Thread: The Diary of a Woodworking Nobody!

Originally Posted by vsquizz

Your shot already mate...That desk is WWWaaaaYYYYY to tidy

Squizz,

Now I come to look again at that photo, I can see how you might be misled into thinking that way. I decline to reveal to you the chaos that is positioned slightly to the right of the Lord Darth Tater and my monitor because I don't want to cause lasting damage to your well-known tender sensibilities.

Suffice it to say that I am a firm adherent to the ancient wisdom that a tidy desk is an infallible indicator of a diseased mind :eek:

Col

Originally Posted by Driver

zenwood

(which reminds me of the newspaper story about a psychiatric patient who escaped from hospital, raped two women in a laundry and fled. It read: "Nut Screws Washers and Bolts") - but I digress .

Classic! Greenieworthy infact!

In other news, I've got some 100x100mm jarrah posts. I was just planning to rip them in half using a good old 235mm ar saw with a rip fence. Sure it's a bit rough but nothing a bit of planing wont fix.

Originally Posted by Driver

...It's issue #178 - August 2005. Page 38 is the reference. Issue #177 - June 2005 has a pretty good article on the principles of table design - showing dimensions, proportions, styles etc for a variety of different types of table.... Col

Beauty, the local newsagent had Issue #177 so I grabbed a copy.

BTW, Happy Birthday Col, hope you have a good one.

Originally Posted by Driver

Nut Screws Washers and Bolts

lol, Col: 4 out of 5 words punned in a single sentence. Greenie from me too.

finish the cutting of the centre section on the band saw ...

Hmmm... Wonder why you'd be resawing on the tablesaw if you had a bandsaw?

Another point: have you got a jointer? Maybe step 1 (after step 0) is to joint one face and edge before resawing, to achieve flatness and a 90 degree edge. This would make subsequent thicknessing easier. Darth spud might recommend handplanes...

Originally Posted by zenwood

....... I'm thinking about using one of those electronic stud detectors to scan for hidden ironmongery in the wood. Would it be hijacking the thread to ask if people think this is a good idea?....

Zenwood,
the stud detectors that I've owned don't detect metal, they work (I'm guessing) on the capacitance of the timber. Having said that the detector I currently own does have one face for detecting metal studs, but I've never used it so don't know how accurate or sensitive it is.

Originally Posted by zenwood

..........Do you remember why Frid leaves a bit in the middle? Is it because the saw won't reach all the way through, or is it a safety issue?..........

Don't know about Frid, but I've seen it reccomended to leave a smidgen and then just break the two pieces apart by pressing on the kerf. I tried it once and found it a pain. I've managed to rip many 100s of metres of timber without any incident doing it the other way (cut right through on the second pass/other side) so I'll stick with that way. Mind you, after saying that I'll probably send a very large ballistic splinter through the shed wall next time I'm deep ripping.

Mick

Originally Posted by journeyman Mick

... I'll probably send a very large ballistic splinter through the shed wall next time I'm deep ripping.

Yeah: makes me nervous. Definitely keep the head out of the line of fire for this procedure.

OK - actually made some progress today.

I'll post this in three brief instalments with a couple of pictures in each post to illustrate current progress.

The first picture below shows the assortment of jarrah as it came off Squizzy's demolition site. As you can see, there are a few nasty bits of ironmongery protruding from the timber.

So the first job is to get rid of them. Chosen method: my venerable Stanley claw hammer (made back when Stanley still had a deserved reputation for quality). I've got a standby jemmy bar available (visible in the background of the second photo). In practice, the claw hammer worked better. De-nailing the whole lot took about 30 minutes.

The bulk of this timber is not 4" x 3" (100 mm x 75 mm) as I originally said - but actually 120 mm x 50 mm.

The shortest length is a bit more than 1300 mm. This will dictate the length of the table, say 1200 mm. Using the Golden Ratio rules, the table dimensions will therefore be roughly:

1200 mm long
750 mm wide
470 mm high

This means that I'll need to cut down the longer lengths. Just as an experiment (probably influenced by Darth Tater whose baleful presence you may have noticed in the previous picture), I'll do this without the benefit of electricity. I have two suitable handsaws: an old western-style panel saw (which probably needs a bit of sharpening) and a Japanese Z saw.

The Western panel saw was hard work in this old jarrah. Midway through the first cut, I switched to the Z saw and progress was fairly brisk.

In the first photo below, you can see a clear difference in the quality of cut. The lighter section at the top of the cut is the Western panel saw and the remainder is the Z saw. I made a total of five cuts in all - using the Japanese saw for all except the first part of the first cut. Each cut took maybe two minutes.

At the end of the exercise, I've got four pieces of 120 x 50, each roughly 1300 mm in length. I'll re-saw these to deliver up eight lengths - more than enough for the table top.

The next step then is re-sawing, followed by planing to thickness. That's for tomorrow.

Toodle-pip!

Col

Looks good so far Col, although the pictures seem to be quite large. Is there any chance they could be made a bit smaller in your future instalments?

Looking forward to watching progress with great interest...great idea and thanks for sharing it with us.

Originally Posted by Dan

Looks good so far Col, although the pictures seem to be quite large. Is there any chance they could be made a bit smaller in your future instalments?

Yes - they are a bit big. I'm shooting this stuff on Nikon Coolpix 4800 and saving it in jpeg format. I'm cropping the pictures and compressing them to less than 100 KB using Nero Photosnap (I've also got Microsoft PictureIt! PhotoShop 2002).

What should I do to make the images a bit smaller? Any advice from the BB's experts would be welcome.

Col

Col, I am yet to examine the rest of the timber from the demo but the few pieces of Blackbutt look good. I have two bearers about 800 x 400 mm in Jarrah, some 2 metres long, which I am pondering over. One piece of the 4 x 2 I ran the sander over last week is very curly...Great Figure = Lotsa hard work!. Is this a going to be all darkside work or are you going to run the 4 bee2's over the jointer & thicknesser?

Just as a recycling aside: (wouldn't catch me hi-jacking a thread ) but I charged the owner of the house about 8K for the demo. This took 4 days and included a fully reinforced slab that had to have the breaker through it (not like the modern POC) and also a concrete driveway. Demos on single storey run from 10 to 14 K depending on location and tip fees. I took one day to take the Asbestos roof off (about $400 of costs), then oneday to take the jarrah gable roof off. The excavator took the house down in about 3 hours and the rest of the time was taken in the slab and loading out trucks.

The asbestos was wrapped and disposed of in the correct manner. The jarrah was stacked neatly for recycling, including doors and window frames. I didn't really make a lot of money on this but I have about 3 1/2 cubes of good jarrah which will go to deserving woodworkers. If this job was under the control of a builders (as most are that we do), it would have been wham bam through with the Front End Loader and the whole lot would have gone to the tip (10 Grand thank you very much) but it have been done inside 2 days (thats what building schedules expect)

I took an extra two days to save a valuable resource but it seems very few people are interested in this approach.

Col, as you have a little more time than I at present I take great interest in this thread and the outcomes. Goodonya and Good Luck... the Jarrah deserves you. (getting all emotional here)

Cheers

Originally Posted by Driver

What should I do to make the images a bit smaller?
Col

With JPEGCompress it goes like this, Image>Resize Image>Set the width to about 600 pixels>OK. I'm guessing it would be something similar with your software.