Wednesday, October 24, 2012

my little woodshop

during the process of building our doghouse, I acquired more or less a complete little wood working shop in our garage and notice that it's really really handy to have all these tools available. For example, a couple of days ago our couch broke:

broken plywood support
and it was really easy to fix using a slab of Mahogany I had laying around (which was supposed to be transformed into something entirely different...)
fixed frame, after removing millions of staples
Granted it took me several hours, most of them removing staples from the couch. But it was so nice to have a thickness planer to just dimension the wood down to the thickness you need to make it fit

Also surprisingly it's not really the tools which are the expensive parts, it's all the tiny accessories you need with the tools. Be it a saw-blade or just a square/precision ruler/etc.

Next project is to install two additional 15A circuits into the garage and hopefully a system to collect air bone dust for health regions.

Also slowly making progress with the doghouse, everything is still level and working the roofing joint's next.



Monday, October 08, 2012

Dog House - foundation mostly done

I'm finally making some progress with the dog house and finished most of the flooring and foundation tonight.

rabbited supports for the roofing and siding, still need some more joints
glueing and doweling the corners together
glueing the cross brackets for the flooring
used joint for the foundation and roof support
after the flooring is installed ant the roofsupports are glued in

finished the reloading press mounts

so the mounting boards out of cedar and mahogany, needed to be slightly modified to allow for the press to be mounted. Since the bolt's were looking out under it.

But the result looks rather nice.

all setup and now only needs to be adjusted

Saturday, October 06, 2012

support for a reloading press

over the last couple of months I started to assemble an AR-15 precission rifle and got slighlty burned by the cost of ammunition. So the only possible way to support this hobby was to start reloading my own ammunition.

So the first step was to aquire a reloading press and in my case I wanted to have one, which can easily produce pistol and rifle ammunition. Because let's face it, at some point we will by a .45 1911 and 9mm Highpower pistol. Basically once John moves away and we loose the access to it.

Anyway, once you have a reloading press you need to mount it to a sturdy support and since I don't really have the space for a dedicated reloading shop (or the financial means), it had to be a simple sturdy board, which has the press mounted to it and can be clamped to a table, when the need to reload arrives.

we start with some rough white cedar and rough mahogany boards

the boards are cut down to 16" length each and planed to 3/4" thickness

after combining the cedar with the mahogany using a spline joint, we just sand them for a bit 400 and 600 grit sandpaper and add 4 coats of mineral oil. And they are finished and waiting for the press to be mounted on it tomorrow.
Since I plan on selling cutting boards with my little company rather soonish, I decided to join the cedar to the mahogany using a simple spline joint, cut on the table saw. The joint was made from a scrap piece of redwood, I had laying around and it turned out to be simpler than planned, but stil took about 90 minutes to make these boards. I really need an orbital sander...
example of a splined joined, in our case we are joining the mahogany to the cedar using a piece of scrap redwood.

Building a doghouse

over the last couple of weeks, I was starting to plan how to build a doghouse for our puppies...

After all they look kinda unhappy in there kennel right now and don't have that much shade:

get me some shade...

rough cad drawing of the doggie house

let's start with a 4"x4"x8' long piece of raw lumber and rip it on the tables aw

cut it to 4"x0.5"x8' strips and plan them to .4" on the thickness planer

so that our puppies have a hardwood floor to lay on during the day... 


Friday, October 05, 2012

Long time no news...

well for a lot time there were no posts, basically the reason is that we were very simple incredible busy and there were some slight changes. First we were running around and tried to find a patio furniture set for our backyard since about 2-3 months and finally found one

our backyard is coming together

We also finally manage to sell the motorcycle and now I'm trying to learn to live without one.

there goes 'rose'
And sadly I do miss it, even if I haven't really ridden it in the last 12 months for safety reasons...

I also attended a fundraiser for ovarian cancer with Robin and managed to finished 8th in my age group in a 5k run.

place 8 in my age group (30-35) and 169 overal out of  ~1000 attending people

I also spend a lot of time reading about how to build a doghouse for our puppies and somehow got a bit carried away and started to put a little woodworking shop together, but more about this in a future post.
we got a table saw, miter saw and thickness planer. Only the lathe, drill press and joiner are missing now...
And we finally managed to order a small little keggorator and a 50L keg of Franziskaner.