Nothing Ventured…

I achieved virtually nothing today, but I had fun anyway. I was trying to make a guard for my table saw, and I also finished up my first MDF zero-clearance insert.

Everyone at Sawmill Creek says MDF is great for inserts. What they failed to tell me, or what I failed to read when they told me, was that this stuff is no fun to drill. You get a crater going in and a blowout going out. It looks like the only way to avoid this is to put your MDF between slices of scrap. Then you have a hard time figuring out exactly where the drill hole will be, which matters when you’re putting a set screw 1/4″ from the edge of an insert.

I managed to do an adequate job. The piece of scrap I glued to the back of the insert to stiffen it is holding on, the set screws work, the slots are in the right places, and nothing has exploded.

Working on the guard was a nightmare. The splitter mount on the Powermatic 66 has no room around it, so you can’t really get a wrench on the jam nut. Maybe you could if you took the blade off. EVERY TIME YOU ADJUST THE SPLITTER. You can imagine what a pain this is, when you have to adjust it ten times. I worked around it with channel-locks, which probably saved no time at all. This probably took a solid hour out of my day. Here’s a great lesson: if you have a nut under your table saw top, holding your splitter on, replace it with a wingnut. I plan to do that. It will be more than tight enough, and I won’t have to keep a 9/16″ on the bench all the time.

I learned that a table saw is a wonderful tool for shaping thin aluminum, provided you don’t care how many fingers you have at the end of the day. It’s ironic; I had to do a lot of things that made me very nervous, while trying to build a SAFETY DEVICE.

I had some aluminum angle…I can’t call it “angle iron,” but I don’t know the right name. Anyway, you get the idea. I was able to turn it into useful flat pieces of aluminum by sawing it lengthwise. Then I had to turn the aluminum into a splitter and guard support, and wouldn’t you know it, the first pieces I cut were too short. I should have measured, but this was one of those times when you don’t measure, because you’re sure the pieces you’re cutting are way too long, and you plan to measure when you cut them down to size. I couldn’t believe the splitter was too short. I had to start all over.

I know aluminum can mess up a wood blade, but I had no problems, and I have two dozen blades, so I was willing to take the chance. The blade I used was a Corian blade with about fifty thousand teeth. This is not what you use to cut thick aluminum, but for an eighth of an inch, it was jim dandy.

I had to interrupt my day to check my car’s codes, twice. It’s going “BLOOP…BLOOP.” I figured it was another COP problem, but the scanner says no codes. Maybe there’s water in my gas. Guess it’s time for a trip to Discount Auto Parts. That sucks, but it beats another warranty repair, which would entail handing my car over to thieves so they could sabotage it in order to get me to pay for more work. The COPs are on a special warranty; the rest of the car is my problem.

Reminds me how much I want a pickup. Maybe next month I’ll buy a new Ford for forty dollars and some table scraps.

I have a Wixey angle gauge. I decided to give up and get one, because some gadgets are such labor-savers, you have to be a complete fool not to buy them. Put it on my saw today, zeroed it, stuck it on the blade. Readout: 90.0 degrees. Thank God for that. That’s one tedious adjustment I won’t have to make. I also got a Wixey digital planer readout. In retrospect, that was probably stupid. I would guess a planer is accurate to 1/64″ without the digital thing. That’s probably good enough.

The chicken I fixed for lunch was fantastic. I guess baked chicken is always fantastic, unless you’re the worst cook in the galaxy. It’s not exactly challenging. I’ll tell you what I did anyway.

Winn-Dixie was selling fryers for about three cents each, so I got one. I salted it, hit it with black pepper and cheapo garlic powder, injected it with Korbel Brut mixed with salt, and draped a few leaves of fresh rosemary on it. Stuck it in a Corningware dish, covered, and baked it at 300 for about four hours. When I remembered it was in the oven, it had flattened out as though depressed. That’s because it had gotten too tender to be perky. I left all the fat in the chicken when I baked it, and it melted and formed a gorgeous fragrant pool. And the chicken was nicely browned.

So far, the saw guard design is feeble, but I know what’s wrong with it, and it’s easy to fix. I’ll crank it out soon. After it’s operative, maybe I’ll order a Shark Guard. The shopmade guard will keep me alive until it arrives. The advantage of the Shark Guard is that it has a dust port, which is a real pain to make.

I found a trash pile with what I think may be mahogany logs in it. Not sure. It’s not the best wood on earth; the logs are hollow. But you could still resaw them and get some wood which would be more than adequate to make beautiful boxes. If you take a two-foot log that’s eighteen inches thick, and it’s hollow, you should be able to get boards maybe two inches thick and a foot wide out of it. That’s definitely worthwhile. If it’s live oak, however, it’s not all that desirable. I may go swipe a log and cut it open. Aren’t bandsaws great?

I’m reading up on cutting and drying wood. Might be doable.

Sleep awaits.