May 2003 [You are here: http://www.funhouse.com/babs/Carpentry_May2003.html]
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Update: Well, after about 10 years, the band being a non-starter, I'm now getting serious and seriously organized about putting the woodshop together for real.
It's now spring 2003, and far too many of the trees are still there. Very annoying. The problem is that the smaller trees I could cut down by hand I've already done, so this is now at the point where we'd need to spend actual money to have the rest taken down by professionals. Our money has been going to other things, alas. At some point, I'm quite sure, one of those trees is going to fall on the house. THEN, there will be sudden motivation to cut some more of them down. [cough]
I am now officially insufferable. I am just about manic about the fact that I'm FINALLY making actual progress on this whole thing, and I'm sure I'm going to be insufferable about this for quite some time (as those who actually know me already have been warned I would). KK saw me doing my "Little Superior Dance" today over this stuff. Insufferable, I say! Insufferable. I warned you.
Really, I suppose I could or maybe should make this into a blog, but, *really*: WHY?
To KK and Adrienne: This first batch is for you guys, for putting up with me for the past few years about this, and just for being, well, YOU. Maybe next week I'll even have pictures. Maye, you've stuck with me since the dinosaurs were dying, so here it is for you as well. As to the others who know me who will be checking this, welcome. Anyone who gets anything useful out of my shop tour is welcome to it. I have SO much to learn, so I'm no expert.
Thus begins my shop tour, such as the current state of my shop is. It's detailed, as usual.
My plan is to sand off the stain on the boards they attached to the top and try to salvage them for other projects, take the label frames and handles, save one drawer as an example of some *really yummy* complex joinery I'd love to be able to pull off even part of some day, and then rip the rest of the cabinet from the wall and take it apart as much as possible. Then it goes to the transfer station and into the "Wood Only" recycling bin and be done with it.
Today's task list was to take those pictures, and then to start in on the sanding. I suited up, got the tools in line, and went at it. Here are the pictures of the current state of disaster, roughly in the spirit of those many shop tours people have on their sites:
From the west looking east, after you come into the basement proper.
This shop wraps around the furnace enclosure, so it ends up being primarily West-to-East, and shaped rather like a capital letter C. When you come into the basement, you'll eventually be facing a rack or tree of bicycles, a set of metal shop shelves behind that on one side, and on the other, this.
ShopNotes Roll-Around Store-All, which you can get from www.shopnotes.com,
look for issue #55. I recommend buying this, so you can do it right. It's
wonderfully compact and gets the wood off the floor, with its wheels I can
wheel it close to the BT3K and use a sheet lifter to hoist it in place, OR
move the sheetgoods onto an added circular saw guide I can make for the
cart and cut it there before any more cuts needed on the tablesaw. This is
why this is such a wonderful shop piece. I saw this cart late one night
and grabbed the picture but not the URL. I spent the next three weeks
hunting it down again. It's one of the prettiest shop furnishings I've ever
seen...
Instead, what you see right now is this collossal mess, looking east.
To the bottom right of the frame is the drill press still in its box, sadly.
Just past that going east is the dehumidifier (which I hope to be rid of
once we put in central airconditioning this summer), the bench (what a
wreck Aaron left us!), the non-working pedestal fan. Behind that you can
see the side of one of the card catalogue drawers and the glint of my yellow
plastic "hard hat". That blue coloured pole you see is roughly the corner of
a sort of nook, which is on the north side, although it's the furnace room
south wall. In the middle in the back in that jumble is my BT3000 tablesaw.
The stuff hanging from the ceiling is the insulation, this is a house
equipped with 7 foot ceilings and the basement ceiling is not finished. We
also have field mice (DIE, STUART!! DIE!! DIE!! DIE!!).
One of too many items I need to jettison from the house, let alone the basement, is a dead stereo. You can see one of the speakers by the circular saw (if you can make that out). Visible in later pictures is the old, lightning-zapped TV (it wasn't on a surge protector!), a broken computer monitor, and a couple of boxes of vinyl musical albums. (No, you can't have them!)
About here, if you looked to your left you might have a view about like this:
including the first of my graffiti marking the shop layout on my shop walls. It's more serious to others now that it's been committed in chalk to my shop walls. It's also one less thing on my very long mental list to keep in my head all at once.
What does the dust system look like? I really don't know yet, I'm still figuring it out. I do know I want the chip seperator here, or across the room from it by the end of the bench. I deliberately erased the dimensional details in the seperator picture because all I want to show is the components. It's wonderfully simple. If you want the real design, it's in ShopNotes #55 also. There's a lot of good stuff in that issue.
The store-all goes about where the bike can be seen now, but against the wall where the sheet of wallboard is. Got a use for that, KK? If you do, you can have it.
Sashay (which I can't spell) a little to the right, to the west end of the bench. Yes, and most of it's not mine. In the distance is the BT3K, and an adjustable roller-top stand. You can also see the card catalogue drawer.
This is a close-up.
I'll probably just save this one, I like the detail of the joinery and wanted to keep a copy for reference. Adrienne has said if I want to really learn to make dovetails and do them right, I should do them by hand. I SO hate handwork, certainly for sewing. This would scandalize my great-grandfather the tailor, of course. I do have a project I want to tackle which will require hand dovetails of a lot of tiny dovetails, President Jefferson's portable desk. I mentioned this to Adrienne recently and she lit up. She and I share an amazement and joy at the range of inventions Jefferson came up with. I think she's better versed in them than I am, but still. (Architecture and the like have always fascinated her and she's made quite a study of it. I mentioned considering a Mission style armchair, and she warned me off of them: they're massive, heavy, and not even very comfortable to sit in. You find the place it will reside in and that's where it stays.)
Above the drawer on my tool case on the bench I have scrawled "Gate Gang 2",
and if you look back to your left, or rather turn around from your examination
of those lovely dovetails on the drawer, you'll also see
"Gang Gate 1?" scribbled on my wall.
(The ganged blast gates above.)
Scan a little right. This is the south wall of the furnace room and the north side of the woodshop. (DP == Drill Press)
Here also is the library card catalogue. That's where the planned dock for the router table cabinet is.
That is planned to look about like this: 
Enclosed, of course. You'll notice it mentions the Rockler router table top. Here's a link to that: www.rockler.com.
You'll notice my design will include an angled panel at the back of the router chamber. That will have a hole bored into it and into the back panel of the cabinet so dustport ductwork can be inserted. It'll need to be removable, so I'll use a rigid ducting end, think 'dust vacuum hose' and 'aiglet', pretty much. If I weren't such a novice I'd know the name of the part.
The saw horse has to be moved, it's useful. The archery target (all of them), I'm not sure where it [they] will go, but not in here.
To your right is my BT3000. To the right of that is a full sheet of 1/2" plywood. Originally put there for another project, it will now become the router cabinet dolly and skin. Leaning against the BT3K legs is the box with the router table top in it. After a bunch of cleaning, I'll be able to start cutting that up and putting the cabinet together, which will be a relief. I finally figured out that for me, the gateway tool cabinet was this one. It's intended to double as an outfeed table for the BT3K, so it's the same height as that table top surface is, as will some of my other shop furniture. The idea is that I need it NOW, and I really don't have room for a router table AND a storage cabinet AND an outfeed table, but I need all three. I got some really nifty locking swivel casters from Rockler, they lock the wheel and the swivel at one time, and will go under the dedicated outfeed cabinet/assembly table/worktop as well. That will dock to your right of the BT3K. The current workbench is a wreck (both of them are) and was left to us as one, but it's also too long for what I have planned. I need to cut 4ft off the 10ft footprint when I make the new workbench (which will have cabinet space under it with some drawers of varying sizes planned, and maybe a sub-cabinet with doors and shelving, and have room for the outfeed cabinet to dock next to it, near the BT3K. At the same height, it will also see outfeed duty.
There's a site maintained by Sam Conder, http://www.bt3central.com/bt3k.asp, and one of many modifications contributors to his site have made is one made to Jim Frye's BT3K. It's an articulated dustport plate system that bolts to the case of the saw on the back and is closely fit around the original dustport fitting. When you change the angle of the blade, that whole assembly moves with it, so an articulated dustport cover is called for. Also, this will change the suction the dust system can apply to the dust generated by use of the saw. Shopnotes also has a bottom dustport I may add, someone on bt3central made a similar one from metal. I haven't decided which version to make, but I have laid out the outlined pieces on 1/4" plywood for the Frye project and will build at least that and install it. Painted blue, yes.
You would be able to see this mess beyond and the left of the BT3K, around the corner is a jumble of stuff, including the box of sanding paper.
I did this maybe a year ago, when I kept having to root around for my sandpaper and it was wasting time and trying my always limited patience. I also sew, and Nancy Zeiman has a long running TV show series about sewing, and one series is also a book "10, 20, 30 minutes to sew". If you organize the workspace well, and organize and streamline how you work, you can maximize the time you have in the shop. If I only have 10 minutes in the shop, I should be using it to set up for a project. If I have more time, so I don't rush a task and cut my hand off, I should plan out what I have time to accomplish on the project and focus on that set of actions only, and then put the project aside for the next block of available unstressed, unrushed time. If I'm rushed, I don't have time to use my powertools safely so I should do something else.
I've taken to labeling everything and looking for containers to stow things in and label. We had gotten a bunch of these to store other items and I hit on rounding up the sandpaper sheets into this container and finding a logical context to stow it in. (The kind of place where it "should be", because it's near where it's likeliest to be used.)
Right now that's in that bookcase, which is in a mixed-use space. We have our LAN cabinet above this. The wall it's mounted to is the west wall of my study/sewing room/etc. It's the one part of the basement that can be said to be "a finished room". It still needs work, I have casegoods to build for it and it needs trim and so on, but it has a door and finished interior walls. The seperation between electronics shop (I married a ham, who is also an amateur radio wonk, among other related things) is going to be almost nominal. It's not practical to build a cleanroom for J, unfortunately, but there still needs to be a set of boundaries between the spaces laid out. This will probably be safety tape around my machines and the nominal "doorway" between the two shop spaces, and then to build J a lot of casegoods to try to keep as much dust out of the electronics as we can. Painting the walls where possible in different colours is another way we can draw distinctions between the shops. "No, dear, MINE is the blue shop. Choose another colour, please." You'll see, as long as I can get it to stick to the walls where needed.
Now, wheel around.
This is the east wall of the furnace room, and to your right is the north wall of the foundation and to the right in the frame is the door to my work room/study.
It amuses me that the space I chose to do some of my finishing work in is marked in graffit on an unfinished wall. When I have more actually done, there will be more pictures.