Creeker's Weekend Accomplishments

[Dennis Peacock]

2 Nov 2015

Good Morning Everyone,
I start oncall duty this morning and I'll strap on the duty belt after I get back from the dentist. The finish on my guitar has cured enough to be rubbed out a bit and I'm hoping to get that part done this week. Still working on my daughter's blanket chest and my hope is that I can get all the major components put together this week as long as my oncall duty remains stable and not crazy busy like it was before.

That's it for me, so what did YOU do this past weekend?

Best of weeks to you all.

[Mike Henderson]

I'm trying to work out the design for a triangular corner table so I started building it in ash instead of mahogany. I ran into a number of problems that required me to make changes, either because it was very difficult to do the joinery or I didn't like the design.

I'm learning that anytime you build anything that's not square or rectangular you run into problems. Seems that we're only taught how to do square furniture.

Curves add another level of complexity.

Mike

Corner table02.jpg Corner table01.jpg

[Patrick Walsh]

Saturday i continued on breaking down my yard for winter. This involved removing 10 very large and heavy bamboo plants from even larger terra cotta and cement vessels followed by digging a hole for each one to overwinter in the ground. In the spring i will dig them back up and put them back in the decorative containers. They are in nursery containers 365 so not actually planted directly in the ground.

This was followed by cleaning my shed so i could put all my bonsai to sleep for the winter also.

I then hoofed my teak patio set up a ladder and through a second story window where i store it for the winter as not to take up shop space in my basement. I live in a tiny bungalow and the stairs to the second floor are to narrow to fit much of anything up.

I then made a trip to the Red Wing store for a new pair of work boots and then Carhartt for some new winter work clothes.

If that is not enough i also walked the dogs about 7 miles and did the grocery shop for the week.

Sunday i did another 7 mile walk with the dogs. Then spent about a half day running wires for some exterior LED flood light. This was real fun as it involved shimmying on my belly through a tiny crawl space that encircles my sauffit or gutter line. Its triangle shaped and about 2.5' x 2 feet and filled with the itchy stuff.


My electrician came over and finally put the finishing touches on the wiring for my shop. Im really really excited about this. My old eight bay sub panel is now a 28 bay. All my big 30amp machines all have dedicated breakers. I have 20 amp receptacles spaced spaced about every 10 foot around my shop. And all my led shop lights got their own boxes in the ceiling so i could plug them in without crazy wires all over the place. If thats not enough they operate on a switch now and not a stupid pull string for each one! Oh and i hung two new LED shop lights.

Then i watched two football games. Now i have to go continue on with a cedar shake roof i have been working on for a couple weeks. Brrrrrrr......

[Justin Ludwig]

Curves add another level of complexity.

Indeed. I spent too much time figuring out the miter angle for ship-lapping an arch of a valance ,only to figure out the answer was as simple as dividing the arc angle by the number of pieces to be cut. The fun part was then gluing 15 pieces together over a 46" arc that have a 3.6* miter. No matter how careful I was with the glue, I spent 2 hours with a chisel and sandpaper cleaning out the grooves.


Murphy reared his head this weekend for my wife. I'd say about 50% of the time I leave for National Guard drill weekends something happens at the house. This weekend the kitchen drain clogged somewhere in the wall. She and her Dad plunged and plunged until it back-filled into the dishwasher and laundry. That smells nice, BTW. When I arrived Sunday about 4, she was under the sink chase a snake down the line with her dad providing the twists.

We ended up pouring 1/2 gal of 50% Sodium Hydroxide (my FIL is a chemist and makes a homemade Drain-O) down the line and walked away. I'm about to see if the line is clear. If it is, I'll pour 2 qts of acetic acid down the line to neutralize the NaOH (Doing that is going to create a lot of heat in the line and we'll probably have steam coming out of 2 sinks for a bit) and pick up some yeasts or septic bacteria to replace the 10 billion we killed.

[Rod Sheridan]

Hi Dennis, I milled a spalted maple log for a friend of a friend, and received a slab as payment.

Here are some photographs, one shows the slab I received which is almost 8 feet long and about 23" wide. It's destined to be a live edge coffee table for my youngest daughter.............Rod.

Half way through the log.jpgMichelle's slab.jpgTom cutting the first slab.jpg

[Charles Taylor]

Good morning,

I finished up the job of hanging and wiring some additional lights over the bench/cabinet where my RAS and CMS are located. What a chore...everywhere I needed to work in the attic, whether supporting the lights or running wire, was underneath or behind ductwork. Because of that, when I installed the box for the wall switch, I used a 3-gang box and fished extra strings to leave in place for pulling additional wires should I ever want to add anything in the future. Then when pulling one of the wires I needed for this weekend's project, I pulled the ends of the strings up into the wall with it. This is an insulated, exterior wall, so there wasn't any remedy except to fish them again. The embarrassing thing is that I had had them tied off properly at one point, then untied them and left them loose before pulling the last wire of the day.

After that was done, I turned my attention to making some drawers for the aforementioned bench/cabinet. I made up the sides for the twelve I need and then called it a weekend.

[Shawn Pixley]

LOML & I played with hot metal. I had made some models for fittings (latch/hasps). We were going to practice some sand casting in Bronze (she is teaching a casting class for jewelers / silversmiths). We had been casting pewter in the sand very successfully. But phosphor bronze melts much hotter (~2,000 degrees).

Saturday we cast and we were getting air bubbles, boil and splatter; ruining the casts. We decided the greensand was too wet and torched the molds on Sunday before casting. That worked much better. My hasps are better centrifugally cast, so I'll make a rubber mold, and then form wax blanks for casting.

[Wes Ramsey]

I spent all day Friday driving to Jeff City, MO to NOT buy a used planer. Saturday I was back on the road to Springfield and came home with a new G0453PX. I wasted so much brain power pondering the merits of lunchbox planers when all I needed to do was run a single board one pass through this beast. It needs a longer cord, but it sure looks great next to my G0513X2 bandsaw!

This was my last excuse to procrastinate on the bedroom closet remodel. Next weekend I'll have to make a run to the farm for lumber to get started. And maybe shoot a deer or 2 while I'm there

[Garth Almgren]

I got some time to finish my "rustic" cedar fence board cooler (except for the lid handle), so now I'm finally ready for summer!
Cooler.jpg

Spent Sunday afternoon hanging some speakers from the rafters of the shop, running speaker wire, and building a little shelf out of scrap pine to hold the mini stereo amp that is going to be arriving today.

[julian abram]

I swore to myself that if I ever added on to my shop the first thing I would build would be an assembly table. I completed a little 16'x20' shop addition a few weeks ago, this weekend I started working on the assembly table. Completed the base first, installed the wiring for outlets & compressor and quite a bit done on the torsion box top. It was a rare productive weekend in the shop, did have to take a couple hours off to install a mailbox post for an elderly lady. Other than that, all shop time.
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