Bombarde16

(A zombie topic rises from the grave!) So, seven years later, I'm finally going to give this a shot. This is the wreckage of my girlfriend's 7' concolor fir. (long, grayish needles, smells like citrus) I've also got a 6' fraser fir that will come down later this week for a similar reckoning with the band saw. The goal is to process this into strips which I can then chop up for a segmented turning of some sort. Perhaps a sphere? Stickered and stacked in the basement. Now we wait to see how badly they're going to self-destruct. I'm betting I'll know within a month whether or not this was a stupid idea.

Indeed. I seem to recall that CNC folks often fire plastic fasteners into the spoil board to hold things down, the theory being that the router can run right through with no ill effect. If these were a little smaller, that might also work.

Old thread, but still a good place to snap and share. Some of these are glorious!

I need a set of roller cradles for an upcoming project. Similar to what you see in this picture. I have a quarter sheet of 1/2" MDF that I'm tired of tripping over. And I've never tried Izzy Swan's table saw turning technique. Put all of this together and you have a level 5 shop cleanup in the making. https://youtu.be/HfICKP3ZrLc Some people say that MDF stands for "medium density fiberboard". They are incorrect. It stands for "maximum dust flurry". I'm always amazed at how much I despise working with MDF...and my seemingly limitless capacity to forget how much I despise working with MDF. Loathesome materials aside, Izzy's technique works quite well. Even including the time to make a single use jig, this was almost as fast as doing this on the lathe and the consistency is all but foolproof.

They totally weren't paying attention when they racked these magazines in the local Lowes...or were they?

People say it on the internet so it must be true, right? The rumor is that softwoods (spruces, pines, firs, etc.) are, once dried, actually more stable than hardwoods. It's counter-intuitive, since most of us encounter softwoods as construction lumber which is carelessly milled and sold sopping wet. But, the rumor goes, if you treat a piece of SPF with the attention and love that woodworking entails (i.e. rip out the pith, stack it, let it dry, mill it square, etc.) it will reward you with greater stability through the seasons than its deciduous brethren. Myth or Truth? My instinct is that it's technically true...but that the supposed benefit is generally not enough to outweigh the extra hassle of salvaging usable stock from construction lumber, especially among a.) professionals for whom time is money and b.) beginners who may not fully understand the subtleties of drying and milling lumber. The exception to this would be the less common case of an advanced hobbyist who a.) isn't counting his hours as money and b.) who understands how to mill lumber and possibly c.) who has access to "free" scraps from a construction site or a dumpster. Thoughts? Does anyone have any practical experience with this?

Realistically? Nah. The nuclear fireball in the sky laughs at your paste wax. Were it otherwise, people could use the stuff to save the color in woods such as padauk or purpleheart. Pictures of the finished cabinet?

I opened the mailbox this morning to find a recall notice from "Chang Type" stating that my little Porter-Cable saw (model PCX362010) has been recalled. Of the hundreds of thousands of units sold in North America, some have had trouble with motors overheating. I purchased mine in 2016 ('15?) as a stopgap while living in temporary quarters. I made thousands of cuts with it and it did everything I asked of it. That last part, I suppose, is key: What did I ask of it? I never asked it to do anything that it couldn't handle...OK, maybe I did push the bounds of sanity once or twice by bevel ripping a 12' long 2x12, but I knew full well I was being an idiot to do that. I made dozens of projects with this saw and even packed it on the road for some jobsite work out of state. Without this saw, I wouldn't have been able to make everything I needed to get my basement shop online to the point of welcoming my big, new Grizzly last year. Make no mistake, it's an abysmal piece of crap. The fence never truly grabbed firm and I got in the habit of clamping a block of wood against the backside so it wouldn't scoot away from the blade while ripping. I made three different sleds for it and held a ceremonial trashing of the worthless stock miter gauge. For all that, I wore out a dozen or more blades and the motor never gave me any grief, always starting up with a bone-jarring bang and then screaming its little head off. Once I got my basement shop operational, I bodgered up some cleats for this saw and hung it in the garage. I pulled it down and dragged it out into the driveway to make one or two cuts last year, just to break down some MDF that I didn't want to cut indoors. It's nice to have a cheap, secondary saw and I may yet treat myself to another. But when the recall notice arrived, I figured I could say goodbye and be quite happy with the run it gave me. I photographed my signature next to the requisite three cuts in the wiring and uploaded it all to the official website as directed. And now we wait for a refund check which (fingers crossed) will be a little more than half of what I paid for it. I'll keep the folding stand and maybe turn it into a folding table. The power cord can certainly be repurposed. All in all, I'm satisfied. This saw was insanely practical, it helped me grow as a woodworker, and it even put a smile on my face as I went about rendering it nonfunctional. Fare thee well, little PCX362010!

Correct. Leftover interior house paint from gawdonlyknowswhat. Drying a rough piece in bags can be a tricky endeavor. Plastic bags (obviously) don't allow any moisture to escape. Within a week or two, your blank with be covered in rank, sticky mold and will smell awful. Paper bags do allow moisture to escape, yet somewhat slower than if the blank was just out in the open air. I tried paper bags a few years ago and sometimes it worked...sometimes it didn't. Sometimes even the paper bag held in so much moisture that it started to grow mold itself. In the abstract, painting the surface is preferred because it plugs up the pores (slowing the transit of moisture) but doesn't leave mold anywhere dark and damp to work its moldy awfulness. In this case, however, nothing would have saved this blank. (Except perhaps a vacuum kiln?) As one other poster mentioned, redbud is just a wild and wonky wood. Lesson learned.

Well, that went well. Ah, the carnage. I doubt that even Frank Howarth could salvage this thing.

Jigs, jigs, jigs. Now that I've created a perfectly sealed and airtight box, it's time to cut a bunch of holes in it. This is an adjustable jig for routing the pallet slots in the lower table.

Best intentions and all that. I wanted to get a time lapse of gluing on the top skin but forgot to set the camera rolling. Use your imagination: A generous bead of glue all around the frame of the grid plus on top of every single bar in the grid. Then lay another sheet exactly in place on top without dragging it around. Then pile it with all the remaining fiberboard in the shop to weigh it down flat. The end result looks something like this. From the bottom: One sheet of MDF underneath just as a flat, clean surface. Then the lower table of the chest. Then the sides of the grid. Then the upper table of the chest. Then every piece of heaviness I could lay my hands on. "Flat and airtight" are more important than "neat and pretty" at this stage. There's drips and squeezeout galore on the inside...things to be revealed later when we start cutting holes in this thing.

The s'mores pile takes any pieces of solid wood down to 4-6" in length. Everything else goes into cans for the regular trash pickup.

Elegant work. The church is fortunate to have found you.

P.S. The other tool in my shop that finds frequent use in such situations?