After almost a month long layoff, I’ve been able to get back into the shop and make some more progress on the change gears project. While they where fairly easy to make, the mounting studs where the part I was least looking forward to making. Mainly because I had to make several of them (7 in total), and because each one had a lot of individual steps.
One part of the process I thoroughly enjoyed, was making some custom thread relief tools. I used to avoid making custom HSS tool bits with my old cheap grinder, as it vibrated a lot and was slow at removing material. The new Baldor & CBN wheel combination are silky smooth and remove material very quickly. The surface finish is almost good enough that I don’t need to hone the cutting edges.
Now that I have the studs done, I feel like I’m over the hump, and hopefully I can wrap up this project within the next week.
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I love my little Jansjo work lights, as they are small and easy to move from machine to machine. However, they don’t produce a lot of light, and thus aren’t overly useful when recording video. This is really only a problem on my mill, because the head blocks most of my overhead lighting, because of how big it is.
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Sometimes the answer is staring you right in the face, but you won’t notice it till someone points it out; that’s what happened to me right after Christmas. Jillian had gotten me some Kant-twist clamps, and I was struggling with where to store them in my increasingly congested shop. My mom walked into the shop as asked what I was doing, and after a short conversation she said why not put them there, point to an area under some shelving.
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Just about everyone has heard the proverb measure twice and cut once. I’ve followed it religiously since I started woodworking, and because of it I’ve made very few mistakes over the years. I’ve had very little time in the shop over the last couple weeks, do work and personal obligations. When I finally made it into the shop the other night, i was rushing, as I wanted to make some real progress on my current project. As I mentions in my last post, I’ve been making little plywood storage boxes. I’d just finished a box, and decided to check how it’s future resident would fit. As you can see below, it didn’t.
After several minutes of cursing, head scratching, and double checking I figured out what went wrong. In my haste, I had screwed up my length calculations. Instead of adding the thickness of the ends (3/8″) to the get the length of the sides, I added the thickness of the rabbets (1/8″). Thus I think proverb needs an amendment, Measure and calculate twice and cut once.
This is a simple project I knocked out this weekend, it’s the base for a child’s birthday party punch-out game. Once it’s painted, solo cups with tissue paper over the top and prizes inside will be glued into the holes with a hot glue gun. This projects was fun to make, it required no planing and a very limited number of tools. The hardest thing about it was making the 25 3-1/2″ diameter holes, and then sanding them smooth. Considering the amount of praise I got for making it, the time I spent was well spent.
