The Blog plug-in for doku wiki seems to have failed completely this time, so I’ve copied all the blog entries into this document for now.

Well, the osberg bed developed it’s fist issue after nearly 10 years of event use during the last Pennsic War. A crack developed between the two tenons on one of the side pieces. Given where it was, there wasn’t any danger of a collapse. I think it may have happened during dis-assembly. It was a damp year and it was difficult to get apart. I used the shop vac trick to draw glue down into the crack, clamped it up overnight and then put an oak butterfly inlay patch on each side. Given that it was my first attempt at inlay, I don’t think it came out too bad. The oak contrasts nicely with the ash.

— Kean Gryffyth 2011/05/04 18:26

The base cabinet is now painted, all the wiring is in, the casters installed and the top has had the layers of Formica applied. Next comes the nerve wracking part, routing out the openings for the router plate and the miter tracks. Oh, and I have learned something about Formica. It’s a serious "rhymes with witch" to work with! It’s almost impossible to cut without chipping & splintering and maneuvering the 4×8 sheet around is a royal pain in the a$$.

— Kean Gryffyth 2009/04/18 23:57

Made some more progress on the router table over the last few days. The base has all of the cutouts and prep done for the electrical wiring and has been primed. Hopefully I’ll get to paint tomorrow. The core of the table has been assembled and edged (the picture was taken before the maple edging was applied). I’m hoping to get the laminate on tomorrow since the temperature is supposed to be around 70 again.

— Kean Gryffyth 2009/04/17 23:30

Made some progress on the router table over the last few days. Rough cut the plywood on Thursday, Finish cut and partially assembled on Saturday and finished the casework today. Next come making the doors, painting and installing the casters/levelers. Then come the hard part, building the top.

— Kean Gryffyth 2009/04/12 16:16

I went to order Benchdog fence today from Rockler, but decided to check Amazon.com and boy, am I glad I did. Rockler has raised the price to $140 and Amazon has lowered it to $92. Guess who got my order?

— Kean Gryffyth 2009/04/06 21:16

Wow! It’s been a while since I recorded anything. So here’s a quick update:

The sheet cabinet was completed last year (Picture to come) and Worksharp works like a dream. If you’re not into or not good at hand sharpening, get yourself one of these!

The current project is the router table since I need it for the bedroom shelves and if I don’t finish those soon I think I will be sleeping on the couch permanently! I’ve finalized the design and will be building one similar to the Benchdog cabinet and building my own top. I’ve decided to buy the fence though; I’ll be going with the Benchdog 32” fence.

— Kean Gryffyth 2009/04/05 20:59

Made some progress on the sheet cabinet this weekend. The carcass and face frame are done and we picked up the tiles for the top on Sunday. I need to paint the whole thing and built the top and door yet.

The replacement Worksharp arrived today. It was supposed to be here last Thursday but, according to the UPS web site, the train it was on was involved in a derailment. I kid you not! I haven’t had tome to open the box yet, but hopefully I’ll get to do so tomorrow.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/04/07 20:53

The workbench is complete! Unfortunately Grizzly didn’t have an instruction sheet of any kind for the vise, that’s the first time I’ve run into that with a Grizzly product. I found a set of instructions for a similar vise at Lee Valley and adapted them to the one I had. It went together pretty well but unless you’re fairly good at creating your own templates and precision measuring, I wouldn’t recommend buying one of these vises from them. Spend the extra money and get one from Lee Valley or Woodcraft that comes with instructions and templates. I ended up using birch for the jaws instead of the maple I had originally planned on using, as it was about $1 less a board foot and they had smaller pieces in stock. I actually got it finished last Saturday and I’ve already started on the first major project using it, the new kitchen cabinet to go between the stove and fridge and hold all the baking sheets.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/30 20:42

I called Worksharp today and all I can say is “This is what customer service is all about!” I explained the issue I was having and they immediately offered to send me out an new unit at their expense, including the paperwork to ship the defective one back, also at their expense. Absolutely fantastic customer service!

I also got a bit of work done tonight, the drawers on the workbench are finished and installed and I jointed/planed/cut the wood for the vise jaws. I ran into one problem when I opened the vise box though: No instructions, templates, etc. I’ll give Grizzly a call tomorrow and see if I can get them online. The bench is almost done!

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/26 22:53

I went out to the shop tonight to work on the workbench drawers and ended up spending the evening playing with my major purchase from Woodcraft this past weekend, a Work Sharp 3000. Setup was easy, but I have to take exception to the manufacturer’s claim that it’s perfectly calibrated at the factory. I had to crank the skew adjustment all the way over to get it to grind straight. I’m going to call them tomorrow and see if they can do anything about it. However, my chisels, which I am ashamed to admit have not been sharpened since I got them, are now all mirror finished and SHARP! It’s a nice little gadget, pretty much eliminating any guesswork with angles (provided you want a 20°, 25°, 30° or 35° angle). It can also be used freehand to sharpen odd sized or odd angled tools (things like lathe chisels). At $199, it’s cheaper than buying a full set of waterstones, guides, etc. and for those of us who are lousy at hand sharpening, it’s a gods-send.

I did get a bit done on the drawers on Sunday, the runners are mounted and one drawer is assembled, I just have the assemble the other one. I also managed to get over to Condon on Friday and picked up a nice piece of birch for the vise jaws.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/24 23:06

Well, I got a bit done last night. I got the frames, hardwood runners and carcases for the workbench drawers all cut. I would have assembled them but I realized (15 minutes after the local home centers closed) that I had nothing to use for the drawer bottoms. So, I did some more cleaning. You can see quite a bit of floor in the shop now.

I’m going to try and pop over to Condon Lumber (our local hardwood lumber yard) at lunch today and see if I can pick up some maple for the vise jaws and some mahogany for paper making moulds.

I’m not expecting to get anything done this weekend though, we’ve got company tonight and we’re going couch shopping on Sunday. However, tomorrow (Saturday), I’m off to the Woodcraft store in CT for their basket sale (15% off anything you can fit in the basket, except power tools)! I’ve got a shopping list all written up (if only I could afford to buy everything on it!)

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/21 11:58

With some help from a friend (Thanks John!) the air cleaner is up and mounted to the ceiling. The homemade anti-vibration mounts are working well (multiple rubber washers braced between metal washers and the mounting brackets) and I even managed to wire in the emergency light unit while putting in the outlet for the air cleaner.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/16 16:54

Well, today was supposed to be the day to hang the air cleaner and mount the vise on the bench, but mother nature interfered. The winds started up last night and at 8:00 this morning one of the neighbor’s trees came down, knocking down the power lines to both our houses and, incidentally, trapping us (at least vehicle-wise) at home. At least it didn’t happen yesterday when we needed to leave the house at 9:00 with all the food for Hrim Schola! I went to start up the generator and it wouldn’t start. Three and a half hours later, after removing the carburetor three times and going through an entire can of carb cleaner I finally got it clean enough to run. I use fuel stableizer and it’s always been fine before, but this year it gummed up. It’s still running a little rough, time for a trip to the dealer for a tune up and proper cleaning I guess. Central Hudson got the power restored about 1:30, after removing not only the downed tree but another that was leaning at a good 30 degrees (and increasing it’s lean as we watched). So much for the day. We went out to dinner and rented Dragon Wars (Nice FX but entire sections of movie seemed to be missing, it skipped around a lot). Hopefully I will be able to get the air cleaner up during the week.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/09 23:15

Where to begin... The air cleaner I ordered (a Jet 1000B) actually arrived a day earlier than UPS predicted, unfortunately that meant my wife had to deal with the huge, heavy box, not me. Not a good start. It seemed to be fairly well packed, but that’s where the good things pretty much stopped. After wrestling it out of the packing material I sat it on the workbench and removed the packing braces from the inside, plugged it in and fired it up. Or at least I tried. It made a soft groaning noise and did nothing. So.. Unplug it, remove the filters and attempt to spin the fan by hand. It spins, but scrapes every revolution. Looks like the squirrel cage is out of alignment. Grab the allen wrenches, remove the 6 bolts that hold the fan assembly to the shell and try to back the shell out of the housing. The wires from the control panel (which is a completely exposed circuit board inside, no dust protection at all) are only a foot long. All but one are on a removable plug. The one that isn’t on the plug is bolted to the control panel, meaning that the whole panel has to be removed to get it loose. Once I finally got the fan housing out and got a close look at things I realized that two opposing arms of the motor mount (a cross shaped thing) are bent, one up, one down. Since there was no damage to the housing, it had to have been assembled this way. Gotta love that Taiwanese craftsmanship. 10 minutes of bending, tapping and banging and it was pretty much straight. However the squirrel cage still seemed to wobble a lot. It no longer hit anything though. So, I plugged it back in and fired it up. It’s running, but since I’m not certain how much noise it’s supposed to make, I’m not sure it it’s really fixed. Note: After reading a few more reviews (that, of course, I didn’t find when I did my original research) it looks like I still need to true up the squirrel cage itself. Since reports are that Jet won’t do it, they seem to think any fan that spins at all is “OK”, I decided to take a shot at it myself. I disassembled the thing again, stuck a 1/2 rod through the fan hub, laid the blade of one square across the top of it and used a second to check for squareness. After 30 minutes of tweaking it into something approaching square, I put it back together and fired it up. There’s still a little wobble, but it’s much harder to see and the unit is running much quieter and with far less vibration. Looks like I’ll be keeping it as long as the mounting goes OK.

A few smaller annoyances:

• The remote only works from the back side of the unit, which means that I’ll have to walk over to the garage side of my shop to turn it on, not a major issue, but not exactly convenient.
• In the usual method of “cost savings” these days they don’t give you the bolts or chains to actually hang it, you’ve got to provide them yourself.

Now I just need to run an outlet from the garage breaker panel to a location near my chosen mounting spot and find either a 7 foot tall circus strongman or a couple of friends with good backs and ladders to help me get it mounted to the ceiling. Maybe I’ll wire that emergency light I got from Dave in while I’m at it...

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/07 00:00

With a little help from a friend on the heavy lifting parts I got the workbench assembled and in place this weekend. It almost didn’t happen though. Last week both Blowes (Lowes) and Home Despot (guess who?) had piles of 30” wide exterior (1 3/4”) solid core doors. This weekend, none of any size at either place and both tell me that they are not getting any more! After some calling around on Saturday morning I located one at the Home Despot in the next town south and got a reason for the lack. Apparently both places are switching door suppliers and their new suppliers only do steel and fiberglass slab doors, no wood. Not a good thing for those of us who like to use them for tops for worktables. All that’s left is to make jaws for the vise and mount it. I still want to replace the door with a maple top from Grizzly though. Under construction:

I’ll post a pic of the completed bench as soon as I take one. — Kean Gryffyth 2008/03/02 20:00

Some SCA related projects I’m working on:

• New shelves for the Pennsic camp kitchen - These will replace the old MDF shelves that are beginning to show the effects of age and moisture.
• Little Canfield Coffer - I’ve been working on this for over a year (well, I did a bunch of work over a year ago and it’s been sitting). I really need to finish it.
• Portable Writing desk for Mrs Teeth - I still own this fine lady this desk. I’ve got the lumber and hardware on hand, it’s just too cold to work in the shop in the winter.
• Walnut Ark Top Chest - I saw an oak version of one of these and thought that it would look really good in Black Walnut.
• A second book/paper press - I already made one of these, but we’re planning on doing an A&S class on paper making this spring so I need another and the $500 price tag on the commercial ones is just ridiculous.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/02/21 23:07

A few non-SCA related projects that I’ve got in the works:

• Built in bookshelves in the bedroom - I’ve been promising these to my wife for two years now. I really need to get them built before I have to sleep in the living room. :)
• Pan and Cooling rack storage cabinet - A slender (8” wide) cabinet to fit between the stove and fridge and hold all the cooking sheets and cooling racks where we can get at them. It will have a tiled top so pots hot from the stove can be sat on it.
• New spice rack - We’ve outgrown the old one. I’m thinking something based on a shaker wall cabinet will work nicely.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/02/21 22:52

I’ve got a few projects in the works for the shop itself:

• Dust Collection - I picked up a Grizzly 2HP dust collector at their tent sale this past fall. I’ve got it up and running, but I need to run ductwork so I don’t have to keep moving the hose around.
• Air Filtration - I found a Jet 1000B air filtration unit recently for a good price, I just need to get it mounted to the ceiling.
• Workbench - This will be a simple workbench, the frame is made of trimmed down dimensional lumber held together with a torsion rod system. The top will be a solid core door to start and I’ve got a twin screw front vise that I need to make wooden jaws for. This summer I plan on stopping at Grizzly on the way to or from Pennsic and picking up a laminated maple top to replace the door.
• Router Table with cabinet - After 5 years of working with a benchtop router table from Rockler I’m finally going to build myself a proper router table. It will have a cabinet style base with storage for non-mounter routers and all my bits. I got a Jessem Router Lift FX on sale from Rockler, a set of combination legs/casters on clearance from Woodcraft. the top will be laminated with Formica. I haven’t decided on the exact design for the fence yet.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/02/21 22:50

Well, the current project is to get the shop (a two car, unheated garage) cleaned up and organized enough to actually work. I’ve made some progress, removing two sets of old rusty metal shelves and replacing them with a built in set of wooden shelves. These hold all the finishing supplies along with my lady’s gardening supplies. The next big cleanup is the center area. Once this area is cleaned up I can put up the workbench and really get to work.

— Kean Gryffyth 2008/02/21 22:35