What Did You Get for Christmas?

[shoozleboy]

It's good therapy for me (stress reduction).

Funny, sometimes I find it to cause me MORE stress??

My last big project was building 10 6-foot tall by 28-inch wide bookcases to line the walls of the room we dedicated to being a library. I had closed off the opening to the room with a wall that was ceiling-to-floor bookshelves, with a door in the center of the wall. The other side of the wall was drywall. I used pine as well for all of it. I would have liked to use premium black walnut, but then that room would have cost more than the house

Sounds like a nice library! I imagine that you enter the room through the bookshelves now? Nice!

Besides, I'm not good enough at it to work in walnut without a lot of waste, and that would be a damn shame with such a fine wood. Pine is easier, and with good stain and polyurethane, it looks pretty good

That's been my motto - cheaper wood, easier to work with and if you mess up a piece, you don't go broke with replacing it! I did the ceiling of my family room with 1x6 T&G southern yellow pine, very grainy and the color is beautiful for the room - country styling and feel to it, so it fit right in. The trim is all white pine with a light stain and poly on it... it almost looks like a clean maple wood - many have thought it was, the keen woodworker's eye has been able to tell it's pine, but 99% of the family and friends all think it's maple.

I have a 60' silver maple in the back yard that is going to get cut down as soon as I can find a mill that will mill the trunks for me - about 5 sprouts at least 20 foot tall and maybe 18 to 22 inches in diameter - lots of maple there for wood projects!

[shoozleboy]

I don't have the facilities to work with wood (yet), but I just find looking at it hypnotic. I often call into the local DIY warehouse just to walk through the isles of wood and to feel and get the aroma of the pieces, and imagine the things I'd like to make with it. I suppose it's one of the reasons why I'm reading into log cabin comstruction at the moment.

My Sunday is rounded off by a couple of episodes of New Yankee Workshop on Discovery. With the equipment Norm has, he makes everything look easy!

Oh yeah! You've been bit by the woodworking bug! It can be VERY contagious and usually has a slimming effect on one's wallet....

I love to work with it, the feeling of having completed a project that I built myself gives me the satisfaction that I miss in my dead end daily desk job.

Regular stick building (2x4 or 2x6) is more carpentry then woodworking, where as log cabins are closer to woodworking as you have to have some woodworking skills to be able to build a cabin... one of my life's (and wife's) dreams is to someday build one....

Norm has the woodshop any man would want! Of course, he gets all his toys given to him by the sponsors.

[Capmaster]

I did the ceiling of my family room with 1x6 T&G southern yellow pine, very grainy and the color is beautiful for the room - country styling and feel to it, so it fit right in.

It sounds great I love wood all over the house ...always have

Yes, we enter through the door set in the middle of the bookshelves. I wanted to make the door bookshelves too, with a hidden catch, but because of the thickness and clearance problems with the door's swing path, I gave up on it. It would have probably looked ghey. It looks great now.

There's another trick you can do with pine to make it look knotty and rustic - apply a propane torch to the knots and grain and that'll darken the features and add contrast. Then just varnish the bare wood. But use a small flame and use a light touch

[offline]

Back on topic.

-A Book on Doomsday about how all the ways the world (illustrated.) could end tomorow.
- nice bottle of wine / whisky & port
- socks, 2 shirts, some shorts
- chocolate
- themos flask set
- metal ball game thingy (some kind of french bowls)
- Calander of extreme weather

I'm not complaining

[rhegedus]

log cabins are closer to woodworking as you have to have some woodworking skills to be able to build a cabin... one of my life's (and wife's) dreams is to someday build one....

Two books currently on the bedside table are :

The Cabin - Inspiration for the Classic American Getaway

and

Log Cabin Classics

They are shortly to be joined by:

Log Construction Manual: The Ultimate Guide to Building Handcrafted Log Homes

and

The Log Cabin: An Adventure in Self-Reliance, Individualism, and Cabin Building

So much for going to bed early - usually end up reading 'till past 1am

Norm has the woodshop any man would want! Of course, he gets all his toys given to him by the sponsors.

Yeah, he's even got a special glue gun for his biscuit joins!

[ZAPPER]

Cap and Shooz and anyone else interested.

I work construction for a living, I am suposed to be a carpenter but I get to do it all. You guys were talking about the "curse of the Jigsaw". There is actually alot going on when you are useing one. Practice is the key to getting good results but more important is paying attention to what happens when you do different things while cutting. Forward speed is pretty important. Go as slow as you think is about right and then slow down some more! If the wood ain't just about to start smoking you are probally going forward too fast. Most modern saws have adjustable orbits and you need to get a feel for which blade and wood combination is going to work best with which orbit. You will notice the ease of cutting change when you change the orbit but the turning charistics change with the orbit setting too. Even the blades are working against you from the factory! Somehow when they make blades for jigsaws, bandsaws, scroll saws and the like, the way that they are ground effects the natural pull or drift of the blade when you cut. I don't know the physics of why, but trust me a blade will always drift no matter what the maker says. If you don't beleive me just try to use a straight edge guide and only forward pressure and you will see for yourself.
When you are cutting and try to turn, you turn the tool and then the tool turns the blade at the point where blade and tool meet, and the blade passes the turn energy along the length of the blade until it gets to the end of the blade. This is where the trouble starts. If you are going too fast or have too much pressure on the blade it can't transfer that turn energy to the end of the blade and the top of the cut and the bottom start to get out of square(or alingnment, if you think that you are good enought to even try a bevel) So this is where going slow and giving the blade some time and a little room to work comes in. Another thing that kills a cut is side pressure. Some times when you are cutting and you stray slightly off the line you tend to put a little side pressure on the saw to make it drift back to where it should be. When you do this you are doomed. You are actually trying to put turn energy in to the blade at its weakest direction and the blade will bow, the top of the blade goes towards the line that you want and the bottom will go in the other direction and you have that damb out of square cut to contend with. My expeirience says that using blades that cut on the down stroke tend to cut best. They dont chip the top surface like when cutting plastic laminate and the blade follows the cut better. Because the top part of the cut is made first the blade seems to cut out the bottom in line with the top better (no emperical evidence to show, just an observation) When cutting thicker stock things only get harder. If you can find blades that are deeper front to back like saber saw blades you can better cut straight but you loose out on the turning ability.

I have been doing carpentry for over 20 years and still love it. Alot of it is rough carpentry that gets covered, alot of it is just plain wood work that very few people will ever even give a second look at. But when you get a package of pre finished, high dollar crown, and no extra for waste the pressure is on big time. Add in the fact that it has to be done NOW so the place can open for business tomorrow, and you are 20+ feet off the floor, you want to tell everyone to **** off! When the last peice is coped and fits perfect and the scrap will fit into one five gallon bucket, you know that you have earned your pay! Ain't nothing relaxing about it except being done. Only the people that have tried it know what is involved. Architects and designers think that it status quo. The guys in the cabinet shop that have all of the luxury of everything being square and plumb and at bench height don't think that it is any great feat. And when some idiot complains about a tight knot in the grain, I tell them that I put that wood there and God put that knot in it, what in the hell did you do?

End of thread jack

[makntraks]

Holy shit... them's a lot of words...

please...

j/k,
makntraks

[ZAPPER]

Holy shit... them's a lot of words...

please...

j/k,
makntraks

Yea I got to get that voice over the internet thingy Going
It would only have taken a coulple of minutes to explain that way
I got a little excited

I do think that the Cliff notes is funny as hell, Thanks for not really bashing me.

[shoozleboy]

Thanks for the info, Zapper. A man who knows his stuff.... A little long, but a good read for me - although I may have to read it a few more times to get all the technical stuff down about the blade and drift.... Thanks again.

[fritzi93]

Good one, Zapper. Twenty years and you still love it? Wait 'til you're close to 40 years at it and nearing retirement.

I am often asked woodworking questions by retired engineers, lawyers, etc. Guys who never got to work much with their hands and have discovered a new hobby.

Once I was asked: "What will you make when you're retired and have time? That should really be something."

"Make?" sez I, "Make? Oh, I hope to make a few thousand on the bigass tool auction I'm gunna have."

[Capmaster]

Good stuff ZAPPER A man who has "been there, done that"