Woodworking for Dwarves

I’ve been watching my box-making video, with Doug Stowe. If you’re a tool person, you have to get this disk.

Doug Stowe is an old guy who lives in Arkansas, and he moves and talks slowly, and he has such a soothing voice, the DVD would be worth it purely as a relaxation video. He makes furniture, but between big jobs, he builds weird boxes. He has a workshop with a Shopsmith, a 1948 Atlas table saw, and a jointer, plus a few other unremarkable tools.

One wall of the shop is obscured behind shelves of lumber. He finds bits of it here and there, and he buys pieces he finds interesting, and he stores it up for later use.

It’s really neat. For decades, I have fantasized about making furniture, but that is not likely to happen. But you can have the same kind of creative experience–cheaper, faster, and easier–making small stuff like boxes. Stowe says he likes it because he can try out new ideas on a small scale, before applying them to big projects.

I think I may try this. It might be tremendous fun.

Take a look at this guy’s website. The furniture is wonderful.

It makes me regret selling off the land my relatives and I inherited, up in Kentucky. If I lived up there and I wanted a nice piece of maple or oak, I could walk outside, apply the chainsaw, maul, and wedges, and get what I needed. It would be wonderful to have some wood from that land. Too late now, though.

We still own the main barn on my grandfather’s Powell County farm. Maybe I could manage to get a few boards. They make barns up there out of white oak.

I had a swell time at the dentist’s office. I’m not totally positive the anaesthetic worked; I felt some pretty unpleasant sensations while he was reaming out my vintage filling. I told him I’d kill for a chair like his. He said it was possible to buy a dentist’s chair all by itself, without the other stuff. “Let me guess,” I said, “seven thousand dollars.” He said, “Eight, actually.” He said he didn’t understand why they were so expensive, and I said maybe the manufacturer figured insurance was paying for most of it. And my dentist said that was incorrect. He said the money came from ME. Apparently, most dental work is not covered by insurance. I feel like I ought to be able to go over there and sleep in that chair whenever I want.

I asked him whether the filling would be a big job, because it had been so long since I had had a filling done, I did not remember. He said, “You’ve never HAD a big job.” I guess that’s true, although I did suffer for four years with braces.

Once again, my phone went off during the visit and informed me I had to go to the dentist.

I don’t know where my sister got off to.

Oh the Glamour

Just when you thought my life could not get more exciting, the thrills increase. Today I received three new woodworking videos!

I know you’re all aflame with envy.

I already have two woodworking books. But there is something about a video that a book can’t match. It may take an entire tedious page to explain something that can be demonstrated in seconds in a video. And besides, it’s just wonderful, watching people who can make their tools do what they’re supposed to do.

I got a video on hand planes. I watched that one first. It features a woodworking instructor named Mario Rodriguez. It was a little upsetting. Tools are almost always more complicated than you expect; you can’t just grab them out of the box and do your thing. You would think hand planes would be exceptions to the rule, but they’re not. For example, they’re usually not flat on the bottom when you buy them. You have to flatten them yourself. And the blades are worthless until you sharpen and square them up, and you pretty much have to have a jig to do this.

I don’t remember all the planes he used. Or maybe I do. Let’s see. One was called a smooth plane, which is also a Stanley #4. You use this to smooth out the sides of boards. In the video, some guy pretending to be his clueless beginner buddy came in, complaining that his smooth plane was giving him tearout. Mario explained what a fool he was, taking his plane apart, flattening the bottom, and fixing the blade. Then Mario had the guy try to use it, and he gave him hell over his stance and technique. But by the time the guy left, his plane was in dandy shape. All it took was a 10″ grinder, a sheet of glass, some spray-on glue, some emery cloth, a strange little pocket square, and some expensive jigs. For $3000, you can have a nice hand plane, too!

He brought out a 24″ long plane, which, I think, was called a jointing plane. You can guess what it’s used for. In addition to jointing, it flattens things. Pretty cool.

One of the things I really liked was the shoulder plane. They’re small and narrow. You can use them to fix the shoulders on tenons. I can see how this would be really useful when you screw something up using a power tool, and you need to take like four thousandths off of your work.

He also used a block plane, which has the blade at the very front. You can use it in confined spaces. Neat.

He had some old planes which are no longer made. One of them cuts dadoes. In case you don’t know, a dado is a slot that goes across a piece of wood. For example, you might have two parallel pieces of wood with horizontal dadoes, and you slide shelves into the dadoes. With the dado plane, you clamp a straightedge to the work, and you run the plane back and forth beside it, and it sinks into the work, making a dado. It’s surprisingly fast. I can understand how a skilled worker might prefer it to a router some of the time. He also had a set of planes that made tongues and grooves. Wild. These are fantastic tools, so of course they quit making them.

I guess he was wrong when he said they didn’t make them any more. I’ve found them online. I guess he meant the big companies quit.

I also got a Pat Warner router video. This guy appears to be kind of a nut. Routers are his whole life. His garage is a workshop, and he has 20 routers in it. He has a magical router table he made himself, with a fence that has a dial scale on it that reads in thousands of an inch. I don’t know if he actually makes anything except for templates and dust, but he’s ready if he ever gets an idea.

He did a bunch of stuff with his routers. He taught about templates and bearings and dovetails and so on. And he said he probably uses his drill press more than his routers. Everyone seems to love the drill press, and of course, I do not have one.

He has his own router website, and he makes and sells doodads to make your router work better. I guess it’s a pretty cool life, for a guy who likes routing that much. And he has written at least one very popular router book.

One thing I notice from watching these videos is that guys who are experts with one particular tool like to talk about how versatile it is, and how you can use it to do stuff you would otherwise need other tools to do. This must be what they mean, when they say, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Pat Warner did some jointing with his router; that was cool.

The plane guy surprised me by using a really crappy benchtop jointer in his video. He had a 10″ grinder, and he used a jointer he probably bought at KMart. Do you have any idea what a 1750-rpm 10″ grinder costs? Neither do I, but I’ll bet it’s at least $500. Let me check.

Okay, it looks like they start at over $700. I have to wonder if he bought the right tool. You can get a jim-dandy wet grinder kit from Grizzly for $160, and I’ll bet it works just as well.

I don’t think I’ll ever need a jointer. The table saw and router seem capable of fixing problems with the edges of boards. But a planer would be hard to simulate.

I don’t want to get out of control. I just want to be able to do basic woodworking, so when I finally get ready to fix my stupid outdoor BBQ cabinet, I won’t have to do it the way I did last time, with a circular saw, a drill, and Og’s favorite tool, the Workmate. It amazes me, though, how many tools you need to do anything beyond monkey-grade work.

I think it might be fun to make a humidor. I don’t need one, but my dad can always use one. I’m not totally satisfied with the expensive one I got him a few years ago. As a Christian, I’m not totally sure I want to encourage anyone to use tobacco, but it’s not like I’m buying him cigarettes. It’s an interesting question. Cigarettes and snuff and chewing tobacco are unquestionably evil, because they’re addictive and they give people cancer. Cigars and pipes, on the other hand, rarely addict anyone, and you have to be really dedicated to give yourself cancer with either. The risk is about ten percent of the risk cigarette smokers face.

Coincidentally, I also have a video on making boxes. Yes, there is a guy who does this as a profession, and he makes videos. He probably lives next door to Pat Warner. I can’t wait to check it out.

I wrote about the book of Job earlier this week, and got a few comments from readers. I have always had a hard time figuring this book out, because it makes it seem like God was incredibly harsh with Job, and the reason was not clear. After all, the beginning of the book calls Job righteous, so you would think he would have a fairly blessed life. I think I finally understand the story.

The first part of the book seems to show that God approved of Job. He called him blameless and upright. But when catastrophe befell him, Job became somewhat self-righteous. He said he wanted God to appear, so he could make his case to him. He felt sure he could convince God that it was wrong to afflict him.

When God appeared and Job encountered him in person for the first time, Job realized how paltry his own virtue was compared to God’s. He realized he was unfit to question God, and he repented of the notion that he could justify himself.

I suspect that the lesson of the book is that life may contain great pain, and you will not always know why, and you are never right to question God for allowing it to happen. The answer is to search your heart and mind for anything you could have done to cause your problems, and if you can’t figure it out, thank God for the suffering, on the assumption that there is good in it which you can’t perceive.

I believe that on the whole, good people have better lives than bad people, and their lives definitely tend to end better, because bad behavior generally leads to a life that deteriorates sharply in quality as that behavior bears fruit. But Corrie ten Boom and her family were imprisoned by the Nazis. Eleven of the disciples were martyred, as was Paul. I think that’s correct, anyway. We will not be completely free from the threat of disaster until we leave this world. That’s just how it is. Corrie ten Boom’s sister Betsie taught her she had to thank God for every misfortune. She learned that lesson in a filthy barracks full of fleas. If you’ve never been attacked by fleas, believe me, it’s no fun. It’s like being jabbed with dozens of needles. If you read The Hiding Place, you know the fleas turned out to be a great blessing.

I think this is part of the magic of faith. You may experience unpleasant things, but you become capable of finding the good in them. It’s a bizarre kind of alchemy. It can make you treasure the memories of some of your worst experiences. You can actually learn to be grateful during a time of suffering.

Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But Job seems to make more sense to me now.

I don’t know all the answers. Just because I have a couple of saws and a router doesn’t mean I know as much as a certain famous carpenter.

Possible Solution to Router Fence Problem

I failed utterly in Saturday’s quest to put together a router fence. My father needed help with his anchor, so I ended up working on that instead.

Here’s the big problem with the fence. I need something very straight and fair, with sides that are absolutely perpendicular. I managed to use my table saw as a jointer, putting nice short sides on a two-by-six, but I couldn’t get it to work as a planer.

Today I read that it’s possible to plane wood with a router. Seriously. You support the router on two straight pieces of wood and put the workpiece between them. The end of the bit reaches down to the workpiece. You move the router around until it has ground all the irregularities off the work.

The obvious obstacle is that you can’t make the guides–the pieces that support the router–until you have two straight, fair pieces of wood! But I don’t think that’s fatal. You can make them on a table saw.

Now, is this possible, when your router is in a table, with no fence? I think so. You put the board between the guides and clamp the whole thing together. You turn it over and run it over the router bit, with a flush bearing on it. Then you flip it again and do it over. You make sure the planed sides are parallel by resting the first planed side on something you know to be level and flat before you apply the clamps.

Does this actually work? I do not know. But I may try it, just for the fun. The bit I used to put the router in the lift has a flush bearing, and it cuts from the bottom as well as the side, so it should be capable of planing.

Optimistic

Is this a beautiful morning, or what? It’s 56 degrees outside, dry as a bone, the sun is shining, and McDonald’s got my breakfast order right. There is order in the universe. Things make sense.

I guess dry weather isn’t exciting to most people, but when you live in Miami, you look forward to it. And since I’ve started taking better care of the property and working with tools, I realize that cool, non-sweaty weather is a godsend. When you spend the whole day indoors, it’s 75 degrees all the time. When you start working outside, you develop a new appreciation for temperature and humidity.

This was my first McDonald’s breakfast in two or three weeks. I could not indulge after Thanksgiving. I can’t remember what got in the way last week. My Saturday Mickey D’s feast is a sacred tradition, so I am glad to get back to it.

Yesterday I wrote about the Big Three mess, and I referred to figures various sources have quoted as the effective hourly rate paid to UAW workers. You can find it all over the place. It’s on the web. It’s on TV. It’s in newspapers and magazines. It’s on the radio. I cited the Heritage Foundation, but that’s not the only source. And it varies. I have seen figures varying from 69 to 75 dollars per hour.

A reader took issue, claiming that figure included money going to workers who had already retired. The UAW has an obscene pension and insurance package, and it’s very expensive. The Heritage Foundation claims the figure includes money for the retirement of current workers, but not people who are retired at present.

I took a few minutes last night and looked around some more, and I found some fairly credible claims that the figures DO include money for people who are currently retired. On the other hand, some sites claiming to “debunk” the high figures are clearly left-wing nut sites.

Now I don’t know what to think. One thing is for certain: Big Three labor costs are completely out of line with costs incurred by employers using people of similar skill. And we should all be angry that the UAW expects the rest of us to subsidize failure while refusing to accept a fair and realistic wage. We should be angry that they want a bailout, period, but expecting us to pay for their unjustifiable lifestyle is beyond the pale. The effective hourly figure is a rabbit trail; regardless of what it turns out to be, there is no doubt that it’s way too high. And even if it were not, subsidizing incompetence is socialism, and we should not be doing it. Those jobs will not disappear if the Big Three go bankrupt. They will be preserved; we will still need and buy cars, and someone will have to make them. The big difference will be that the companies will be under new and presumably better management, which will be better for everyone concerned.

Maybe it will be Japanese management. If that makes you feel bad, buy stock in the companies that buy the factories. Japanese companies are owned in large part by Americans. We say the Big Three are American, but who owns their stock?

If the high figures are right, we have auto workers bringing home $150,000 per year in one form or another. If they are wrong, it’s more like $80,000, which is still ridiculous, in a country where you can get a master’s degree and expect to earn $40,000 per year, including benefits. An average nurse makes less than an auto worker. Don’t even try to tell me that’s acceptable. Uneducated people with limited skills are not supposed to be affluent. That’s a simple fact of life.

I should be fair and criticize management as much as I criticize labor. Management agreed to the collective bargaining agreements that have crippled the Big Three, and management failed to put together design teams that produced credible products. Some American vehicles are great, but on the whole, they are stodgy and cheap-looking and not fun to drive. Let’s face it; generally, they look like crap. And the engineering, while much closer to foreign standards than it used to be, is still second-rate. As is the quality control.

I bought an American car because the model I chose was enjoyable to drive and had a unique style. I didn’t need to be practical. But if I were looking for something practical to put a wife and kids in, I would have a hard time justifying an American offering. The full-size pickups seem pretty good. Maybe that’s because the basic designs are ancient.

In other news, I am absolutely determined to get a fence put on the router table today. I don’t care if it’s a yardstick held on by rubber bands. It has to be done. And I want some kind of dust collection design.

I used the huge sliding miter saw yesterday, and dust went everywhere, even with a vacuum attached to the port. The throat plate is not even close to zero-clearance, and a pile of dust accumulates under it every time the saw is used. How am I supposed to fix that? I’m thinking maybe I should rout out a hole under the saw, put some mesh over it, and attach a vacuum hose under it.

The impression I get is that effective dust collection is not possible, unless you spend five or six thousand dollars. If I put a hose on the saw and a hose in the table, dust will still go everywhere. I don’t know how the professional tool guys who make videos and write books keep their shops so clean. They probably cheat. They probably make lackeys sanitize their shops before they turn on the cameras. I guess I will always have dust in the garage, no matter what I do.

I wish I had a better respirator. I don’t know what to get. I’ve tried various masks, but I always find that I end up breathing heavily after a while, because of the air resistance.

As for the fence, I think the best possible solution is cast iron, milled flat. You can put magnetic accessories on it, and it shouldn’t warp. Problem: it cannot be had. I can’t get a piece of cast iron that big without cutting up a piano frame, and I can’t mill it, and I am not willing to pay to have it milled. Maybe I could cannibalize an old jointer. Which I don’t have and can’t get.

Back to wood, I guess. Maybe I’ll give up and head for the lumber yard and make them plane down a piece of hardwood for me. I’m not sure which wood is best. Something relatively cheap to start. Then when I get to be a big router expert, I can make myself a fence from ipe! It’s supposed to be like cement.

It would be nice to have a ferrous front surface on it, because then I could use magnetic featherboards. I am sorry to say, I am not all that impressed by the Grr-ripper, which is supposed to be a featherboard substitute. I don’t like running my hands directly over a table saw blade, and these things don’t grip and hold workpieces the way featherboards do. And they’re a pain to set up. While I was trying to resaw my two-by-six, I had to cut a piece of scrap, drill holes in it, and screw it to the Grr-ripper to make it work. A featherboard would have taken ten seconds to set up, and it would have been safer and more effective.

I wonder if I could put a steel surface on the router table. This is a terrible thing for a former physics student to admit, but I have no idea whether magnetic attraction increases in proportion to the depth of a metal. I assume it doesn’t; magnets hold onto thin pieces of metal very well. I’m thinking I could put a sheet of thin steel over the table, screw it down, and use magnetic featherboards from there on out. They wouldn’t work past the edge of the aluminum router plate, but I don’t think they’d need to.

I will make this stuff work if it kills me. And then maybe some day I will make something with it.

Table Saw Planer = FAIL

I learned some stuff today. I learned that a table saw will put a straight edge on a two-by-six in nothing flat, so it’s a pretty good jointer. I also learned that trying to do the same thing with the broad side of the same piece of wood is like walking a greased tightrope naked over a pond full of piranhas. So it’s a very lame planer. If I had all the right featherboards and something decent for outfeed support, MAYBE. But as it is, it’s terrifying, and the results are bad.

I also hate the table saw.

I have always said that if I got filthy rich, I’d invest in a Sawstop saw immediately, because it’s safer than an ordinary table saw. But this week I saw a safe, versatile, compact, relatively cheap substitute for a table saw, and I refused to buy it. So in the future, I would spend $2000 or whatever on a big cabinet saw, but in the present, I am too cheap to lay out $200 for something that will outperform a table saw 80% of the time.

Clearly, I am a slave to logic.

I’m talking about the EZ Smart track system. I know it’s a good product; too many good woodworkers say so for me to deny it. But I already invested a surprisingly large amount in a pretty good jobsite saw, with related paraphernalia. Therefore, faced with the prospect of spending more money, I would prefer sawing my fingers off.

The only obvious drawback to this thing is that it’s based on a circular saw with a small diameter. My table saw has a 10″ blade, and a circular saw would be a little over 8. So you get limited depth. The system involves an extra plate that goes on the bottom of the saw, so that makes it even worse.

I don’t know what I’m going to do for a router fence. I would feel like an idiot, going to a lumber yard and paying them to plane down a board for me.

My Scrap Bin Runneth Over

Lots of comments on the router table. Let’s see.

“This: LINK is the Bible when it comes to dust control.”

Oh good. I hope it’s expensive.

“Next thing you know you’re gonna want one of these, a palm router: ”

Okay, just shut up. I am not listening.

I wonder who makes a good one…

“There is nothing you can’t do with a router.”

Succinct.

“Don’t forget about a “D” handle router, too.”

[fingers in ears] STILL NOT LISTENING.

“Something that both sucks and blows is called an eductor. If you blow high-pressure air into a venturi, it entrains air into the nozzle and out the back end.”

I actually thought about venturis in this context. My dad’s boat has toilets that work this way, except instead of air, they blow water. But I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Again.

“Does being 30% done on building an airplane count as worthy?”

I don’t know. Cutting a hole in a desk is pretty freaking impressive.

“From the picture it looks like the base is recessed below the surface of the table. Is that an optical illusion, or is that what you meant by adjusting the height?”

It’s both. Later on, I took a small block of wood and ran it back and forth over the joints, adjusting the set screws whenever it met resistance. It seems pretty level now. Or pretty fair, or whatever the word is.

I am still finding dust everywhere. I need to conquer it. Problem is, I will make dust when I create a fence, and I can’t make a dust collection system until the fence exists.

I originally wanted to buy an aluminum fence from Rockler, but I am developing an aversion to buying stuff a real man would make (having somehow confused myself with a real man), so I am thinking I should just grind one out of a two-by-four or two-by-six. I may be able to get a straight bottom and top edge using the table saw. A straight side may be more of a challenge. I could cheat and put a sacrificial strip of MDF on it.

I keep calling the table MDF, and I have seen other people call the same material MDF, but I believe it’s really particle board, with smaller than usual particles. Whatever it is, it routs pretty well. I think once I get it totally flat, I may spray the underside with something to seal it up and keep water from making it swell and bend. I don’t trust paint to do it. I happen to have some truck bed paint. That ought to do it, big-time.

Let’s see. Two-by-six for the fence. Flatten the top and bottom with table saw. Fair up front side with hand plane. Attach sacrificial MDF strip with dust rabbet along bottom. I could attach something to the fence at a 90-degree angle, on the back, to rest on the table and support it.

Guess I’ll look at my books and see what the story is.

People are telling me I need certain types of filters to minimize the health risk. To tell the truth, I wasn’t thinking about that. I figured I would always have to wear a mask. I was thinking mainly about the mess.

I hate masks. After a while, I find myself breathing heavily because of the air resistance. Dang it.

Anyway, progress is happening.

How Many is Enough?

I thought people were kidding when they left comments saying they had several routers. Now I can see how that happens.

I got a big ol’ plunge router, intending to put it in a table. Now it’s installed. So I have no handheld plunge router. Sure, I can uninstall it when I want to use it. And I could also do my routing using a sharpened spoon. It’s not going to happen.

The router experts say you need a nice fixed-base router AND a nice plunge router, but you don’t want a giant one like my table router, because the little ones are easier to handle.

I need to get rid of my old Sears table. Maybe I should keep the router.

Here’s something cool. A Greek guy named Dino has come up with a strange rail-based system for routers and circular saws. It’s amazing. You can cut 8-foot sheets of lumber accurately with this thing. You can get near-furniture-quality cuts with a 24-tooth saw. He has a thing that connects a router to it, standing up, and you can move the router around like a CNC deal. You can literally write your name with it. Although now that I think about it, that’s pretty easy with a router you hold in your hands.

There are other track-based systems, but his is the most interesting, because it’s just one lone nut, competing with Festool and Dewalt.

I have to make dust collection a priority. I wish I could blow it out into the yard, but as I have pointed out previously, it’s not easy to make a machine that both sucks and blows. Maybe I should just pressurize the garage with my compressor and run a Y-shaped hose from the fence and router to the yard. Will the compressor be big enough? Maybe I can find a surplus jet engine. And perhaps I could put wings on the garage while I’m at it.

Sooner or later I really have to build something.

Finally, a Tool I Refuse to Buy

Here’s another reason to beat everyone who works for Harley-Davidson.

It looks like I have a bad diaphragm on my fuel supply valve. The solution? Remove the vacuum hose, remove the fuel hose, take off the valve, and open it up. BUT Harley-Davidson uses stupid spring band hose clamps, and you have to have special hose clamp pliers to remove them. This is brilliance at its best. You save maybe five cents on the cost of the bike by using the crappy clamp, but you lose ten dollars when you buy the special hose clamp pliers to take the clamp off.

I can’t think of one good reason not to replace it with a nice AWAB worm drive hose clamp. That’s what I did to the carb, and it worked out fine. It will save me the price of those stupid pliers.

I love the little touches manufacturers put on their products, to quadruple the time and money it costs to fix them.

More

Harley-Davidson used to make a replacement diaphragm that cost around seven bucks. Then they decided that was too cheap. Now you have to buy the whole valve, for almost thirty bucks. Supposedly, you can buy the diaphragm by itself, but they make you pay the cost of a valve.

No wonder people hate Harley-Davidson.

I’m getting a Golan aftermarket petcock. I’m tempted to eliminate the diaphragm and replace it with a gasket, but I’d have to remember to turn the petcock off whenever the bike wasn’t running.

This is how Harleys are. The stock parts fail, and when you try to replace them, they screw you so badly you pretty much have to buy aftermarket if you want to retain your self-respect.

Soup & Planers

The stuff from Woodpeck.com arrived a while back. It looks pretty good. Maybe it was stupid to get a router lift, but people who use them seem to like them.

I got my sliding miter saw set up on the woodworking table. I am still amazed at how big the saw is. I’m worried it may interfere with some router work, because it’s to the left of the router. But it will only matter for pretty big items. I think the answer is to mount the miter saw using lag shields and easily removed bolts. That way I can yank the saw off the table when necessary.

One problem: the table has an edge near the right side of the router, but the left edge is over three feet away, and between the router and the edge, there’s a saw. So I can’t use a conventional router sled. But I can think of ways to get around that.

I need a jointer. Or rather, I need boards that aren’t crooked. I know very little about tools, but I have learned that you can avoid buying a big, noisy, expensive jointer if you are willing to buy a hand plane and use a clamp. You learn something new every day.

The vegetable soup came out great, although I should have stuck some herbs in it. I know absolutely nothing about vegetable soup, but it seems to be programmed to taste good no matter what you put in it. One hazard I am aware of: soup made with red cabbage looks so disgusting it’s hard to eat.

It’s really sad; for 13 bucks I made like a gallon and a half of soup that is like ten times as good as anything you can get in a can, and I am sure a person who actually knows how to make soup can do it much better than I did.

Without muh Sleeve…

I am anxiously awaiting the delivery of my router lift. Very exciting. The desk I am converting into a woodworking table looks viable, and I can’t wait to install a router.

I’ve been reading Bill Hylton’s router books. This man is not a fan of gadgetry. For example, I thought I needed a miter track in my table, but he says only a FOOL would have a router track. Actually, he uses the phrase “completely unnecessary.” He even thinks lifts are silly. I think. It sure looks that way.

I don’t care. I want convenience. I don’t want to pull the fricking router out from under the table over and over, and I don’t want to suffer with under-the-table adjustments. Maybe it will turn out that I’m stupid and wrong. I’ll get over it. I always have.

I thought I needed a fancy aluminum fence, but I was utterly lost and consumed with ignorance. Hylton uses crappy bits of MDF and scrap wood. So there’s a big expenditure I won’t be making. But I’ll have to be all manly and craft a dust thing to put on my scrap fences. I also need something to catch dust that falls through the hole in the table.

For the three times a year when I actually use this thing.

I seriously think I should hook up a blower and make a hole in the garage wall, so the sawdust goes out in the grass. It’s MULCH! It IS! Really! Sort of.

You could eject three hundred pounds of dust out there, and two days later, you would see no evidence. But while it’s easy to suck dust, and it’s easy to blow dust, it’s not easy to make a thing that sucks it while also blowing it.

I have a template for the router lift. Naturally, that turned out to be a total waste of money. Hylton says he-men make their own templates by routing around a lift plate’s edge.

Once the rabbet for the lift is cut, I’ll have to get rid of all the material inside it. How on earth do I do that? I never thought about it. Some people use a jigsaw. Which I do not have. Real men drop a circular saw straight onto the table. I assumed I would do it with the router. That may take a while, with an inch of MDF to cut.

I need to build a few things, in order to develop some competence. I’m wondering if I have what it takes to make a humidor. I don’t really need one, but I have never been happy with the one I bought for my dad. Maybe I could make a better one.

Shut up. It could happen.

Come on, UPS. I’m bored.

Hope So

I took my new sliding miter saw out of the box and stuck it on the woodworking table today. It’s HUGE. I’m going to have to have the table a few inches out from the wall in order to use the saw. That’s not a problem, though, since I have to move the table out to get clearance for any wood I care to saw. I haven’t tried putting it on the Workmate yet. I may do that.

The other day I complained that I was going to need outfeed support for my tools. People suggested some roller doodads. I know I will irritate toolheads when I describe the solution I found. Kelly Mehler’s table saw video confronts the issue, and Mehler uses a sawhorse with a top surface half an inch lower than the saw table. You may wonder why he doesn’t use fancy rollers. He said rollers steer the work. The wood will naturally move perpendicularly to a roller’s axis. That means you have to have the roller aligned at a perfect right angle to the direction of the wood’s movement on the saw table. With a sawhorse and two-by-four, you don’t get this problem. And the total cost is about five bucks, plus scrap wood. Rollers are considerably more expensive.

The big miter saw should be a great convenience. The vast majority of cuts I make are short, and this thing goes up to 13.5″. You aren’t supposed to rip with it, though. Bummer. I wonder if I can get away with it for short rips, with the wood clamped in there real good. I’ve gotten away with it with my smaller miter saw.

A radial arm saw might have been a better answer, but try to find a nice used one in this area. And they say it’s easy to julienne yourself with a radial arm saw.

I think once I have a band saw and a drill press, I will feel like I can cope with almost every tool problem I am willing to face.

Of course, I am not known for my realistic expectations.

I’ll Just Get my Protractor and Line up These Wrenches

I am amazing.

I was reading my router table book–I bought Bill Hylton’s router table book–when I realized the garage was still a mess from all the stuff I did yesterday. So I went out and took all the screws and anchors out of their little packages and stuck them in drawers in the wall organizer thing, and I put a P-Touch label on each drawer! I should put a gold star on my forehead.

The book is very good. In the front, it says Bill Hylton was an editor before he wrote the book, and he only did it because he couldn’t find anyone else to do it. Maybe that explains why it’s a good book. He knew what bad tool books were like, because he used to fix them.

The woodworking table I am trying to build magically flattened itself overnight. I guess the pressure of the two-by-six I screwed onto it wore it out. I checked the flatness from front to back–the other direction–and damned if I don’t have another two-by-six to install. Oh, well. That should be easy. I think I’ll put one short board on either side of the router, to compensate for the weakness caused by cutting the hole for the lift.

It turned out I had some parts for my Grr-ripper I had failed to install, so I put those in, and I took the leftover stuff and put it in a little drawer in my electronics cabinet, marked “GRR-RIPPER.” I am too cool.

So far I mainly use tools to make things to help me use my tools. But eventually, I will work on something not tool-related. And then you will all go down on your knees and give me my props. Oh, yes. You WILL give me my props. Or at least one. Prop, I mean.

Beat Your Power Tools With a Hammer

Okay, the sensation of manliness has worn off, and I feel like an idiot again.

I’ve been watching Taunton’s Router Joinery DVD, with Gary Rogowski. He says he has been making furniture for 20 years, so I guess he knows a few things.

Remember all the BS I’ve been through with my router aspirations? I got a big-ass plunge router with a huge motor. I wanted to be able to use it in a table, and I wanted to be able to change bits and so on without reaching under the table, so I bought a lift and a router plate. For days, I’ve been agonizing, trying to get my old MDF/melamine desk perfectly flat so I could mount the plate in it.

Guess what this guy uses for a router table? A crappy sheet of melamine with a hole in it. I am not kidding. It’s like two by three feet, and it has NO attachments except for a router base. It has no dust collection hole. No cutesy fence. Is it flat? I very much doubt it. He sets it up by putting about four inches of it on a workbench and holding it in place with TWO CLAMPS. There is no way it doesn’t flex when it has weight on it. I can’t believe it hasn’t snapped.

His router? It’s a Stanley. I know; I didn’t know they made routers, either. It’s probably thirty years old. It’s such a piece of crap, he has to bang on it with a hammer to make the bits come out. He has other routers, too, but he seems to use this one just to torment people like me, who actually spend money on tools.

His fence is a piece of scrap held in place with clamps. This guy is a professional woodworker, and it appears he has invested about two hundred dollars in tools.

I want to kill him.

I haven’t gone all that crazy. Some guys buy $300 lifts and $900 tables. I have a router and a lift and a cheesy old desk; that’s not so bad. But compared to Gary Rogowski, I’m wildly extravagant.

I was considering giving my old Sears router and table away, but now that I’ve seen what this man does with horrible tools, I may have to keep them. Although I really hate that router. You adjust the depth by turning the router inside a plastic collar which gets stuck once a certain amount of sawdust hits it. I hate it. I HATE it. Maybe the table is worth keeping.

I need a band saw.

Look, leave me alone.

Norm Abrams is a Loser

I just finished screwing a two-by-six to the underside of my routing-table-to-be. I only made one mistake, and it was one of those things people never find out about until they take things apart.

I got a funny result. The left half of the table is now absolutely true. The right half is damn near true, but not quite. And oddly, most of the problem is in the 3″ of the table that are beyond the two-by-six. I would say we are looking at maybe 0.2-0.3 millimeters. I don’t know if that’s bad enough to cause problems. I very much doubt it, considering the kind of crap I am likely to use the table for.

I learned one fun thing today. Melamine and MDF don’t like being drilled with Forstner bits. This stuff is pretty hard.

Question: how much MDF/melamine dust do I have to breathe to be sure of getting a gigantic tumor? I was a few holes into the project before it occurred to me to put on a mask. If that’s not a big enough dose, I can always go out there, put some dust in a spoon, and eat it.

The router lift will be here on Monday, more or less. Between now and then, I have time to play with shims. And the table might straighten up on its own, I suppose.

If I decide to try shimming, I think I’ll cut something out of thick paper instead of trying to make a wooden shim. I don’t think I would enjoy trying to cut a 0.3mm slice off a two-by six.

I feel all manly now. This is a rare sensation, so I am trying to enjoy it.

I had to get a 7/8″ Forstner bit at Home Depot today, and when I got there, they had a regular old bit for like five bucks, plus the super-amazing Porter Cable bit assortment, with slip-proof hex-shaped shafts as well as some remarkable improvement or other that makes them cut UP TO TWICE AS FAST AS REGULAR FORSTNER BITS and they were only $45, and they came with a box which, I’ll bet, would cost me like $25 to make, so it’s as if the bits were only $20, and, well, obviously I made the smart choice.

It’s a shame a person with my gift for rationalizing isn’t married. Look what I’m wasting.

More

Forgot to say, I ordered a router DVD, and it arrived today. I plan to break that out to enjoy with lunch. And here’s something crazy: Woodworking With the Router, by Bill Hylton, has gotten hard to find. A new version is coming out next year, and the 2006 one has disappeared. I found it online at McFeely’s, so I ordered that, too.

Heh heh. Life is sweet.

It’s amazing how much pleasure I get from things that are utterly trivial.

“I’ll Sneak up on Jeff Bob and Try to Insert a Tag”

Because I am a failure and I do not possess a 7/8″ Forstner bit, I had to quit working on my woodworking table pretty early yesterday. I get to bed between 8:30 and 9:00, so I’m glad things didn’t work out, because I think there is a good chance I would have stayed up late and ruined my morning.

I ended up watching a woodworking video with Marv and Maynard. It’s a Taunton.com video about table saws, featuring a guy named Kelly Mehler. It was so relaxing. When you have tools but still can’t get anything done, they cause anxiety. When you see someone tackle similar problems effortlessly, it’s incredibly soothing. I do not know why.

Maybe this is how women want to feel when they pick husbands. “Look at all the crap this guy can do; he can take CARE of me.”

Oh, hey, it looks like he has his own site: Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking.

He works in Berea, Kentucky, where my late mom went to boarding school. According to her, Berea was “arty.” I think that means a lot of yankees had descended on the place and tried to turn it into a bizarre and geographically inappropriate colony of longhairs. I don’t know too much about Berea, but I believe it’s one of those towns where they have a whole lot of people making butter churns with hand tools. It’s probably the kind of place where it’s very easy to buy a really good chisel.

I don’t know if the theme of the place has anything to do with Appalachian culture. To hear my mom tell it, the situation was pretty much the opposite.

Wikipedia says a past president of Berea College started the artsy-craftsy metamorphosis, hoping to capitalize on the national market for Kentucky crafts. I don’t want to break anybody’s rice bowl, but Eastern Kentucky is not known for finely crafted items. It’s just not. It’s not even known for good construction. The old houses tend to have crooked walls and sloping floors. I’ve been all over Appalachia, and one of the things I noticed was that old houses and buildings in North Carolina looked a hell of a lot better than they did in Kentucky. The difference is very obvious.

I’ll bet the vast majority of the people making this junk are from out of state, and that they have taught the locals ten times what the locals have taught them. I’m just being honest. People up there have always made great music and fantastic quilts, but I can’t think of anything else they do really well. The sad truth is, people who are good at things generally leave, to get away from the bad local economy. They call it “brain drain.” This is why I grew up in Florida.

Kentucky attracts people who are much more excited about its culture than they have any right to be. One example: Appalshop. This is an outfit in my dad’s hometown, Whitesburg. This town is located among some of the most nearly vertical terrain in the US. The hills aren’t all that high, but they’re about four feet apart. It’s very close to West Virginia. For some reason, a bunch of hippies showed up and started documenting the culture and recording the music. That’s Appalshop.

It’s kind of odd, because culturally, the hippies are about as much like the locals as Cambodians. Their values are utterly foreign. Nobody in Eastern Kentucky wants to hear about composting and tofu and recycling. People who preach that stuff are lucky if their houses don’t get burned down. The only liberal value people in Eastern Kentucky support is the desire to addict people to welfare checks. When it comes to government money, they are hardcore socialists, on the same page as Saul Alinsky.

Here’s a handout horror story. My aunt was a school principal up there. She said people in her town instructed their kids to fail ADD tests so they would get stuff from the government. Imagine that. “Honey, be sure you don’t bust 600 on the SAT, so mamaw can get free Ding Dongs.”

It’s kind of insulting, having hippies educated in New England show up and “help” the locals preserve their culture. But I guess they’re not going away. If I lived up there, and they came to record me playing the autoharp or the banjo, I’d feel like a monkey at the zoo. It’s funny; no one seems to notice the implicit condescension. There is nothing flattering about having yankees show up, take photos of you, your house, and your family, and treat you like a newly discovered aborigine.

I wonder why the hippie organizations don’t send people into black ghettos to preserve the wonderful culture. Okay, I don’t really wonder. It’s because it’s harder to get away with condescending to black people.

I think people from Appalachia should get in vans and go to places like Michigan and Massachusetts and document the culture. Problem is, people in places like that don’t have any discernible culture. “Here’s Lance and his wife Margaret. Let’s see if we can film them playing some indigenous music. Oh, wait. That’s right. They HAVE no indigenous music, because they’re exactly like people in California and Indiana. Well, maybe we can film them hitting a bucket of balls at the driving range.”

I want some more woodworking videos. I can’t get enough of this stuff. For some reason, they’re the best tool videos. The metalworking stuff just isn’t as satisfying. Maybe it’s because metalworking is so much easier. Metal does whatever you want. At least it seems that way.