World of Doug

Well, what to say. It has been a week since I got anything up here. Unfortunately I really don't have a lot to show for the time past. Both Erin and I are finding it extremely hard to find time to accomplish even the minimal tasks we would like to get done.

We did manage to get the house to a bare minimum of function this weekend. We painted some in the kids room and got them set up. Not big on my todo list, but Erin is nesting in and has some core honey-do chores that I need to help on. It ended up with a fun theme and the kids are quite pleased.

Also up this weekend was going through boxes. Organizing the stuff we aren't going to be using and putting everything in some kind of logical place. Not as easy as it might sound. We are phasing the storage space in, trying to get everything in tubs so that bugs and critters can't damage our stuff.

Next up was some couch wrangling and rug placement testing. If you would like to see the house, check out Erin's Blog for all kinds of pictures. She went gung-ho yesterday and was cleaning and documenting our home. I am not going to do it here as well.

While doing this work in the house, my penance for new tools and shop time, we came up with about 50 new projects. We could use a book shelf here or a table here and there. The list just keeps growing. I am really going to need to become proficient at building some of this stuff.

Finished the weekend off by refinishing our mailbox. It was looking a bit crusty. Greg had just rattle-canned it without masking it the last time. So I stripped it and gave it a fresh coat, repainted the flag red, and applied some new numbers. Not exciting, just an hour or more out of my afternoon.

Nothing much new in the garage. I did turn around and flip the planer I picked up. I just was not very happy with how the darn thing worked. After mauling a peice of lumber scrap I had laying around I promptly put it up on e-bay and sold it for more than I had paid for it. Not really sure what the problem is with it, but the infeed/outfeed rollers aren't working propperly and I don't really want to invest the time to try and fix it. Problem with some of these tools is that there is very little documentation and even less built in adjustability. So I am done with that POS. Of course I turned around a bought a more expensive planer (the one I was originally wanting). So I got a scroll saw out of the whole deal for $60. Erin did note that wasn't on the original must-have list. Oops. And the budget of $500 turned more like $650. Double oops.

I took the jointer apart again last night. The safety feature that keeps the cutter head bolts from falling off also means that the entire jointer needed to be dismantled to replace them with the correct length. Sunhill did good by me and even sent an extra long set of studs in case the intermediate didn't work. So I am out a bit of extra time, but things should be okay from here on. Jointer once again up and running with an extra coat of wax.

I have a few things I need to get done here in order to be up and running effectively:
1)mobile bases for the drill press, jointer, scroll saw
2)I need to put together the base for the new planer. It is about 100lb, so not really something I want to be picking up and down much.
3)get one of my routers mounted to the extension table on the tablesaw
4)tune up and check the tablesaw setup. I really haven't used it other than a test cut since I haven't been able to check it out fully.

There is more, but that is a start of the list of things that I am not finding time to get to. Hopefully this moving in business will settle down soon. No pictures from me today. Maybe later in the week something exciting will happen.