wood – Twisted and Delusional

Spring is starting 2…..

After years of trying various lighting and humidity profiles to grow my coffee plants, I think I may have got close to the right conditions. I know this because not only are they growing well, but they have flowers..

They seem to be happy, and they are pretty little flowers…

I spent last Saturday moving the greenhouse from my backyard up to the property on the hill by the shed (due to the asshole behind me planting a bunch of trees to block my sun for growing things) . The greenhouse was in shade almost all day long and was useless where it was, so best to put it somewhere it can be useful.

I put it in the middle of all that tall grass, the thought being that there must be plenty of light to grow things there. 😉

I’ve already put my Tayberries in there. Herd to believe these were just bare sticks from Trees of Antiquity just a month or so ago. They love the light and already have buds for flowers…

I put my blueberry plants on the other side of the greenhouse, they have a ton of flowers on them and I’m hoping I will get to enjoy the berries this year instead of feeding the grasshoppers like last year.

Speaking of things that are budding and flowering, the Medlar tree has more buds on it and they are getting closer to flowering. Last week they were closed tight at the top, this week they are larger and just starting to unfurl the outer leaves/petals.

Last but not least, this Saturday I made a stand for the new oven. It was WAY too tall sitting on the table I made. I couldn’t get my coffee maker on the top and there is no way I’m going to put up with that. I wanted the top down low enough that I could use a pan on it comfortably like I would at my regular cook top. This is what I came up with.

Much more usable now. I just need to run it a few more times to double check the heat levels on the things around it. Every weekend I’m up there things get a little more refined for ease of use, and every weekend I’m up there it gets harder to come back to town.

As if I didn’t have enough projects…..

Actually, can you ever have enough projects? I’m leaning toward ‘no’. If there was a smiley emoticon in this editor I would put one here.. 😉

Soooo, yeah… I’m working on a Pietenpol Air Camper. A simple, open cockpit, 2 seat, Model A Powered, airplane. Did I mention the original Piet is dated 1929? There’s a thing for 1929 in my life for some reason. Both my Dodge and my Ford are ’29’s, and my plane was designed in that year. Kinda cool. Here’s the general layout for the Pietenpol Air Camper….

I’m starting with the tail since it is kinda straight forward to build and is one of the cheapest parts to build. Therefore, if I’m incapable of this simple bit of woodwork then I don’t need to invest in the rest of the plane. I’m smart that way……

I started out with laying out the vertical fin in full size on a piece of board and then putting in blocks to hold the structure as I build…

I even used a square to be sure I have something close to a 90 degree angle. Next was to profile several of the wood pieces using a router table. I worked for a short time doing pre-builds for a staircase company, so I’m not a complete stranger to woodwork. I had never used a router table before, just a regular plunge router. I’m finding out that I am not a fan of the router table. Something about the 10,000+ RPM blades of death looking at me while whirling at break neck speed is disconcerting. Never the less, I routed the pieces and put them in the jig to see what I had…..

Looks like it will work. I made a couple cuts, did a little sanding, and this evening epoxied the first few joints on the vertical. I’m not totally proud of the joints, but they will work since there is plenty of gusseting around the structure before it is done….

I will also make a test piece for every batch of epoxy. This will be a destructive test piece to make sure that the epoxy mixed properly and cured successfully. This is test piece number one (TP1). If the wood fails and the glue joint stays intact then it will be a good part. If the glue gives way on the test part instead of the wood, then I will need to reassess things.

I’ll update after the epoxy has had full cure time.

New toy….. I mean tool…..

I’m still trying to figure out which it is. Maybe it’s both… a grown-up toy that’s a cool tool. I have to admit I was pretty excited when the delivery guy pulled up out front and rolled up the door on the trailer. I took the day off just to make sure I was there. We got it off the truck and stashed it in the garage and that is when I realized…

That this is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. Yeah, 4 feet long and over 2 feet on the other dimensions. Crap…..I don’t have any room for something this big. Hmm, maybe it’s all packing space and foam to insure the trip from China is a good one.

Nope, it’s all machine. One big, fat , awe inspiring 50 watt cnc laser cutter/engraver. So, I guess there is only one thing I can do…. re-arrange the garage and make room to squeeze it in. It fit in it’s new spot but barely. No pictures of it’s area until I make a decent stand for it, right now it’s on cinder blocks and portions of the packing crate. There is some redneck in the blood somewhere, at least it’s not my house on blocks. 😉

Of course it couldn’t be smooth sailing and laser light shows. Being a chinese product from mainland China I gave it a serious and thorough once over to make sure everything looked like it was in generally the right place. As soon as I plugged it in to the socket something cooked and the breaker to the garage popped. Not good. Turned out the culprit was the primary power supply for the electronics, not any of the expensive laser stuff yet.

Mmmm…. Toasty. Well, it gave me a good chance to see if the 3 year warranty was worth it. The people I had to talk with were in Hong Taiwan or something like that, so all correspondence was answered at 3 in the morning. They are paying for the replacement part and some time to do the work. Check is in the mail they say. We will see if it shows up. In the mean time, I needed to get this thing working, so a new power supply went in , got wired up, and turned on. All checked out, the laser powered up and smoked holes through some popsicle sticks I had laying around so it was time to try something. The very first attempt to cut a file turned out like this….

I’d say that was a success. Mom’s favorite embroidery file and a little text engraved, a square cut out to finish. The one thats right side up in the pic is actually in the hole it was cut from. The laser cuts a very very fine line.

One was cut from 1/16″ ply and the other from 1/8″ ply. The engraving in the 1/16th” ply went almost all the way through, leaving a thin layer about the thickness of a half sheet of paper. It looks kinda cool if you backlight it.

Each of those took under a minute to cut. It’s a lot quicker than using my cnc mills to do this kind of work. This last pic is a piece I just cut, a little over 10″ from top to bottom. Took about 2 minutes to cut and I’m really liking this machine.

Yes, I’m still here…..

The Labor Day 3-day weekend finally gave me the opportunity to get some things done that I have been wanting to do. I still have a big project for work that needs to get done (turning a discarded airplane into a usable flight simulator) but that went on hold so I could get some things of my own accomplished.

First things first, on Saturday noon I went and looked at a couple pieces of property. There ware some parcels with definite possibility, but I’m waiting to look at another property that caught my eye also. All of these were 40 acres or larger and I’m beginning to think that I may be happier with the extra room that 40 acres has. More of a ‘buffer’ between me and other people and I can let friends ‘camp’ out occasionally if they want and not feel like they are too close to the house. Not to mention more room to hide small outbuildings for various hobbies. lol.

One of the things I have been keeping my eye out for is a small wood burning heat stove in case I ever do get property. I bought a wood/coal cook stove/oven project last year and it is well under way on it’s overhaul. The cook stove is a 1920’s Wedgewood and was in deplorable shape. Barely any of the original color was left on it but the cast iron cooking surface and the oven door were in amazing shape. I’ll make a separate post about that oven in a few days, but I still didn’t have a wood heater. Saturday morning before going to look at property I took a look at Harbor Freight to check prices on the little cast iron box-heater I had been keeping my eye on. I was waiting for it to go on sale since I had one of the 20% coupons they put out about once a month to really save some cash and I had to drive to at least Gilroy to get one since they can’t be sold in the Central Valley (F* the air quality a**holes). As it turns out, Harbor Freight doesn’t seem to carry the wood burning stoves anymore so I was starting to get unhappy and decided to check Craigslist for anything local from a private seller. The third ad down the page after a ‘wood stove’ search turned up a buy I just couldn’t pass up. In the picture was a beautiful little free standing Wedgewood heater, and the person was asking only $50!! I scrutinized the pics he had on the ad looking for a reason it was so under-priced, but this heater looked like it was off a factory showroom. Needless to say I made a call, got directions to see it, and then went and picked up my dad on the way to the sellers house. When we got there the seller was really nice. Seems the stove was more of a furniture piece than heater and had barely been used. It had been moved to the garage since his girlfriend was redoing the house and he wanted the space to park his truck again. I gave it a quick look over and promptly handed the guy $50, I wasn’t even going to haggle on it since the original enamel was all pristine except where they had set things on the upper grates and the mica windows were broke out. Dad and I loaded it up and celebrated all the way home.

As usual you can click on the pics for a bigger version. Overall, I think I like this a LOT better than a little black cast iron stove. Oh, and the mica to make new windows shipped out today, another $50 but well worth it.

Weekend projects

This will be short, but I just had to throw it on the blog.

First off, I did a little rework on the small cnc machine I keep in the third bedroom/office area. I built this one to do small parts inside without having to go out in the garage and fire up the monster cnc converted mill out there. That thing eats energy at a prodigious rate and most things I make are smaller. Anyway, I built in a new circuit in my home made controller board and added automated Z axis part height. Everyone out there can roll their eyes at the geekiness but it saves me a TON of setup work that I had to do before. Here’s a pic of the machine, built from the cabinet up from parts I had laying around.

It’s kinda Frankenstein, but it works great. This pic is after the mods and a test pattern run to check performance. The pattern was a simple DXF file of a chicken I had laying around and had Mach3 do a quick convert on. The results were really nice though, ‘specially after I ran some stain in the cuts and sanded the top down.

I had a scrap of oak to run the file on. It looks good, so I may have to cut it down and route the edge to clean up the block and give it to mom.

If my friend at ThisRusticSoul.com sees this and ever gets her blog up then maybe you will see some of the work she does. LOL!

A new table project

A few years back I picked up a couple of old treadle sewing machine bases. I think it’s time to start a project with one. My friend who is starting a blog (i think, lol) over at ThisRusticSoul.com should love this idea. They both need some love and attention with the usual various broken brackets and rust issues. One needs a lot more work to restore than the other, so that is the one I will start with ;)-

By the way, those of you who have known me probably recognize the garage (shop) in the pics. It feels soooooo gooood to be finally working out there again and making stuff. Maybe my slump into inactivity is finally over. So, there is the treadle I plan on making into a little side table. Lets take a look at it problems, I’ll show the fixes in follow up posts.

The first and most prominent issue is the wheel broken off of the bottom corner. These treadle bases have little wheels in the corners of the base and this one was abused and the whole wheel and bracket is missing so it doesn’t sit flat. I’m gonna have to build a whole new bracket assembly and wheel to make this right. Time to order a chunk of mild steel.

There is a small break on the back casting that holds the sides upright. You can see the break where I mis-aligned the break just under the bolt tab. This should be a good candidate for brazing the joint, basically like soldering it back together with another metal. I havent brazed cast iron on treadles yet, so I’m curious to see how good or bad the quality of iron is in these castings. Once again, I’ll post later with the fix.

Looks like I have a lot of age and dust to clean up. I can’t wait to see this stuff all cleaned and refreshed without all the crud burying the surfaces. In the meantime, lets start the work on the top of this table. I want an old look to the top, which means I can’t just leave it as a plain flat top. I want oak for the look, since a lot of oak was used around the turn of the last century, and I kinda want an old ‘school desk’ look. So, lets get started.

Here we have 3 nice planks of 3/4″ thick oak. I spent a little time looking at grain and coloration when I went to get the wood. It has a nice open pattern and the coloration is a decent red in most of it. Now I need to fasten them together to form a top.

Three strips of oak to tie them together. The outside strips fit just inside the sides of the treadle, making a good snug fit. It left some marks on the oak as I did trial fits to make sure the runners were where I wanted them . I glued the runners before doing the final tightening on the screws, so it should all stay nice and solid.

Now it’s time to flip it back over and knock the rough spots down and make the top surface nice. There are slight variations in the wood surfaces where they meet, so I want them to blend smoothly and take out any small imperfections in the boards at the same time. Once thats done it time to add some ‘charm’ to the top.

To add charm, I’m going to use some more oak, glue, and a brad nailer. I want to run a small rail around three of the sides like I have seen on many old jewlers benches and other work tops. I like the idea because it keeps small things from falling off the table, contains small spills, and overall looks better than just slapping a plank on top of a treadle and proclaiming it a table.

I cant just slap on a couple pieces of wood and call it done either, so over to the bandsaw I go. I want the outside corners of the table to be rounded off nicely. So I rough cut the shape with the bandsaw and then go over to the belt sander to finish it off. One both sides are done I can put them on.

Now we are getting somewhere…. just in time for me to stop. I was hungry and the temp/humidity was getting to my comfy point so I quit there for the day.

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