Woodwork – Thwarted Again

Lots of little things

A few weeks back my 2001 Honda Accord that I bought new crossed 200,000 miles. It has been a fantastic car but I told myself I would start shopping for a new one when it got to 200k and so I have been. So far I’ve driven a BMW 335d, a Lexus CT Hybrid and an Acura TSX wagon. I have been dreading the car shopping experience. I’m not a particularly assertive person. More of a go along to get along which means that I’m basically sure I’m going to get taken advantage of at the dealership. However, it’s turned out to be not as bad as I thought. The BMW dealer was excellent. They let me take the car out with just me and my friend. The saleman didn’t pressure me at all and just asked if we had questions when we got back and then wished us a good afternoon. The Lexus dealer was a little more pushy and the Acura dealer a little more than that but all of them were polite and I wouldn’t say I got the hard sell from anyone.

The 335d is very fun. It’s 265hp, 425lb-ft and is otherwise very sporty. It is, by far, the most expensive of the three and you have to pay for every little thing option wise but it definitely stands out in terms of driving experience. It does get 23 city / 36 hwy which is fantastic.

The TSX wagon is basically my Accord ten years later. It has a nicer interior and a Nav and a lot of little improvements here and there and the wagon part is nice because I could just toss my bike in the back. It does want premium gas though which is kinda meh considering that it gets 22/30

The CTh is not really for me. It’s completely gutless and the center console is like this giant wall between you and the passenger seat and the “NuLux” interior is plastic. I’d rather cloth than that stuff or at least a real leather option. Leather is actually a fantastic material and not just because it’s fancy.

Anyway, the 335d and the TSX are candidates right now. I figure I should go try a Chevy Volt and maybe like a VW Jetta TDI. Need to check Consumer Reports on that last one because I have a lot of apprehension about VW reliability.

So, that’s cars. I also finally got the TR6 running enough to back it out of the garage a few times in September which means that I got a little work done on the eternal bookshelf project. Of course I managed to aggravate a radiator leak badly enough that now I need to get a new one of those so I stop leaving big green puddles on the rubber mat under the damned car. There’s a guy on Ebay that sells new ones for ~$270 + s/h which beats the hell out of the $450ish that the resto catalogs want. But anyway, bookshelves. I found a paint that I like for the final finish. Sherwin Williams ProClassic Acrylic Latex. It’s water based so painting and cleaning isn’t awful and it dries fast and hard so it will be reasonable to use on something I actually use regularly. I’ve milled the face frame pieces and dry fit them and they look good. I have also milled the map drawer pieces and they are awaiting priming, painting and assembly. Basically the big obstacle right now is the top. I still don’t know what I’m going to do about that. Good news is that a sheet of bamboo plywood similar to the floor in the office is down to $270 from $400 so I’m more likely to do that now since it isn’t a huge deal if I mess it up and have to try again.

I rode the 60 mile route in the LiveStrong Challenge a couple of weekends back and that was good. It was a lot harder than it should have been because I basically didn’t ride the bike at all in August because of the 106 F median high temp for that month and September wasn’t really enough to get back into shape. I have been riding a little more in October though and it’s been good to be back into it. It’s been cooler too which really helps.

I joined www.fitocracy.com this last week. It’s basically Facebook + WoW for exercising. You log your activities when you do them and it awards you points which causes you to “level-up”. I put quotes around that because there’s basically no point to it. You don’t get anything for your levels. There are Achievements and Quests too. Quests are sort of progress indicators. Like for bicycling there is 10k, 50k and 100k that I know of and you have to do the first one to unlock the next one and so on. Achievements are more like milestones and you can earn them whenever. There are Achievements for various lifts 0.9x body weight bench press, 15 pullups, 1000 career miles run, that sort of thing. I expect that the list of those will grow because there aren’t any for a lot of different thing that people commonly do for exercise. It’s a pretty good idea and is responsible for me riding my bike to Mighty Fine today rather than driving the car so I guess it’s working.

Finally, the “Power Ball” lottery was up to like $208M last night so I bought a ticket because why-the-hell-not. And I matched one number and the power-ball which got me FOUR DOLLARS WOO! So now I have another ticket for the $245M drawing and a Big Red soda and $1.39 in change. Not bad at all.

Oh! One last thing. Apparently the clothes that I had tailored for my birthday present to me are finished and are ready to ship. The charges were declined by the card company but I got that sorted today so when they try again it should go through and then they’ll mail me my new duds.

Almost a box

I now have cabinet carcasses. You could set a book on one if you wanted but it would look a little silly. I still need to stick the back boards on the boxes but I’ll hold off on that until I’ve painted the box. Bill was kind enough to loan me his paint spray gun. I also want to see if they actually fit in the room too in case I need to have a bonfire. Wouldn’t want to waste paint on kindling. So, what’s left? Backs on the cabinets, glue the book cases, backs on the book cases, make face frames and tops… on second thought let’s not go enumerating all of the remaining things so I don’t feel terrible. Let’s rather say that some day I will finish the shelves and perhaps books will not be completely obsolete by then. Yes, we’ll say that. Anyway, here’s pictures.

Also, I know I’m doing it wrong with the lap joints on the panels but I don’t care so nyah.

le sigh

So there’s this old woodworking adage, “Measure twice, cut once.” That’s super. I did all my maths and then did them again and decided that the rabbet in the back of the bookshelves to accept the back sheet of plywood should be 3/8″ X 1/4″. That would allow the plywood to be recessed into the case by 1/8″ and fit snugly to make sure the case was square and did not rack. So I set up my saw with the dado cutter to do 1/4″ wide cut, 3/8″ deep and ran the pieces through. Oops. That should have been 3/8″ wide and 1/4″ deep. See illustration. I think I know what I’m going to do to fix this without buying new plywood but man, what a pain in the ass. I would propose an amendment to the rule to be “Measure twice, cut once, don’t be a dumbass” but I think that last part is supposed to be understood.

oops
A:Reality B:Design

Is it furniture yet?

No. It is not. But I’m making progress. The bookshelf project has benefited from my sudden surplus of free time. All of the wood has been cut to size and the hardwood blanks got run through the jointer this afternoon to remove the saw marks and try to square them up a little. Pictures!

I will need to spend a little time getting the various dadoes and other milling things well defined and written down before tackling the next part but that’s ok because it’s time to get the garden ready so I’ll be able to think about that whilst carting around rocks and dirt. Now that it seems spring is here to stay more flowers have appeared in the yard. The wisteria in the front is blooming again and the bumble bees are fighting over it. Also, the daffodils in the back bed are blooming and there are more of them this year than last which is encouraging. There’s also a pink shrubby thing in the back by the sago palms that is very pretty but I can’t remember what it is called and I haven’t managed to take a decent picture of it for the album. More pictures!

Shop

I am whupped. This weekend was spent mostly in the garage. There are new shelves on the walls replacing the craptacular free standing metal and MDF shelving I had before. It’s wire shelving that has standards which hang from a top rail like the Elfa stuff they sell at the container store though it has a different brand name. I wonder if it’s actually the same stuff. I still need two more shelves since the Home Depot was running low when I was there but I already have most of the stuff off the floor which was the goal. The table saw is now on its new rolling platform parked neatly under the hanging shelves which is very nice. It took me an hour and a half to put the “mobile base” together though, mostly due to the fact that math is hard.

The jointer came from Amazon on Thursday and I put that together this afternoon. I think it may actually be heavier than the table saw. It works well though so I’m looking forward to the start of the cabinet building. Of course I didn’t actually manage to do any actual woodworking this weekend with all of the shelving, organizing, cleaning and construction. Maybe next weekend. Also, I have six cans of WD-40. I think I’m set on that for the rest of my life.

jointer

Lots of stuff

I had a little vacation last week. It was great. Didn’t bring the camera though so you’ll just have to use your imagination. Since MoMA is having their van Gogh exhibit now and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to see all of those paintings again in my lifetime I figured out a way to go and see it. I flew to Philadelphia Thursday, had a nice dinner at Brasserie Perrier that night which was superb. I had pumpkin ravioli to start followed by the crispy duck breast and a side of root vegetable au gratin and pear crisp for dessert. It was all very good and the service was excellent. I got up early Friday morning, took the Amtrak into Penn Station in Manhattan and walked the twenty blocks up to the museum. First of all, the membership is great. There was a huge line to get in and a timed entry ticket system for the van Gogh both of which I got to skip completely thanks to my magic plastic card. The van Gogh exhibit itself was very crowded but completely worth the trip. The Starry Night Over the RhÃ´ne is amazing. I haven’t seen a picture of it that does it justice. In fact I ended up going through the show three separate times throughout the day.

The rest of the museum is fantastic as well. There is a gallery of the painting and sculpture highlights on their website that is representative of the collection. I was in awe all day long. It’s funny to go into a place and see things which were in your textbooks growing up. I’m just going to start linking in things I saw that were superb. Boccioni, Rousseau, Picasso, also Picasso, Pollock, Monet. I briefly considered hosting the images locally and in-lining them here but I think that might have some unpleasant copyright implications so instead you should just click the links and enjoy the show.

I also saw the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall in Philadelphia and had a Philly cheese steak and a slice of genuine New York style pizza. It was a great trip. Hopefully I’ll get to go back again soon.

Let’s see, other stuff. Before I went on vacation I finished the cutting diagrams and bought the wood for my bookshelves. I’ll start breaking that down into the component parts this weekend. This project has been a long time in the works and I’m not expecting it to get done quickly but I’d like to have the individual cases constructed by the end of the year at least. I’m pretty happy with how the design came out. The asymmetry is minimal considering the limitations of the room. My current complaints are that a) Engineered bamboo plywood costs about ten times what it should meaning I will have to get creative for the desktop and b) Lowes doesn’t sell my choice of jointer anymore so I ended up ordering one from Amazon. They’re giving me free shipping though so that’s nice.

The not-so-super, not-so-secret dining room lighting project also continues. The electronic proof of concept has been designed and laid out and the PCB is in queue to be manufactured on the other side of the world. The company providing this service is BatchPCB which takes a bunch of board designs puts them all onto one big 11″ x 15″ panel and then has them cut apart. It’s a pretty good deal for prototyping. When it comes time to have 120 half-inch square boards made I may need to re-evaluate my vendor. The whole design process has turned out to be much less difficult than I had expected it to be. SparkFun has good tutorials on using Eagle to do schematic and PCB design and the software only took about a week to get comfortable with. I’m sure it’s quite a bit more powerful than I’m currently exploiting but it was quick to pick up. All the actual electronic parts and my shiny new soldering iron came in last week so now I just need the board to finish up and I’m ready to see if I’m any good at routing electrons.

With all of the projects in progress and the fab shutdown and the holidays and art shows coming up it’s looking to be a busy winter. Plus there’s this video game I used to play that has an expansion next week. I may have to get some folks to lash me to the mast lest I be overcome by its call. I have to admit that though my account remains inactive my client is up to date as of this week so all it would take now is a moment of weakness and a scroll of resurrection.

Small Stellated Dodecahedron

A while back I received a very nice pendant light for my entry way from my mother. The catalog at Lighting Universe calls it a moravian star though I’m not sure that’s technically correct based on looking at the google results for that term. It is however a fairly specific mathematical solid called a Small Stellated Dodecahedron. A regular dodecahedron has 12 sides each of which is a regular pentagon. If you imagine each of the sides as being part of a plane and then extend that plane outwards and look to see where they all intersect one of the sets of intersections makes this small stellated dodecahedron. It’s a nice looking solid and it has some fun mathematical properties, not the least of which is that the angle between any two adjacent faces is the same. This becomes important later.

I decided that I wanted to try to make one of these. There’s an ultimate motive behind this but that particular project is so far down the priority list that it might as well be in my will. One star made out of wood is an achievable, short term kind of project. I bought a few pieces of pre-dimensioned pine and some 1/2″ MDF for making jigs and got to work. The first step was to cut 60 triangles out of the pine. I ended up cutting more like 80 due to a few errors early on and so I would have a few extras to practice on. That was fairly easy. Put a gap block on the table slotted into one of the guide grooves to get a constant gap, set the miter gauge on the slide to 18Â° to get the right angle on the triangles (36Â°, 72Â°, 72Â° isosceles) and then flip the board after each pass.

The next part is a little more difficult. Once you have your triangles you need to bevel the edges so they will fit together correctly to make the points of the star. If you use the math from the mathworld page you get an angle between planes of 116.57Â°. That means the bevel angle needs to be half that or 58.3Â°. The table saw is not really set up for sub degree precision on cuts but you can get there with, again, some trial and error. It is also helpful to have a few jigs to stick the piece in because that means you keep your soft, meaty fingers away from the hungry saw and, depending on how you build the jig, you can cut more than one bevel at a time. Once I got the jigs made, tested and refined it ended up taking about four hours to cut the three bevels per piece. Once they’re all cut they look like this.

After all of the pieces are ready I started gluing them. The way I found easiest was to glue two triangles together and let that dry instead of trying to put all five per point together at once. When you have two sets of two and one single it’s easier to make the pyramidal point. After I’d made all 12 pyramids I glued three at a time into a quarter of the structure. Then finally glued the four quarters into the final star. The gallery of pictures is here and I’ve put a few more thumbnails below. I think it turned out ok and I gave it to a friend who liked it. Now I need to finally get my ass in gear on my book shelves. Wish me luck.

Model

table The SketchUp model of the table is finished. There a copy of the file here in case anyone wants to have a look at it. I’ve also uploaded a few screen shots to the gallery here and made a little animation which fades between a few of the different display modes. The animation is a little more than 1mb so nsf56k or something.

Table Finished

The end table is finished. The travertine block from Travertine Stone Products (or possibly Webb & Reed, Inc. according to the business card I collected today with my stone) looks great in the table. The koi pull from Bright and Thorpe via the Hardware Hut is fantastic. The glass from Anchor Ventana fits perfectly. Thank you to all my wonderful suppliers and to everyone who encouraged me and listened patiently to my complaining and worrying and thanks to Bill for finding TSP for me and to Heather for helping me get exactly what I wanted in the way of a rock. Bill took some pictures of it today for me though clearly the lighting in the house is still problematic for photography even if you have a fancy camera and I don’t really know what I’m doing around the color and light balance portions of the photo editing software.

Here’s a big picture that links to the gallery.

Blueprints

Though I used to mess about with POVRay back in the day I actually know precious little about drafting/modeling software. This project is coming to a close but I will want to build a second one of these tables in the future. I decided that having an actual schematic with measurements in an electronic format for the table would be a useful thing to have so I don’t have to keep hunting around for the piece of copier paper that originally I drew it on. Google pointed me at their own solution for this which is called SketchUp. It’s decent and the time from installation to being able to use it isn’t bad. The built in instructions are pretty good and have little animations to show you what it is you’re supposed to be doing with the tool you have selected. I’ve modeled the four side pieces of the top so far. Ultimately I think I’ll model the whole thing and then lay the pieces out in cutting diagram form. Maybe there’s even a useful way to upload it here and let everyone play along. Tomorrow is rock day!