A Sight for Sore Eyes

There hasn't been a post on this blog for something like 4 months.  Perhaps there's someone out there wondering why.  The answer is that we've been moving.  Between fixing up the old house to sell, and fixing up the new house to move into, there just hasn't been much time for anything else.

As anyone who has moved a shop before will tell you, it is just an absolute disaster.  It's just like moving a house, except if you are moving houses at the same time then everything to do with the shop ends up taking a back seat to getting the house set up.  So the shop just turns into a dumping ground, boxes seem to never get unpacked, you can't start anything because you can't find your hammer or the right box of screws, the whole thing just destroys any initiative to get anything done.  Add to this the heat of an Arkansas summer, and you may never get your shop back going!

But, today I would like to report a success.  I got to the bottom of the pile of stuff on top of and around my workbench!  I am happy to say that tiny slice of the shop, at least, is ready for duty.

And now, here are some shots of the rest of the mess:

We have already spent a fair amount of time putting up shelving to help get stuff off the floor.

 

Believe it or not I moved this sheet of plywood with all the toolhangers and tools intact.

You may recognize this set of under shelf drawers from a LONG time ago.

The tablesaw top is relatively clear, but lots of the other machines are too bunched up to even use.

You can see there are lots of yard tools in here as well.  We don't have any kind of outbuilding to store that sort of stuff in yet, and boy do we need one!

 

I will continue to work through setting up the shop.  Look for a real woodworking article in the next month or so.

Shop Electrical

This weekend I tackled a couple of electrical tasks that I've been putting off in my shop for a while.  I installed an additional florescent light near the garage door to brighten up a dark area of the shop.

  

I also resolved a long standing issue with my bench grinder setup.  I have the bench grinder mounted on a small bench in the hot water heater closet off the shop.  There was no plugin in there, so I have been using the grinder with the cord running out the door to the nearest outlet for a long time.  This is an obvious tripping hazard, and I have to unplug it when I'm done to close the door.

 

So I installed a new outlet inside the closet.

 

These aren't the most exciting tasks, but taking the time to resolve these sort of annoyances just makes the shop more enjoyable to use.  Now time to get back to making some shavings!

Backyard Shed: Part 3

Having completed the build of my shed in part 2, I was eager to start getting some stuff out of the garage and into the shed to free up some space.  I started with my yard tools, specifically, my shovels, hoes, rakes, and forks.

I began by selecting a group of tools and laying them out so that they would fit along one of the short walls.  I laid them across a 2x4, and marked where the handles of the tools intersected the board.

I cut a rabbet into this board, and it became the top of an L shaped assembly which I would hang the tools from.

I cut rough notches into the top board with the bandsaw to match where the tool handles would sit, and then glued and screwed it to the bottom board.

I hung this rack in the shed, and set my tools in place. 

I found that the rack had to be set low enough for the large shovel heads, which caused the hoes to sit too low and hang below the exterior sheeting of the building.

To remedy this, I threw together a quick little frame to raise the hoes up.  It's all constructed of scrap 2x4s and held together with pocket hole screws.

This first rack took care of hanging my shovels, hoes, and forks, but I needed a couple of other hangers for my rakes.  I left them off of the first rack because their large heads would have taken up a lot of the space.  I made these hangers by cutting another notch into a board, and then gluing and screwing it to a piece of 2x4.

 Here you can see I let the large rake heads overlap a bit to save space.

I also made a mount of the same design as the rakes to hold my pickaxe.

I forged a piece of 1/2" rebar into a hanger for my sledgehammer.

I made this little tool holder for this wooden tamper I use in the garden.

Sorry for the extremely long hiatus I took between this post and the last.  I hope any formerly regular readers I had are still hanging in there.  Look for the last installment in the shed series coming very soon!

Christmas Snowball

This Christmas, I received the last 3 chisels to complete my set of Narex bench chisels.  I had seven chisels (1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 5/8", 3/4", 7/8", 1"), so the three I needed to complete the set were the big ones, 1 1/4", 1 1/2", and 2".  

I was very pleased to have these new chisels, and I wanted to get them integrated into my hanging tool storage area over my bench with my other chisels as soon as possible.  I have reached a point in my shop, though, where every new tool requires additional storage space I generally don't have.  

This is the hanging tool space above my workbench.  You can see that it's quite full, and more specifically there is no additional room to make a longer chisel rack.  Suddenly what started out as just hanging up some new chisels is turning into a bigger project.

I really like having often used tools hanging on the wall for easy access, so I wanted to expand my hanging tool area.  The plywood tool hanging area is pinned on either side by the electrical panel and the drill press/clamp area respectively, so the only option for expansion was to expand vertically.  There was a shelf directly above the plywood, though, that would have to be moved.  On this shelf, I had been storing a plethora of finishes, glues, oils, and other liquid products.

Longtime readers will recall that a while back I built a sliding door shop cabinet.  At the time I just threw whatever random tools and stuff that didn't already have a place to go in the cabinet.

But my original intent was to eventually store my liquid goods in there.  Readers may also recall that the doors bowed a little bit on the cabinet and left a gap on the side that I never have gotten around to closing in.  Because of the gap, everything I took out of the cabinet was covered in a layer of fine sawdust.  So I resolved to close up this gap before I moved on.

I started by ripping a piece of poplar to fill in most of the gap.  I installed it with screws.

Then I needed something to fill the remaining curved gap. 

 

I found this vinyl door bottom at the hardware store.

I trimmed it to length, and cut notches in it so it wouldn't interfere with the shelves.

The flexible vinyl conforms to the curved gap pretty well.

I then applied the vinyl to the other side of the cabinet as well.  The gap was smaller here, so I didn't need the wood filler strip.

Here is a view of all the stuff out of the sliding door cabinet, as well as most of the stuff from the shelf I'm working on getting rid of.  At this point, one wonders if all this will fit in that cabinet.

The shelf is cleared.  It's odd to see it empty, as it has been crammed with junk seemingly as long as I can remember.

I did manage to get all the liquids, as well as my spray finishing gear, into the cabinet.

With the shelf gone...

And the tool hangers and tools removed...

The space is eerily empty.

To remedy that, I start working on making a new piece of plywood for the expanded tool hanging space.  I went to Lowes to buy a piece of 3/4" plywood.  My options were to buy cheap 3/4" sheathing which had pretty low grade surfaces for $25, or buy a piece of BC plywood for $35.  I chose the $25 piece, and bought myself a whole lot of work smoothing it in the process. 

I rip the plywood down to size with a skil saw.

You can see the printing on the surface that will have to be removed.

I do the heavy removal with a Number 81 scraper plane., then finish up sanding.  I probably spent 2 hours on this scraping and sanding. Moral of the story - pay the damn $10 extra.

On to the next problem: there is a shelf just that is in the way of the piece of plywood on the first trial fit.  It's the lower one in the picture below.  I cut a little length off the end of the shelf with my jigsaw and a handsaw.

I want the plywood to extend above the bottoms of the shelf brackets for the shelf above it, so I need dadoes in the back of the plywood to allow it to sit over the bottoms of the brackets, but still flush against the wall.  I hold the piece of plywood up in place and make marks on the top, which I then transfer to the back of the plywood.

I cut these freehand with a 3/4" straight router bit.

 

And the piece of plywood finally gets mounted to the wall with screws.

Now, finally I can make the new chisel holder.  This is simply a board with holes drilled in it and slots cut connecting the front of the board to the holes.  

Once I have this made, however, I realize that I need to give some thought to the arrangement of all my toolholders to accommodate this larger chisel rack.  I start out by making a replacement for my mallet holder.

When I made this, I had a square headed wooden mallet.  This holder works for my new round headed mallet, but I quickly think up a better design for holding the round head.  The new one is a couple of pieces with half-holes drilled in them mortised and tenoned into a mounting plate.

As I start hanging the hand planes back up, I have a new plane laying on the bench that I recently purchased with some Christmas funds.  This reminds me that I also have 2 other planes lying on a shelf waiting to be cleaned up and put into service.  I need to have all the plane holders in hand, the old ones and the 3 new ones for these new planes, in order to come up with an efficient arrangement.

In order from left to right, a Stanley #140 skewed block plane (the plane I bought with Christmas funds), a Stanley #3 bench plane, and a Stanley #62 bevel up jack plane.

Incidentally, these are all pretty neat and somewhat unusual planes.  The #140 I bought mainly to thin tenons.  It has a removable side plate, allowing one to work all the way up to the shoulder, and a skewed blade to produce a better across the grain cut.  The #62 is a somewhat unusual plane that high end manufacturers are copying frequently these days.  It's basically a #5 jack plane sized body with a block plane blade and adjustment setup on it.  The #3 is just a bench plane, but it's so small in size that it's somewhat unusual.  In practice, it's just way to similar in size to the #4 to have both, but I just ran across it and it was too good to pass up.

All the planes above are already cleaned up, sharpened, and ready for use.  The #3 in particular was pretty rusty and dirty, and the other two needed some pretty involved cleaning and de-rusting as well.  The blades were almost all ground at the wrong angle from unskilled or careless sharpening, as I often find on old planes.  I'm not going to go into great detail here, but it probably took me 6 or 8 hours to get all 3 completely ready for use.

With the planes themselves ready, I set to work making the holders.  Longtime readers will recognize these as my usual design.  I have a previous article here if you are interested in how to make one. Here are all the plane holders, both new and old.  The new ones are top left, first long one in from the left, and far right.

With the increased wall hanging space available, I also decided to finally get my combination square mounted on the wall.  I made a quick hanger for it out of some scrap.

  

Finally, with all the hangers in hand, I work out final positions for everything.

I also hung up another Christmas present that I'm very excited about: a custom made drawknife from JB's Forge!  It's just hanging on nails for now, which works great. 

You might be arriving at the end of this article wondering what exactly it was supposed to be about.  I think sometimes folks who are not hobbiests or craftspeople (or crazy or whatever else you want to call us) often wonder just what in the world it is that we do in our shops all the time.  After all, sometimes we work for weeks without any product that leaves the shop.  This article just shows how one little project can be like a snowball that rolls down a long hill, gathering more snow and growing bigger all the time.  Pretty soon what started out as just a desire to hang up 3 new chisels can end up taking a week's worth of nights and the following weekend in the shop!