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...