers with a magnifying glass attached, but that was from their regular store, so I don't think it counts.)
(Part II is here)
A couple of weeks ago a friend and I decided to check out the Grizzly tent sale. We live in the Redmond, about an hour and a half south of Grizzly's HQ, so this was a bit of an undertaking. We took Scott's wife's pickup and plotted our plan of attack in the car. Scott was shopping for a studly new 8" jointer, so I brought catalogs from Sunhill and others for price comparison. I didn't have anything on my must-buy list, although I'm keeping an eye open for a bargain to replace my old Grizzly tablesaw.
A moment's intermission: for those unaware, Grizzly is low-price tool importer. They're one of the best importing Chinese machinery; they usually use american-made motors, and have their own engineers do quality-assurance. While the quality isn't quite what you'll find from an American-made tool, it's not bad and a heck of a lot cheaper.
So the tent sale is their chance to unload the planer that rusted on the way from Shanghai, the tablesaw that has minor bloodstains from the troublesome Safety-Shield demo, and everything else that can't be sold through normal channels. The good news is that the prices are crazy-low. The bad news is that there's a lot of junk to sort through, and most of the good stuff goes in the first 15 minutes.
Yes, you heard me right. Brave souls line up at 8 in the morning, even camping out the night before, and charge in first thing in a fit of scavenging fury. They burst forth with literally tons of machinery, and the checkout/loading line can take an hour or more.
We got there at 10:00, inadvertently discovering a neat trick. If someone tears off the tag from a machine but doesn't pay for it, after two hours, it gets re-tagged and you can buy it again. So while we missed the first round of deals, we did get first crack at all the re-tagged merchandise. As a rule of thumb, if you can't be there at 8:00, be there at 10:00 (or 3:00 when they'll haggle over what's left).
More on the trip coming shortly...
(Unfortunately, it's tough to know if a given tool is really American-made. For example, Delta and Jet both import some of their tools. Some of the very high-end guys like (I belive) Oliver don't, but then again, their smallest jointer is 10"! Not exactly in the casual woodworker's price range.)
Woohoo! I've got a Forrest Woodworker II on the way. A co-worker wanted to use my shop for a couple of days to build some stuff for his boat. He agreed to hook me up with one of these guys in payment. According to the reviews (all 63 of them!) this is *the* best blade for just about any woodworking task. I'll report back as soon as I start using it (next project: dining room table).
(I'm curious about it's claims to be great on plywood too--usually sheet goods blades are 60+ tooth)