9 more hours done in the shop today. It was a great day to be outside. Around 80 degrees and slightly breezy. We won’t have many more like that for awhile.
I got the face frame for the cabinets all completed and installed and gave the bookcase faces their main sanding, and that’s about it. Yes, it really takes 9 hours to do that when you’re being really careful.
I also changed the design just slightly, but more on that later.
wherein Sean comes up with a brilliant and potentially world-altering idea.
I’m truthfully humbled.
Physicist Brian Cox gave a talk at the recent Ted Talks conference on the impending operation of the Large Hadron Collider. It may sound geeky and inaccessible, but Cox is an engaging and genuine presenter. It’s very much an everyman, popular-science type talk, but it touches on a subject that I’m very interested in. Do yourself a favor and take 20 minutes to watch his excellent talk. That way you’ll understand the significance when, a year or so from now, I make an effusive blogpost that they’ve found the Higgs Boson.
On a sidenote, how can you not love Brian Cox? He holds a chair in particle physics at the University of Manchester, but looks more like a member of the Beatles. I hope this guy gets more face-time with the public. Who knows, we may have school girls swooning after a physicist- surely, something that’s never happened in this universe.
Got another 6 hours in today. More sanding (koff!), as well as some more face frame construction. I would have had another three hours but an unexpected call let to some unexpected audio work on a film next week that’ll go a long way toward paying for the ent. cent. Yay!
Tomorrow I tackle the face frame on the main center section, then figure out a good way to attach all three frames. After that it’s time to move on to the doors, then the ebony inlay.
Total time is 88 hours.
Amazing! And a great physics lesson, too.
If health insurance premiums and national wages continue to grow at current rates, the average cost of a family health insurance premium will surpass the average annual household income by 2025, approximately the time when the Medicare trust fund is projected to be insolvent.
I don’t know what the answer is- nationalization, privatization, boutique medical treatment, some sort of hybrid, or something completely new, but this is a serious issue, and the numbers don’t just get scary in 17 years. It’s looking like sometime during the next presidential term most Americans are going to have to take a hard look at their medical insurance and just quit paying premiums, either that or start doing without absolute necessities (and I’m not talking iPhones and cable tv here).
Much of the waste and out of control costs go not to the doctors, but to the lawyers and insurance companies themselves. Whenever we go to the doctor, we just pay out of pocket and usually get a 20-30% instant rebate on the bill- which is the market’s way of saying that there is a huge amount of waste in the system.
I’m happy that we live in a prosperous country. I’m happy that life spans are so dramatically better than they were even three generations ago, and I’m not unwilling to see a company turn a profit (a company is just made up of people, after all). But the system is badly broken and right now it seems like they only thing that will catalyze a fix is a complete breakdown. Which looks like it will happen, at the latest, by the end of the next decade.
The list of reasons why everyone should start a business, and why the home is a great first frontier for many of those businesses, is long. Here are some examples:
1. Because of online and communications technology, you can start many businesses at little or no cost.
2. You can start a side business without foregoing your “secure” day job.
3. You can spend more of your time doing something you’re passionate about.
4. You can make a little extra money, and maybe eventually ramp up to replacing that day job.
5. The biggest companies now have many free or inexpensive solutions available for small business making it easier than ever to start and grow.
6. If you have a family, just imagine what a positive impact it could have on your children as they watch you toil, create, breakthrough, tough it out, and demonstrate how to take control of your life and live passionately rather than being a cog in the wheel.
7. Outsourcing enables you to streamline your activities (and the physical footprint) of your business so that you focus on doing the work you love and farm out the other stuff.
8. Home-based business is generally accepted - even preferred - as a mode of business in the marketplace these days (whereas before there were credibility issues).
9. Tax write-offs are often available.
10. You take control of your destiny rather than relying on someone else to make the right decisions for your future.
Good news: anyone can become great in just about any field. It only takes 7300 hours.
Silicon just got a LOT cheaper, and this is reportedly going to drop the the price of solar panels. Technologyreview has an article on it.
I would love to see solar drop to the point where it’s competitive, or even cheaper, than grid-tied electricity. We have plans in our next house to generate much of our electricity from solar panels. I mean, how cool would it be to run the whole house off of solar-tied to the grid for when I’d like to run my table saw or dishwasher, of course.
Ultimately, it’d be nice to be able to generate enough power to charge a plug-in hybrid so that we could almost completely do away with paying for gasoline as well. I think within 10 years we’ll start to see this kind of thing become mainstream. It’s possible now (there are thousands of people living completely off the grid), but the primarily-electrical, plug-in car is only now starting to hit the streets. Give it a few more generations and some improvements, and I’ll bet that we see this soon. Not only will this get us off of foreign oil, but it’ll reduce emissions and free us from the tyranny of the gas pump.
It can’t happen fast enough for me.
I spent 8 more hours in the shop today for a running total of 82 hours! Had to run back to the lumber yard for three more pieces of QSRO. Hopefully the final bits of solid wood I’ll have to buy. Came home and spent a quality 90 minutes in front of the planer driving my neighbors nuts with the noise. I got everything planed up and the rest of the day was spent gluing up one final panel (this one will be the main surface directly underneath the TV) as well as making the face frame for the left side bookcase. A funny thing happened whilst doing this. I had very carefully measured all the pieces and pocket screwed them together. Perfect 90 degree angles between them. The bookcase also has perfect 90 degree surfaces. When I applied one 90 degree surface to the front of the other one…..
everything was crooked.
It was like suddenly we didn’t live in Euclidean space-time any more. It was the weirdest thing. I could measure 90 degree angles all over the place, but the face frame was “slanted” by as much as 1/4 inch between the top of the case and the bottom. This utterly flummoxed me until I took the face frame apart, reconstructed it (with the same wood and the same screw.. in the SAME HOLES), and it worked. Amazing. I think I’ve discovered a unique quality of wood: it has the ability to bend spacetime.
So anyway, that’s how I spent my 8 hours today.
4 hours yesterday (total of 74 hours!) on the entertainment center. I planed up a bunch of thin pieces and glued them to the back where the TV will be mounted. This is so, when you look at the surface the TV is mounted on, you’ll see solid hardwood oak and not plywood (yuk!). I only applied solid wood where you’ll see the back around the edges of the TV, and not over the whole back “wall”, so right now I’ve got a roughly 16×9 TV “space” layed out. Looks kinda funny.
I also started in on the face frame but ran out of wood. Well, I have more QSRO, but it’s not the same color and I want to make sure the color match is right, and that I’m using stock that has consistent grain and ray-flecking:
Back to the lumberyard today for more wood.
So yesterday I spent another 4 hours (total time: 70 hours) on the ent. cent. I didn’t do much but cut the tops to final length and sand, sand, sand. If you’ve ever wonder why the iPod was invented, it was so woodworkers could stand for three hours in one place while sanding.
Speaking of sanding, I always wear earmuffs and a face shield, but I can’t use the inexpensive filter that I bought several years ago. It’s really uncomfortable and since I have a beard, it has small gaps around my face that let the dust in anyway. I’ve been considering the purchase of a much more expensive and effective dust hood but can’t quite bring myself to pull the trigger on it. After all, there are better things to spend the money on (like, say, nothing at all), but I figure that I can spend a few hundred dollars on this now, or several tens of thousands of dollars later on when I get chemo for the lung cancer that’s brought on by inhaling fine wood dust for a few decades. Or maybe the Hodgkin’s disease. Oh joy. (cough, cough). I do my best to keep the exposure to a minimum by sanding outside with the wind behind me, but there’s only so much I can do.
Yeah, yeah. I’ll probably just buy the stupid thing. It’s a new product and I’m waiting for the first round of reviews to hit. Dropping almost four Benjamin’s on a ventilated face shield isn’t my idea of fun, but neither is an arm full of bleomycin.
Back to the shop. Today’s I start on the face frames. Then more sanding…
This is becoming a (very enjoyable) habit. Yesterday (monday), I spent 6 hours in the shop, and pulled another 7 today. 66 hours in total on the ent. cent, and it’s starting to look like a piece of furniture! I think I could probably speed things up by at least 50% if all of my machines and stationary tools had permanent homes. As it is, the table saw is the only thing that lives in one spot. Each of the other major tools (band saw, planer, jointer) have to be moved to one particular spot in order to be used. I only have one tube from the dust collector so if I want to use the band saw I have to move the planer out of the way, or if I want to use the jointer, I have to shift the planer aside. It makes for a whole lot of moving and shifting, and a piece of wood might have to visit every machine before it gets glued into place. Then the whole dance has to start over again. I’ve gotten pretty good about looking ahead and doing as much as I can on one tool, but I often have to complete one piece of wood before I can move on to the next.
I love my shop. It’s a nice big 2 car garage. I’m not complaining. Indeed, I have a friend who works out of a very small 1 car garage. It’s ridiculous how little space he has in there. Still, one of these days I’m going to build me a big place where all the tools can be bolted to the freaking floor, never to have to move again. With their own dust collection and outfeed tables.
What the hey, as long as I’m wishing, I want a pony.
…someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.
So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter…
…And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Read the rest of the really fascinating article here.
Not to be a pessimist, but I suspect that today’s odd 60 degree weather is the last gasp of Old Man Winter. We shall not see his like again. For about eight months. Thus begins my least favorite season: the three quarters of a year we Texans like to call Summer. Here comes the triple digits.
I think this year I’ll finally break down and get the A/C in my truck working. I’ve toughed it out for the last three years but I’ve about had it. Melting away in a 120 degree car in the Texas sun has gotten old.
Sorry to be cranky, but I really do hate the hot weather around here. Bleah.
It’s 57 degrees and rainy. My absolute favorite weather (except for the wind- I really don’t like wind). What in the world am I doing inside?!?
Time to change back into the grubbies and go find something I can do in the shop with the door closed. I can’t work the main machines when it rains because they’re right next to the garage door. If the cast iron tops get wet they’ll rust in about ten minutes. No kidding- 10 minutes. You can almost stand and watch it happen. Only the most generous and frequent application of paste wax to their tops keeps them from turning red and flakey from rust. So if it’s raining I can’t use the table saw or planer (the two machines I need to use to finish the ent. cent. top).
But I’m sure I can find something else that needs to be done. It’s too cold and rainy to stay inside. I’m off!
UPDATE: 4 hours in the shop. The rain quit and I got a bit done-mainly a glue up on the bookcase tops, plus a lot of standing around cogitating on future problems to be solved. There’s a lot of ‘em. Tomorrow is the main top glue up and… more sanding! Yay! 
Another 9 hours in the shop today working in the ent. cent. I’ve got the main carcasse glued up. Thanks to neighbor James for helping move the beast off of the work table, and for the ant killer in the yard. 
I had to rout out a groove in the back for the back piece, then plane and joint more wood for the top of the center and two side book cases. I had all the wood for these tops all laid out and ready to plane (6 pieces each 7 inches wide and 60 inches long), and realized that it was over $130 in lumber! Don’t screw it up.
I screwed it up.
Well, to be fair, I really didn’t, but the results are sub-optimal. I wanted to leave as much of the inch thick lumber remaining so the top could be very thick. As thick as possible, preferably 7/8ths of in inch. I feel that this thickness balances the heft of the rest of the piece. Unfortunately, the wood has to cooperate. If you’re planing 4 pieces of 7 inch wide wood that’ll eventually be one solid top, you are limited by the maximum thickness of the roughest piece of wood. Put another way, the lumber comes from the yard very rough, and you have to run it through the planer and jointer until both sides have no imperfections. If there’s still an imperfection (a saw mark or a low spot), you have to run them ALL through until they match the thickness of the thinnest piece. My thinnest piece ended up being almost exactly 3/4 of an inch (1/8th inch less than I had hoped). So by the time I caught it I had already hogged off than extra 1/8th inch from all the boards. It’s not a catastrophic deal by any stretch of the imagination. It only means that the top of the entertainment center will be 1/8th inch thinner than I had designed. Still, it rankles. I turned 1/4th of my $130 pile of lumber into sawdust getting everything smooth. That’s a trash bag full of $33 in shavings and dust. Ug. That’s woodworking, though: turning large pieces of wood into small pieces of wood.
Next step is to joint and glue up the tops. One of the boards I worked today had the most spectacularly rayed grain I’ve ever seen. It’ll be my showpiece board in the best position (closest to the door). The other bookshelf has a serviceable grain, but nothing to write home about. The top of the center section is very nice, but I have to do some creative grain matching since I went ahead and used a new board in place of the too-thin one I described above. I’ll still use the too-thin one for trim (got just the place for it), so it’s no loss.
In the last three days I’ve put over 20 hours of work into the entertainment center. I can now put all three basic carcasses next to each other and get a feel for the size of the piece. It’s wide but not too tall. Nice proportions. I told Erin today that I fell like 1/3rd of the time spent on any project is the basic structure build, 1/3rd is spent detailing, and 1/3rd is spent on the finish. The detailing (trim, face frames, ebony inlays, doors) will start as soon as the tops are done (another couple of days).
Incidentally, I found this site tonight while looking around for design ideas. I wasn’t surprised to find out that this craftsman charges up to $9000 for some of his work. Next time you look at a hand made piece and wonder if it’s really worth 10 times what you could buy a cheap dept. store version, just remember that I (a much less qualified and talented woodworker) just spent 40 hours doing a basic carcasse build. I aspire to that level of quality some day and certainly don’t begrudge him what he charges. It’s beautiful work.
“Human flight will not be achievable for 1 to 10 million years.”
The New York Times, two weeks before the Wright Bros. flew at Kitty Hawk.
The unholy (but cool) offspring of a unicycle and a Segway.
