Been A While

 I know, and I apologize.  Been dealing with things that aren't normally a problem for me, which makes it difficult.  

And I offer another apology, as I won't touch on the issues until I get a real handle on them.

One of the issues which is rather surprisingly difficult for me has been, believe it or not, woodworking.  And specifically, there, I know I am a little beyond upset and trending towards a rather low-level depression regarding woodworking in general.  Time has become somewhat nebulous to me when it comes to thinking and planning with regards to woodworking, so I do apologize.  

I believe that last year, I finished the monster table, and set off to use it for various projects.  That is, I suppose, I should describe it.  

As a boy, I distinctly remember my father in the garage at various times, building things.  This goes a long way back to his youth, from the memories I gained from him talking about how he did things.  My father was a craftsman when it came to his woodworking, but there were some small issues with some of the things he built.  

I distinctly remember several items that he made which I guess I noticed problems.  The first was a really good piece of furniture which we called the "library table".  This table was about five foot long by about three foot wide.  The table top was solid oak, with a drawer, and two six-inch square pedestals dropping down to the base, which had a sort of curled block foot - the foot, if you looked at it head on, was about four inches wide.  From the side, it looked very much like a sort of rolled up thing.  Think of the very center of a cinnamon roll.  There was a round center to this side view, but coming out from that was a sort of thick layer which curled away from the front, down, under, and back over the top - then into the 3/4" base of this table.  

I think this might have been a relatively early veneer project for Dad.  Most of the table was solid oak, but there were spots that were veneered.  And I think he also made his own drawer glide, as one did then, for the single drawer in this table.  The table itself was old when I was a child, but did not show much in the way of wear.  Dad had planned for years to re-do the top in slate.  That's right.  Not so much replace as in cover the top of the table with a slate slab he purchased around the time we moved from the first home I remember a half-mile or so away to the house on the river.  

The other two projects I do have strong memories of my father building were a pair of cupboards, I suppose you might call them, which were extensively veneered.  These were built from 3/4" plywood, stood about 40 inches tall, and were about four feet wide.  They each had two drawers above two doors which opened for storage.  I do not recall what we may have kept in them, because they didn't get opened much.  The entire cabinet was covered in veneer, and I do very vividly recall the smell of the contact cement he used to attach those sheets of veneer to the cabinets.  

And he had more than a few workbenches.  Dad liked his built-ins, so when we moved from the first house to the River House, I remember that workbench.  The top was built from several old closet doors removed when they remodeled the house.  That river house had started as a cottage for a family with as many as seven kids, though two of them passed away - one in infancy, one at the age of twelve or so, from Leukemia.  There were plenty of closets in the house, and nearly all of them had sliding doors which were made from some 3/4" material.  Not hollow core or solid core doors like today, but just what I think of as "slab doors".  And several of these, laminated, made the primary surface of his main workbench.  It was a flat surface with a shelf below for storing smaller pieces of sheet goods, and the wall above was filled with the inevitable pegboard.  

Much of the pegboard was filled with small jars where he stored various screws and attachments.  In that, my father was extremely organized.  The problem became getting those things off the wall to use them, so that's why I never chose to do that in my various garages.  It probably helps that I have yet to have a garage space which has open-stud walls.  That is, you can see the studs, because the garage does not have anything built above it.  I suspect part of that came from later building codes, and it is what it is. 

But getting back to the table, Dad had several small work-stations.  One of them fell to the table on the radial arm saw - a giant beasts of a tool which I now own, and need to get back into regular use.  That's next year's project.  More on that later.

The other work table I recall was a smaller project that was a bit unusual.  The table's legs were made from some fairly firm 2x2 pine lumber - that is, each leg was one and one half inches square.  And they splayed out slightly.  I no longer have access to that table to measure it, but my gut sense is that it was around two feet wide by about four feet long - but that was the tops, which were separated by a small 2" wide gap.  I think Dad did this so he could clamp things down on the top, and the under-side frame was also set back from the edge of the top.  This table also had a pair of outlets on one end, and a switch, which controlled the flow of power.  

I liked that table so much I decided, last year, to build a larger version of it.  Mine is 30" wide by 72" long.  The legs are out of 2x4s, not 2x2s, and this table has a total of 6 outlets, all on a switch, and it sits against the side wall in my garage.  

What I am anticipating when it comes to building projects is my somewhat versatile saw stand.  I have a contractor's table saw which I got extremely cheaply.  The drawback is that the thing is ... well, it has some issues.  We'll start with the miter gauge.  This nifty bit of metal and plastic is the tool which should permit you to use the saw to make square or angled cuts.  It fits into one of the two slots on the table top, and in theory, has a bit of a gauge which can be adjusted to be square, or an angle.  

Now, when I got this tool I made the beginner's mistake and ASSUMED it was square out of the box.  Well, the blade WAS square to the table top.  So that much was certain.  But then there's the miter gauge.  Some are pretty solid beasts.  Some are spectacularly accurate and incredibly expensive.  Some are ... well, trash.  Mine, or that is, the one which came with my table saw, was a metal bar which fit into the slot on the table, a sort of a protractor tool with a knob that allowed me to tighten it on a specific angle - this was mostly plastic, with a few metal bits.

And the nice part was the typical angles - 90, 30, 45 were marked on the gauge.  If I needed anything more specific, I have a protractor in the garage for those moments.  But the important part is the 90.  And when I started cutting things, they weren't quite square.  And so I decided to check the miter gauge using the simplest tool I had.  The table Saw.  

How did I do that?  Well, the miter gauge is designed with the bar hanging below the protractor portion so it fits into the slot on the table.  And I flipped it.  I put the protractor part below the bar, basically, upside down, and then pressed it against the table saw edge.  That, my friends, is - if you know your blade is square to your table top, and the guide slots are square, you've squared your miter gauge.

What's that, you in the back?  How do you know?  I have a number of carpenter squares.  I have a very small machinist square - about two by three inches - for squaring off small things.  I have a larger one, about six inches of heavy rosewood handle, bound by brass, with an 8" ruled portion sticking out square.  Then I have a couple of the old-fashioned Carpenter squares - looks like a large L, is flat, with numbers printed in both sides, both directions.  I also have three "Speed Squares" - these are metal or plastic triangles with one wide edge and some slots in them.  They are usually used to mark lines on boards you are going to cut.  Among other things.  

I also have a rather large "Drywall Square" - this is less a square, and much more like a giant T.  It's a little over four feet long and has a two-foot-wide top - the top of the T - which hangs down.  I use it for plotting square lines across things like sheets of plywood, when I can afford to work with those.  When they were $30 a sheet, I was careful.  Now that we're looking at $60-$120 a sheet, yeah, I ain't buying plywood.

But back to the table saw.  I took one of my carpenter squares - the larger L one - and hooked the short edge over the front edge of the table.  Then I slid the longer side up against the saw blade.  And I noticed, and made certain, that the length of the carpenter square touched along the entire width of the saw blade.  This meant that the edge of the table, and anything relying on that edge, was square to the blade of the saw.  Then I checked the slots against the table edge - verifying that they, too, were square.  This guaranteed that anything that slid in the slot and was square to the edge of the table would therefore also be square to the blade, and thus square to the cut edge.

And when I checked the miter gauge that came with the table saw, that cheap Chinese-made piece of crap was 5 degrees off square if you set it directly onto the 0 mark.  So every end cut using the miter gauge set to 0 was cutting a 5 degree angle.  Or in other words, if you were planning on building a wall, the top of your wall would not allow water to puddle on top of it.  If, say, you were building a cupboard, everything would be tilted in one direction.  

So yeah, while that gauge still worked, I squared it against the table edge.  And eventually the little plastic pin broke off, which meant that the gauge was useless.  The good news was that I'd ordered a new one.

Which was no small adventure, either.  Because most grown-up table saws are built with a standard set of slots in the top.  These slots are machined very carefully as 3/4" wide slots exactly square to the table.  Because, you see, if you have even the slightest bit of wiggle in the slot, you might compromise your angles.  That might not be critical when you're building a box, but let's say you're trying to build a six-sided box.   And when you have six cuts, each of them 1/8 of 1 degree off exactly 30 degrees, when you combine those ends, you have problems.

Because, you see, while each one of your cuts is only off .125 a degree, you have, in a six sided figure, twelve 30-degree angles.  Because a six sided figure can be made out of six sides, each of which have a 30-degree end.  Of course, if you were really smart, you'd cut a 60-degree angle in one end, and leave the other side square.  This way you'd end up off only .625 of a degree.  Possibly not noticed, if you've got some slop.  If, however, you're building a picture frame or a nice piece of furniture, everyone's going to notice a half a degree of a gap at the end of your assembly.  

So a tight EXACT fit is critical for miter gauges.  And my miter gauge slot is not 3/4" wide.  It is 5/8" wide.  Which means that every single miter gauge on the market, both original equipment, and secondary specialist tools, are 3/4" wide.  Except for one.  That one gauge comes from Rikon, a company that makes many power tools, and it turns out their band saw line uses a 5/8" slot as a guide slot.  Which means you can, for a price, purchase a 5/8" wide miter gauge.

Or, allegedly, I could back in February when I ordered mine, for $24.49.  And it was cheap, compared to some of the things I'd seen, so I ordered two.  And here we are, in June of 2021, and my $49.98 of miter gauges have still not arrived on these shores, and I'm still waiting.  But I haven't got a load of lumber to slice up, so there we go.  But eventually, I hope, they'll get here.

In the mean time, I have carefully constructed a dual-slot miter gauge to guarantee I am getting square cuts from my table saw.  And I'm working on building my next-level sled which will permit me to cut larger pieces.  

And all of that will aid my building a multi-tool stand which will allow me to use the table saw, a "chop saw" I got for cheap at a garage sale, or my router table - all tools which can modify longer lengths of lumber into shorter or differently-shaped pieces of wood.  And all generally have the same needs.  They need to handle lumber that flows from side to side, or from front to back, as it is modified.  So the stand I'm engineering will have a spot where I can slide, on a mount, the table saw, the chop saw, or the router table.  And the "wings" to the side of the tool will support the work for each of the processes I will need to accomplish.

When, of course, the price of lumber returns from orbital to merely high.  I mean, I recall as a teenager spending $20 for a full sheet of 3/4" plywood.  And that sheet lasted me for a couple of weeks.  More recently, I was spending about $35 a sheet for a lower grade of plywood, but it worked for what I needed.  And hopefully, it will return to something I can afford.  I can hope, anyway.  Because until it does, I ain't doing much in the way of woodworking.

So there ya go. I'm still here, doing things.  Just quietly.  I hope.