Archive | January 2012
January 30, 2012  

Habit 7 (of highly effective people) – Sharpen your saw

I have spent a lot of time cutting wood at the sawmill and in the shop with bandsaw, chainsaw and circle blades. I have found a sharp blade to be imperative. Probably all of you know this already, so I am preaching to the choir. But I wanted to add a few things that you may not know.

A sharp bandsaw blade will overcome almost all of its other shortcomings. Your blade may not have the proper set, may be tracking to the left or right, or have other issues that will cause crooked or wavy cuts, but once sharpened it will always improve. I can’t tell you how many times I have had a blade that started out strong and cutting perfectly, only to find that the cuts quickly became wavy. I would tell myself that I must have a problem with the saw, maybe with the blade guides, because I haven’t used it that long and it just couldn’t be dull yet. And, though one time I did have a blade guide issue, every other time the blade was just dull. Dull and nothing else. I probably hit a rock and didn’t know it. Here I was, worried about the set of the teeth and it has never been the set. Now, I don’t question it. If the saw isn’t cutting right I put on a newly sharpened blade and all is good.

A sharp circular blade will overcome almost all of its other shortcomings. See a theme yet? Not long ago, I owned a circle mill with a 48″ bottom blade and a 30″ top blade. These big blades are set at a slight angle to the feed of the log so that the trailing side of the blade is out from the cut just a bit. The saw guide on the front would keep the blade in the right place, but only if the saw was sharp. If it wasn’t sharp, the blade would dig in, cut crooked, warm up and cut more crooked until finally it became shaped like a big salad bowl. With a sharp blade the tolerances of the setup were much less critical. As long as it was sharp, and the kerf was still wide enough, it would just cut… and cut… and cut.

A 12-volt electric grinder, like this one from Oregon, quickly and accurately sharpens chainsaws.

A sharp chainsaw blade makes life worth living.There is nothing better than a chainsaw that cuts fast. It makes the job enjoyable and a lot less like work. I sharpen my chainsaw a lot. If it is not throwing out big chips at a fast rate I stop and sharpen. I sharpen my chain on the bar with a hand-held electric grinder until the teeth get so worn they break off. I highly recommend this type of sharpener. It uses your car battery for power and will sharpen a 20″ bar in just a couple of minutes. If you use a chainsaw and don’t have a sharpener like this, get one.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Abraham Lincoln–

January 22, 2012  

The New Shop: 1735 S. River Rd., St. Charles, MO 63303

(more photos at bottom of post)

So, I have decided to let the cat out of the bag and tell everyone that I officially have a new shop, even though it is not official. The lease paperwork has not been completed, but I figure if the owners are opening the place up and helping me move in, that they won’t be in a hurry to turn around and kick me out. For the past week, I have been moving in tools and hooking them up, and I have been dying to show my (my wife would put “little” right here) wood friends what’s going on.

First off, appreciate the fact that, as my dad pointed out, this will be the cleanest that you will ever see my shop. He recommended that I get some pictures of it, before I start my “work”.

With that said, “Let the tour begin.”

The new location is large for me, about 25′ x 200′ or 5,000 sq. ft. of well-lit, semi-climate-controlled, smooth-concrete-floor, easy-access space. I am used to about 1,000 sq. ft. of dimly-lit, no-climate-controlled, wavy-concrete-floor, muddy-access space for the shop and lumber, so this is huge. It is also in a great location for me and, hopefully, my customers. The location should be good for my customers because it is easy to access from I-70 or the Page extension just across either of the bridges into St. Charles. The location is good for me because it is only a couple of miles from our new house (we moved to St. Charles in 2010). The shop address is 1735 S. River Road, St. Charles, MO 63303.

Since all of my tools are burnt beyond recognition or at the scrapyard, “moving” didn’t take long. I basically, drove my pickup truck to the shop and unloaded the tools that were still in the cab. Then, with just a trip of tools out of my garage at home and the moving was done. I have been acquiring though. I focused on the tools that I use the most often as the first to bring in to the shop. Lucky for me, I stumbled on a shop that was going out of business and had tools for sale. I found the business last fall, when I still had a shop, so I didn’t pursue the tools. But, since I showed such good hustle and quickly burned down my shop, the tools that I was interested in were still available.

The two main acquisitions for me were the jointer and planer. I need those tools almost every day and they need to be tough enough to pound through some lumber. The jointer is older than my last one, which I didn’t think was possible, but it is in better shape. My last one was abused by folks before me, and then I crashed it pretty hard one day when a blade came out and abruptly stopped the cutterhead (my fault, I put the gib in backwards). The new one is a 12″ wide American, before it became Yates-American, which is a well-known industrial woodworking machinery company. It is very straight and has an easily adjustable tilt on the outfeed table, which is a dramatic improvement over others that I have seen. The planer is a Powermatic 180 from the real Powermatic in Tennessee, not the new fake imported Grizzly/Sunhill/Northtech/Powermatic that we are forced to purchase these days. It is 18″ wide, which is a slight downgrade from my 20″ fake Powermatic, but it has a lot more power at 7hp. The coolest thing is the factory sticker on front that says,”Do not remove more than 1/2″ of thickness at a time.” That’s not a planer, that’s a chipper!

The last major acquisition is an AEM (Timesavers) 37″ wide belt sander. I had a grizzly dual drum sander before, that I found very useful, but not very fast. I was able to consistently get pretty good results, but it was like watching paint dry as for as the speed goes. The other major drawback was that it was only 24″ wide, and I would be left on my own with an orbital sander on larger pieces. At 37″ wide, it will handle cabinet doors and entry doors, as well as most face frames and many table tops. And, with 20 hp it should do the job in a reasonable amount of time. I have jokingly named this machine “The Friendmaker” because I expect a long line of friends to be waiting to use it. Speaking of friends, thanks Martin, Patrick and Dad for helping me move this particular item.

Lastly, I need to thank Mike Willard who is semi-temporarily, quasi-permanently lending me a 5hp older Delta Unisaw. I love older, stronger, heavier tools and this one is right in my wheelhouse. Now I just need to hook it up.

That concludes the tour except for the photos below. Thanks for flying with WunderWoods today. I will be sure to update you when my new location is stocked with wood and tools and “officially” open for business.

January 14, 2012  

The “Augusta Project”

I have been working on a project for a year or so,nestled in the rolling hills of Augusta (MO) on 200 acres of land that makes me question going home at night. After all (I ponder), if I had a tent I wouldn’t need to drive all the way home just to drive all the way back in the morning. There is a never-ending chunk of woods surrounding a never-fished pond at the end of a never-seen-before creek bed. I picture myself catching fish for dinner and sleeping off the aches of a long day alongside the crackling fire. Of course, I come ill-prepared to camp and don’t really have permission to do so, but I think about it – then head home.

Now that winter has rolled around, I think less about camping and fishing and more about the project at hand, and it is a good thing now that it is finally coming together. There have been a few bumps in the road, but it is on track again and it is time to show some photos. Everyone I talk to has heard about the “Augusta Project”, and I am sure that they are starting to wonder if there really is such a project. Well, I have proof now.

The “Augusta Project” is a timber-frame house that is being built with an earth-friendly approach, though the homeowners aren’t going out of their way to get any particular green certification. I got in on the action through the architect, Dan Hellmuth, from Hellmuth & Bicknesse. I worked with Dan a couple of years ago on a project for Washington University, where the Living Learning Center was crowned one of the greenest buildings in the country. This job has much less paperwork (none, to this point), but I am doing very similar work.

So far, I have been contracted to harvest the trees and manufacture specific products for the building. The exterior decking is made from 5/4 thick white oak and is the first finished product that has been delivered to the job site. The land has a lot of nice white oaks (some that I can actually get to) that I felled, milled, dried and then had molded by Fehlig Brothers in St. Louis. The material was profiled with grooves down both sides to receive hidden fasteners. I have also cut a lot of cedars which are going to become the siding for the parts of the house not covered in stone. There was also a mix of hard maple, hickory and ash that I milled for purposes yet undetermined.

I cannot take credit for the major installed work to this point, which is the timber frame being installed by Trillium Dell Timber Framers. It is made from Douglas Fir and mostly cut in the shop, though some of the trickier cuts are being done on site. I snapped some photos this week of the frame, which is almost done. Be sure to enjoy the view! Click on the photos to enlarge.

January 10, 2012  

Slippery White Oak Changes Woodworking History (Maybe, Kinda-Sorta)

When I build a piece of furniture I like to build my own drawers and drawer guides. The drawers make me feel like the furniture is more useful, like it has a reason for being. The key is that they must work well. I started out trying many different ways to make drawers operate, but have been using only one way for a long time now.

About ten years ago, I went to a presentation at a local furniture store about Stickley furniture. The one thing I keyed on that night was the video of a worker at the factory fitting a drawer and closing the drawer with just the push of a finger (video link below). I had been around plenty of drawers, especially old ones that don’t work properly, and I wanted to know more.

Now, I build every drawer side-hung and center-guided

The secret at Stickley (which isn’t much of a secret), and now at my shop, is the side-hung, center-guided drawer glides or runners. The drawers hang on runners mounted to the inside sides of the cabinet which are made to fit a little loose up and down and not touch the drawer at all left to right. This set up alone isn’t enough though. Without the center guide the drawers would rack in the opening and bind. The center guide under the middle of the drawer allows the drawer to only move in a straight line in and out, and it eliminates the possibility for racking. In fact, the drawer can only go in one direction and can easily be pushed shut with one finger from anywhere on the drawer front. Forget using both hands to push in the drawer.

The system works great and doesn’t take much fussing to install. After I fit the drawers and make sure they are working, I wax the guides with Johnson paste wax, and they work as smooth as silk. One of the keys to extra smooth operation is the use of white oak for the drawers and guides.

I don’t know Stickley’s intent on using white oak for the drawers and guides. I assumed originally that he just used white oak in the drawer system because he was using white oak on the rest of the cabinet, so it just made aesthetic sense to use the wood that was in the rest of the piece. But now, I am starting to think that ol’ Gustav came to using white oak through the back door. I am thinking that he found the perfect wood for drawers and drawer guides that also just happened to be a great wood for furniture – an awesome 1-2 punch. Here’s why: White oak is a hard wood, a very stable wood when quartersawn and also a very slippery wood. That’s right – slippery. Slippery is not the first adjective that comes to mind when you think about white oak, but it is slippery after it is planed. I can’t explain it, but if you take two planed pieces of white oak and stack them up, it is hard to keep them together. Plenty of times in the shop, when I am planing white oak, I slide a piece on to the stack and it just keeps going.

I haven’t noticed this phenomenon with any other woods, just white oak. It doesn’t seem slippery when I am pushing it through the jointer, in fact, just the opposite. On the jointer, it feels like it wants to stick to the bed. But once that white oak touches another piece of white oak it wants to take off. So, I am thinking Stickley noticed that white oak repels white oak like a reverse magnet and thought it would make the best drawer guides ever. Then he looked at white oak and said quietly to himself, “If I am going to use white oak, it has to be quartersawn to be as stable as possible.” He also knew that quartersawn white oak looked more refined and that it was expensive to produce, all of which makes the finished piece seem more valuable. He then loudly exclaimed, “Quartersawn white oak all around.”

And the rest is history (maybe, kinda-sorta). This, of course, doesn’t explain why he used white oak for chairs, but I choose to ignore that for now.

Click here to see the Stickley company video

January 2, 2012  

Once You Go Impact, You’ll Never Go Back

A friend of mine is a tool junkie. He has at least one tool for every job. Often he has more than one. This is especially true for cordless drills. He has about fifteen of them and most of them are DeWalt. Many times I would have my drill out, within easy reach, with the right bit in it, and he would still go get his. He never used my drill, or at least never wanted too. He called himself a drill snob and I agreed. My Porter Cable was a fine drill, worked with no problems, and only had recently become weak in the battery department. Why wouldn’t he use my drill? Turns out it wasn’t my drill that he had problems with, he had become used to using his drill and impact driver combo. Apparently, the two together were a deadly combination. His said his drill was good, but the lethal blow was handed out by the impact driver. I blew him off at first. It was just another tool. It was just more money to spend. It was just another trophy for his case.

Then I used it. It was fast, strong and light. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. Here’s the thing – the impact driver doesn’t just drive screws. It kicks their butts and asks for more. It starts out fast, driving the screws at maximum speed until it hits enough resistance. Then the impact kicks in and it beats it home. It does all of this without stripping the head or breaking the screws. The best part is that when you are driving screws from odd angles, especially above your head, it takes about half the force to hold it in place. And did I mention, it doesn’t strip the head. It is unbelievable!

Now, if I don’t have an impact driver with me I find myself thinking, “This is how they used to do it in the olden days.” Sure, it works. You can drive screws with a drill. But once you go impact, you’ll never go back.

Note: I have since used a Bosch, Makita and Hitachi, as well as the DeWalt, and all have worked great. The key seems not to be in the make, but just in the fact that it is an impact driver. If you were to purchase one, I would only recommend to get one that matches the batteries you already have.