What did you do today?

[wtnhighlander]

I spent some after work daylight checking fir damage from these:

A brief but intense hail storm swept thru, just minutes before I got home. Ice chunks the size of a quarter, and windy enough to wet my front door with rain from top to bottom, under a 9' porch overhang.

No damage I can spot, thankfully.

[Tpt life]

6 hours ago, treeslayer said:

That’s cool @Tpt life, what instrument do you play ? Young folks could use a course in music appreciation, I like everything about the symphony 

Tpt=trumpet. The best of the several I play. 

[Mark J]

How 'bout your vehicle  @wtnhighlander?

[wtnhighlander]

1 hour ago, Mark J said:

How 'bout your vehicle  @wtnhighlander?

Wife & son's cars were in the garage. I missed the storm while commuting home, so my truck is fine as well. 

[drzaius]

A couple of years ago my wife's car was hit with hail. I couldn't even see any damage until a couple of days later when the light was just right. Damage was about $6200. Then a couple of years later my car got it to the tune of $5,900. I took the payout in both cases because the damage was not that bad and we keep our vehicle until resale is no longer a concern.

We get a lot of hail here. Almost all the car dealerships have hail shelters in their lots. The Honda dealership where I bought my car has shelters with solar panels on all of them. I'm sure they can easily power their whole operation with them on a sunny day. Their next phase is to install storage batteries. It's a well run operation and the service is superb.

[wtnhighlander]

@drzaius, a colleague of mine drove a 1990 Suburban to work every day. Kept it fastidiously. He is a mechanical engineer that takes machine maintenance to OCD levels. He is still cutting his grass with a Murray riding mower he purchased new in 1980.

Anyway, his Suburban got caught in a hail storm, and came out looking like a rented golf ball. Crack all the way across the windshield. He took the payout and kept driving that thing to work until he retired, about 5 years ago.

[jussi]

Had the day off yesterday so I Started install of Byrd head on my planer yesterday but got stuck when I couldn’t get the pulley out. Instructions say it should just pop out but it wouldn’t budge. Had to borrow a bearing puller from auto parts to get it out. Will have to wait till my next day off to finish.  

[wtnhighlander]

I started playing with the prototype for 'Spin-a-ma-Jig' 2.0:

This rendition is far stiffer and safer than version 1.0.  

Here is a scrap glue-up I started milling.

I don't suggest this as a lathe substitute, by any means. But, since I have no lathe and no space to add one, it does let me experiment with a little round woodwork.

[drzaius]

That looks like it belongs in a medieval dungeon with a poor unfortunate clamped in there somehow

[JohnG]

On 5/5/2022 at 9:15 AM, drzaius said:

That looks like it belongs in a medieval dungeon with a poor unfortunate clamped in there somehow

When showing the contraption to someone you have to make sure you enunciate “bowls” when you say, “I’m going to clamp you bowls in here and then raise the TS blade into them.”

[drzaius]

45 minutes ago, JohnG said:

When showing the contraption to someone you have to make sure you enunciate “bowls” when you say, “I’m going to clamp you bowls in here and then raise the TS blade into them.”

Best one of the day

[wtnhighlander]

More experimenting with 'Spin-a-ma-Jig". While I had it over the saw, I lowered the blade to barely clear the insert, and 'faced off' the bottom of the dish.

Then I put in vertical mode for some hand work.

End-grain sanding is sloooooow, so I switched to scraping.

Sorry the pic is rotated.

Scraping  worked much better after I ditched the hand wheel and turned it with a drill.

Lots of creative clamping to hold the drill motor and squeeze the trigger. Now it is effectively a lathe headstock setup for outboard turning. A really, really crappy lathe headstock.

I actually have an old tube-bed lathe, with a burned-out motor, and a frozen tail stock. I'm now thinking it would be good to cannabalize that headstock and rig it as shown above, so I can use a much better faceplate and bearings. I can really see the attraction to turning. Just spinning this chunk at low speed and scraping it smooth was very satisfying.

[BonPacific]

Can confirm, lathe work can be addictive.

I was feeling a lot of pent-up energy today. While I've been spending a lot of time out in the shop, it hasn't been actually making anything aside from the shop itself. So I decided to spend some time today just playing on the lathe. I remembered I had a bag of pen kits laying around, so I whipped out a small selection.

From left to right, the woods are: English Laurel, unknown (bloodwood?), Hard Maple, and Lilac.

[Coop]

@wtnhighlander, I think there is a fine line here between woodworker morphing into MacGyver and vice versa. 

[legenddc]

On 5/7/2022 at 10:52 PM, BonPacific said:

Can confirm, lathe work can be addictive.

I was feeling a lot of pent-up energy today. While I've been spending a lot of time out in the shop, it hasn't been actually making anything aside from the shop itself. So I decided to spend some time today just playing on the lathe. I remembered I had a bag of pen kits laying around, so I whipped out a small selection.

From left to right, the woods are: English Laurel, unknown (bloodwood?), Hard Maple, and Lilac.

Do you use traditional or carbide insert tools? I got a lathe a while ago but haven’t spent enough time on it to become good. 

[Mark J]

@wtnhighlander, very ingenious.  

[BonPacific]

On 5/8/2022 at 4:08 AM, legenddc said:

Do you use traditional or carbide insert tools? I got a lathe a while ago but haven’t spent enough time on it to become good. 

Bit of both, though I wouldn't call myself "good". I just muddle along. On most of these I roughed out the blank with carbide and then finished them with an old gouge. Some woods (like the lilac) seem to prefer the carbide right to the end.

[Woodworking_Hobby]

I have been working on these little memory boxes and finally getting close to being done with them!  Today I finally put on the hinges and added the top to the box.
 

I put the hand cut dovetails on pause and used one of the old templates my uncle gave me a long time ago. It is amazing how many different skills a little box takes and it had a lot of firsts for me…this is the first box I have made and it was a ton of fun. 

First time for: making a box; dovetails on a box; installing hinges; and probably a lot more I am not thinking about. The box is made out of cherry, the first photo is raw and the second two are with the first coat of Danish oil. A few more coats and it will be all done. I ended up trying out the liquid hide glue on the box and I am a huge fan. Super easy cleanup and the glue does not show on the end grain like PVA glue can show if you miss some in the final sanding. 

@Chestnut thanks for the tip on the boxes; I have a Horizontal belt sander and I ended up hitting the top and bottom of the box for like a second and that worked perfectly to smooth out all of the edges. It took the “rock” out of the box and removed that little gap that I got when I put the bottom on the chisel box that I made in parallel with these boxes.  Thanks to everyone else and all the little tips along the way as I could never have gotten this far without a little help and guidance. 

[pkinneb]

On 5/2/2022 at 6:12 PM, wtnhighlander said:

I spent some after work daylight checking fir damage from these:

A brief but intense hail storm swept thru, just minutes before I got home. Ice chunks the size of a quarter, and windy enough to wet my front door with rain from top to bottom, under a 9' porch overhang.

No damage I can spot, thankfully.

We had one come through today...doesn't appear to be any damage but will probably get someone out to check the roof, gutters, etc

 

 

[treeslayer]

Yikes! Hope there’s no damage 

[Tom King]

I've never seen hail like that here!

I spent the day sifting rocks out of fill dirt beside the last couple of hundred feet of the waterline trench.  On the end of our point, the ground is about half rocks, and half sandy loam.  I didn't want to push all the square edged rocks back in with the water pipe, so the only way I thought to do it was by hand, sifting one metal stall cleaning pitchfork of it at the time.  That was followed by a sifting shovel.

It took all I wanted to do today to do that.  Fortunately, there was only a couple of hundred feet of it.  I just put the rock on the shoreline with the rip-rap, so didn't have to haul it far.

The bad thing was that Monday is Back Day, so I had done that workout before I started this job.  Anyway, that's one behind me.  The rest of the trench is clear red clay.  I am going to have to haul some more dirt down there because there was enough rock volume that will have to be made up.

Picture is just of the turn at the end.  I was in attack mode, so didn't think to get more pictures.  It's all clean ground now.

 

[drzaius]

No hail here, but this is what I woke up to this morning.

 

[treeslayer]

“ Oh Canada” it’s been a crazy year so far, winter coats and blankets at granddaughter’s soccer game last night, 85 today

[Chestnut]

17 hours ago, pkinneb said:

We had one come through today...doesn't appear to be any damage but will probably get someone out to check the roof, gutters, etc

The south portion of that storm hit our office a bit of hail fell but no damage. You got hit way worse than we did... yikes! Hope everything is ok, or maybe not if you need new shingles.

11 hours ago, treeslayer said:

“ Oh Canada” it’s been a crazy year so far, winter coats and blankets at granddaughter’s soccer game last night, 85 today

Has it been extremely windy down there this spring? I've had to fix my boat and ATV cover daily becuase of strong winds here.

[treeslayer]

Yes it has @Chestnut, and cold and rain, and now 80’s and high humidity