Duct Tape and Baling Twine

The seeds have arrived. The bulk of them from Pinetree Garden, but Parks Seeds supplies our favorite Beefy Boy toms. They also had a new chocolate (dark purple) cherry tomato variety that I couldn’t resist. Vermont Bean and Seed had a much better price on our Silver King corn this year. They had very prompt service, arriving only a few days after the Pinetree order.

There are a few changes in the seed lineup this year. These are a few things that definitely won’t be planted this year.: 1. Kohlrabi. It actually did well but I don’t think it was ever used. It was almost buried between a corn patch and a fence and pretty well hidden. 2. Rutabaga was shuffled around in it’s seedling pack until it was planted and lost in the greenhouse jungle. 3. African horned melons were as wild as they sound. If you didn’t have a leather glove on when reaching into this patch the fuzzy vines would leave your hands embedded with hair like needles. The melons were large spined, baseball sized, stuffed with seeds and almost no flesh. A complete waste of space and time.

Pinetree had a good price for the seed starter cell packs. I try to recycle them from year to year, but the ones from last year were about on their last season. They also have a good list of books on gardening, and have a sale price on many of them. A good book with a bargain price is a bonus.

It even comes with some news from Maine.

March 16th, 2010 | Category: Gardening | Leave a comment

After eighteen hours of work on the nightstands this is where they are. I sanded all of the panels prior to assembly. The finish quality always feels better if I can get the bulk of the sanding done while I can still lay the panels flat. Not wrestling with the entire heavy assembled piece saves the joints as well.

Setting the stopwatch when I start work has really been keeping me on track in the shop. It literally feels like I am on the clock and have to keep every moment productive. I have found that I have been averaging about three hours a day in the shop on my days off. The rest of the day is spent on normal family life things that happen around here.

The to-do list is still long for this project: 1.Two dovetailed drawers. 2. Four doors with beading edges. 3. Baseboard foot system times two. 4. Edge moulding for tops. 5. Backs of cases. 6. Varnish everything.

With spring planting just around the corner this project does need to get done or it risks staying in the shop until late fall.

March 15th, 2010 | Category: Woodworking | Comments (1)

My oldest son is taking some college classes already. His new Swiss book bag apparently wasn’t strong enough to handle two classes worth of books. Maybe Swiss books are lighter….hmmm? They still make the best knives.
The bag was pretty heavy, and the handle strap blew some stitching after a few weeks of use. Taking after his father, the receipt was long gone, and left us with having it fixed or fixing it ourselves.

This kind of repair isn’t something I normally do, but I had some ideas for this one. Obviously the thread wasn’t good enough the first time, so I decided to up grade it to pop rivets. The torch was used to heat the head of a finish nail to make some fray proof holes. The tough cordura of the strap and bag would melt and leave nice sealed holes.

The pop rivets came in a pack of multiple lengths from 1/8 to 3/8 inch. You have to determine how much fabric you are riveting as well as the thickness of the washers to decide on the rivet length to use.

The 3/8 inch washers are necessary with fabric. Unlike the machine rivets on jeans these only have a large (one quarter inch) head on one side. The other side is smaller even after it has been activated by the riveter and will not hold in fabric well. Even the wide end is small enough that it might tear through.

The washers need a 1/8 inch center for the rivet to fit through. I didn’t have any of these and found a few flat square nuts and just ground them round and smooth on the bench grinder so they wouldn’t cut the fabric. Buy them with your rivets and you can save yourself this step.

Sandwiching the cordura between the washers gives the rivets something very solid to attach to, and once attached they are quite smooth.

With one side done successfully the other side looked a bit bare, and was probably going to give out later anyway. All of the tools were out so I went ahead and pre-fixed the other side as well.

This fix did not take very long, and could be used on many of the kids backpacks and book bags that are in use these days. This might even be useful for some luggage fixes.

March 13th, 2010 | Tags: metal washers, pop rivets, propane torch, Swiss bags | Category: Home Repair | Comments (1)

Keeping track of my time on this project has made me very aware of the efficiency of each phase of it. I used these chisels to clean out four of the dadoes on the nightstands, and quickly decided that there was a better way to use my time.
I like the look of hand tools, and even using them is fun, but they don’t meet my requirements for productivity in my shop. Sadly, my limited skills with them would trash the quality of my work as well. There might be some jobs that are faster to do with hand tools than with power tools, but I can’t think of any at the moment.

This bench was a fun project to build, but if you don’t use a lot of hand tools you could probably get by without one. The hardware was from a leg vise that my father in law found on an old decrepit bench, and if it had looked this good he would have saved the whole thing. I wasn’t about to spend this much money on the vise for a bench that would only get minimal use. The whole bench cost about half of that.

A rare scene of my bench in action.

These small dadoes can take some time to clean out to the proper depth with a chisel when there are a lot of them.

With a few passes with the router set at the proper depth, and held in a tight grip it took less time to clean out all of these dadoes than it did write a blog post about it. Free handing cuts with a router takes some practice also, and it can make a mess out of a panel in short order. A router should qualify as a hand tool. It’s just a hand tool with horsepower.

March 8th, 2010 | Tags: chisel, dado, hand tools, router | Category: Woodworking | Comments (3)