The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins With a Single CutThe first look at a beginner's journey into woodworking with a ShopSmith. Continue Reading
Workbench: It works if you work it (and build it)!!Building a wall-mounted workbench (with modifications) to fit a one-car garage shop. Continue Reading
Custom-Built ShopSmith-Mounted CabinetA three-part series about building and mounting an under-ShopSmith storage cabinet. Continue Reading
The last assignment of Lesson 1 is miter cuts, Part 1 and Part 2 of this series cover the other assignments. That is, making angular cross cuts across the stock at any desired angle. As an introduction to this technique, the most common angle of 45-degrees is presented. Cuts are made to produce a kind of frame.
Each side has two 45-degree miter cuts, which assemble into a rectangular form
In the following video, I run through the process with a couple of different approaches.
Glancing ahead a bit in the lessons, I see that these pieces will be used in future assignments, so I will not be gluing them up at this time.
In my last post,
I posted my first shop video. And while it takes a while to edit video
footage and put together a project, I am much more likely to get useful
imagery to post here. Therefore, I will be making more video content,
even if it takes me just a bit longer to get a post up here. While I
strive to make weekly updates (mostly on Saturdays), I would rather have
well documented content that most clearly demonstrates what I am doing.
This week, I continued in Lesson 1 of the self-study course. Previously, I did assignments 1 - 5. Assignment 6 instructs in the creation of a tongue and groove joint.
As described, this assignment called for stock 3/4" thick. Unfortunately, all that I had to hand that was of sufficient dimensions otherwise was 1" thick. This turned out to be extra educational, as I was forced to also learn how to adapt measurements to achieve the desired result.
I ended up sawing off the tongues and grooves, and repeated this assignment about 6 times (once per side), until the stock was too narrow to safely saw on edge.
Reviewing the video helped me identify some of the trouble I was having (another reason I like video!). I was using a zero-clearance insert, which you can see sits just a bit below the surface of the main table. I was measuring blade height to the table surface, and not the insert surface, which for the face cuts on the tongues didn't matter, but for all the cuts with the board on edge, it made a variance in the depth of the cut.
The table may have also been just slightly out of square in relation to the blade, which combined with the raw lumber led to distinct problems in getting good fitting joints. Guess I need to buy some pre-surfaced boards until I learn about that!
The big news for today is that we have termites. We saw some mud tubes yesterday, and the inspector came out today and confirmed subterranean termites. This took a large portion of the day, and by the time he left, it was way too hot and humid to start anything in the shop. I will try again tomorrow.
What I was able to do today was a quick shop tour video!!
This is the first video that I've ever made that wasn't just a quick capture on my phone. I actually used video editing software, Openshot! I'm not displeased with the result, particularly since I kludged it out at coffee. While never having used the software before.
Nothing else for now, but if I make it out tomorrow, I will have a supplemental post for the week.
