and I didn't even get a couple of adirondack chairs built! It started out as a simple, fun project. I salvaged 10 or so 4x8x8 redwood beams from a remodel job last winter and finally decided it was time to make something from them. Armed with some of drawings, I hit the shop Monday to start resawing... After trying to unsuccessfully maneuver those beams around, I decided it was time to stop and clean up things a little...... One thing soon led to another, and by Friday the shop had undergone a full restoration. It took two trips into the big city over two days and spanned at least half a dozen tool stores. . Everything got cleaned, tuned up, re-arranged, re-arranged again, organized and reorganized. All the screws, nails, and errant hardware now resides in a couple of pick racks from Harbor Freight. The new 718 now sports a Forrest Chopmaster and the old Rockwell "Contractor's Special" now has had a complete tune up with a Super Bar and sports a WWII. The band saw has a new 3tpi hook tooth, the jointer has new knives as well as the planer. The mortising machine got all the chisels sharpened. I also added 20ft. of 2.5" flex pipe to the dust collector and picked up some shop vac attachments to clean the place up. Start Saturday morning.... went out there first thing to rough out all the pieces for the chairs. What a joy it is to work in a clean, organized shop with tuned up tools and sharp blades all around! (It'll probably will be the last time until next year!) I made all the templates, cut all the parts and routed them in what seemed like record time. The Forrest blades, so far, have been an absolute pleasure to use. That old table saw has never cut things so smoothly. Cleaning up was almost fun (did I say almost?) with the shop vac attachments for the DC too. The one thing I was not looking forward too was sanding all those parts. As much as I'd like a drum sander, it's just not in the cards (yet). So today, I built a downdraft table. Just a 18"x30" box with a bottom that slopes from near the top to the bottom where I cut a 4" hole to attach the DC, and a piece of scrap pegboard for the top. Works really good, no dust could be seen in the lights after sanding all 100 or so parts. One bad thing though, it whistles annoyingly throught the holes in the pegboard . Oh well, that's another day. Christmas vacation is over after tomorrow, and I have some chairs to assemble! --dave
- posted
18 years ago