Craig from Springfield, Ohio - Shop of the Week

July 23, 2008 | Filed Under Blog, Shop of the Week | 5 Comments 

Here are some pics of my very small one car garage wood shop! Here I am pictured with my current project, a small bookcase. This is about the largest piece I can handle as you will see in the rest of the pictures I have very limited space!

The door in the next set of pics leads to a small room that contains a furnace for a 600 sq foot addition we added to the back of our home. While building, I took advantage of the situation and used the furnace to heat and cool the shop. I also use this small room for tool storage and sharpening. The green tool chest holds all my hand planes, marking tools, chisels, dovetail saws, etc. In the next pic you see my jointer, table saw, and work bench are all crammed together on a wall. Believe it or not it actually works quite well! Large pieces of stock or sheet goods are impossible to machine here but that’s where the Festool comes in! If you look closely, under the work bench you can see my router table. (I just pull it out and set it on the bench to use it.)

The last pic just shows how I share the storage area with the furnace for our addition. When we did the addition I also increased the electrical capacity. My shop went from a few outlets with about 20A total to more than 20 outlets and 100 Amps! The wall to the right is a pegboard wall that I use to store all my templates and some tools.

I absolutely love my Festool, I use it almost exclusively to build my projects. I’m a huge fan of the entire system. I have 2 MFT’s the large one you can see in the next set of pics, the smaller one is folded up and is sitting next to the MFT1080. If I could do over again my entire shop would be Festool from the beginning! With my limited space, the Festool system is a great fit. The next shot shows the inside of the storage/furnace room. I have a sharpening area set up in there all well as my shop stereo, (with sat radio) and a TV with a DVD for watching instructional videos. I also use this area for tool storage. All four walls are pegboard from floor to ceiling. Thickness planer, miter saw, band saw, dust collection, and wood storage are all very close together as shown in the last picture. The cool thing is that the dust collector can handle all these stationary machines from where it sits without ductwork!

Well that’s my small, but efficient shop! I absolutely love to work in here because everything is just a few steps away. It’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and thanks to Festool it’s almost completely dust free! It’s a very enjoyable place to spend whatever free time I can manage. I hope you enjoyed my little shop tour as much I enjoyed sharing it with you!

Demo Night Tonight - 8pm Eastern

July 22, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | 5 Comments 

Tonight we are planning another Gadget Station update. Only this time, I will show you how I plan on making the case joints. Dovetails, box joints, miters, butt joints, rabbets are all good choices. But what I want to do is more of a Greene & Greene style embellishment. I will show you a quick way to make this really sweet looking joint. So don’t miss it! Oh and I will have a cute blond camerawoman with me. Wink wink! Webcam/Live Chat.

*Note* This demo will be recorded and released for viewing on the website later, so don’t worry if you can’t make it.

Episode 58- Gadget Station (Pt. 2)

July 21, 2008 | Filed Under Blog, Projects, Video | 21 Comments 

For the first time ever, I am using mail-ordered wood. This material came from Bell Forest Products and I was very impressed with the quality. The shipment came in two packs and contained some really nice wide bubinga boards, as well as a piece ebony for the trim and some spalted maple for the doors. I sticker and stack the wood and talk about acclimation, and how it pertains to this particular situation. I talk a little bit about moisture meters as well and finish up by showing my strategy for cutting the cabinet parts out of the rough lumber so that the grain flows nicely.

Links:
Gadget Station (Pt. 1)

Swelling Dovetails? - Question of the Week

July 21, 2008 | Filed Under Blog, Question of the Week | 5 Comments 

This week’s question comes from Ben who asks: Why do my dovetails dry fit perfectly - but when I go to glue them up, they no longer fit flush? It’s cheap pine (this is a test project) - and I’m using a dovetail jig: if that helps? Any suggestions?

And this was my response:

Hey Ben. My guess is that the dovetails are sucking up some moisture from the glue and swelling a bit, leading to a change in the actual fit. That means that if left alone for some time, the swelling would go down and they might get close to flush again. That being said, I very rarely shoot for perfectly flush dovetails anyway. I always aim to have my dovetails a little proud. This way, after the glue dries, I can flush them to the surface. If you aim for perfectly flush, you might wind up slightly under, which means you now have to sand or plane the entire board to get a flush fit, which of course brings with it a whole series of problems. But if you aim to be slightly proud and you wind up a little short of your target, the worst that can happen is the dovetails will be nearly flush. And if you are slightly over your target, a few extra swipes with the block plane are all you need to remedy the situation. Hope that helps.

*** Anyone else have some slick tips for perfectly-fitting dovetails?***

A Little Love for the International Viewers

July 20, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | 19 Comments 

One thing that quickly became clear in our recent survey was not only the fact that we have international viewers (something we were already aware of), but that we have A LOT of international viewers. In the past 6 months, about 30% of our t-shirt and DVD orders have been to international customers! This, my friends, is what doing a show on the internet is all about!

So we just wanted to take a moment to welcome our international friends. And just for fun, we added a live map on the blog page that shows the origin of the most recent visitors. The small map shows the last 100 visitors and the big map (click on the image) shows you the last 1000 visitors. I installed the map late last night and I already see visitors from Iceland, Canada, France, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, Finland, Romania, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Australia Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, Mexico and Russia!! Nicole and I wish you all a hearty welcome and hope that you enjoy your visit to our site. We may be a world apart, but we are really only a mouse click away. I would like buy you all a Coke!

So Who’s Making a Gadget Station?

July 18, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | 36 Comments 

Hey everyone. I have already heard from a few folks who are making their own Gadget Station, and I wanted to get an idea of how many folks are going to participate. Like I said before, this isn’t exactly a build-a-long. Its more of a community design and building experiment. No pressure and no time-frame. But knowing how many people are making one, and who they are will help me organize content and live demo nights. Also, I would really like to showcase your ideas and designs right here on our site. So just let me know. Thanks!

Design by Committee - Gadget Station Update

July 17, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | 11 Comments 

Design is discussed quite a bit in our woodworking community. Afterall, without a design we just have a pile of wood (or worse yet, a pile of sawdust). And over time, I hope that we can discuss and learn about all types of design theories and practices. But here’s one I never thought I would utilize: design by committee??? Read on.

While I am giving the wood for the Gadget Station some time to acclimate, I decided to jump into the design of the legs. Like with most of my shapely wood creations, I decided to start with a template. Since I wasn’t able to fully explore the curves that I had in my head using Sketchup, I decided to draw out several profiles as potential patterns for the legs. Each one contained subtle differences. So subtle that at first glance they all looked the same. But upon closer inspection, some just look more “right” than others. As I was pondering several of these variations, it occurred to me that I have an incredible resource at my disposal: my chatroom! I had the live shop cam on all day so they were already up to speed on what I was trying to accomplish. So I sat down with my top three choices and solicited everyone’s opinion. Of course, we all know what too many cooks can do to the broth, and I kind of expected that to be the case. But much to my delight, we all agreed unanimously on one particular leg profile. How cool is that?

So I quickly set off to cut the template out of a sheet of 1/4″ birch ply. With template in hand, I began tracing the profile onto the prototype leg blank (a piece of 8/4 alder). Since these legs have a curve cut into two sides (referred to as a compound curve), I had to trace the shape onto two sides. I filled in the cut off area with a marker so you can visualize the two cuts that need to be made.

At the bandsaw, the first cut is the easier one. The second cut, however, requires us to tape the cutoff back onto the blank. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the first cut removed our cut line for the second cut. So after a nice helping of blue tape, I was ready to roll for the second cut. Everything went as planned. As you pull the pieces apart, the compound curved leg reveals itself.

Right off the bandsaw, things don’t look so hot. But with a little sanding, the elegance of the leg becomes much more apparent as does the fact that my design committee made a great choice. Now the prototype leg is a little thinner than the final legs will be, so you can expect them to have a little more heft in the final version. I also have a few other things I want to do accomplish with these legs, but I havn’t gotten that far yet. All will be reveled in the videos. And speaking of video, the second part will be out very soon, and will cover laying out the cabinet pieces in the rough lumber, as well as the creation of the leg template and the prototype leg.

I’d like to thank the folks in the chat room for lending a hand with this (you know who you are). And if you haven’t been to the chat room in a while, it has been buzzing with activity lately so be sure to stop in.

Chuck in AZ - Shop of the Week

July 16, 2008 | Filed Under Blog, Shop of the Week | 13 Comments 

This week’s shop comes from Chuck in Chandler, AZ. He writes:

Here are a few pics of my garage shop as it is every day. We have a three car garage and the third space is all mine and, as you can see, I use every inch. The tall rack by the jointer holds my chop saw, oscillating spindle sander, planer and scrollsaw. All are mounted on plywood bases that I just slide in and out as needed. The rack is an old bakery cooling rack from a grocery store that I repaired after finding it by a dumpster and is probably the most useful thing I have in my shop.

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