Weekend doings

Well, another beautiful weekend here in Alabama. We did have some thunderstorms and rain. They were transient, so not too much of an issue.

I got to play around with some of my new toys. Sorry in advance for the hazy photos. One of the kids must have put a finger on the lens.
A few minutes grinding away on the water stones. I am going to need to get a course material to speed the flattening of the back of these.


The small one is a bit of a bugger. I wasn't worrying about it much and took it to a course grinding wheel about a year ago. Well, not knowing any better I mucked up the back side of the chisel. So in order to fully fix it I will need to grind back another 1/4in. For now I will deal with a bit of an uneven tip. I gotta say the bevel sharpening method is great. I will have to bevel the rest of my chisels. In the photo below you can see the small chisel is beveled. Only the leading edge has to be maintained. Much less material to remove at sharpening and an added bonus is that the 2 points of contact make it more stable on the stones.


After 800, 4000, and 6000 stones the blades get a mirror finish. They are also sharp enough to shave with. I have bald spots on my wrist to prove it :-)


I took some scrap mdf and built me a drill press table. The blue trays are T-track for aligning the fence and attaching material hold downs. I pirated the fence off my old router table. I didn't have time or a plan on how I wanted to make the fence. I saw the router fence sitting there and oddly enough it lined up serendipitously with the arbitrary spacing I chose for the t-tacks. I had to stretch one of the holes a bit, but it was a minor mod. I will need to add a better face board to it if I continue using it. Overall it was a couple of hours well spent. Now it is much easier to clamp bigger items to the table for safe and accurate drilling.



Other news on the garage front...
A real project is born. You are looking at the top I am working on for the hall entry table. Just jointed and glued up a couple of 6/4 hard maple. Knew those clamps would start coming in handy around here.


Boards matched up so nice it is like they were one.


We made a trip over to Scottsboro to check out a hardwoods dealer there. Man, that is a dangerous place. Way too many great pieces of hardwood. We got there just before close, which was good in a sense. Just enough time to grab the wood needed for the table

In other news the planer that arrived on Friday is great. I get a little snipe, but with some fine tuning I may be able to completely remove it. I will run the table top through it tomorrow. My test pieces have been very good. I am excited to toss a bigger board at it and see how it does.