Picture frame with integrated stand

Cocobolo, future gift for christmas.  What a pain to add a finish to it.  I think I should approach cocobolo differently.

Better pictures of our deck and pergola

Shortly after finishing, the rains came.  Had a random day in december where it wasn't rainy for pictures.

 Both pergolas.  

 Main part of the deck - hidden fasteners

Deck railing.  Side facing the neighbors that adds privacy and a base for the future outdoor kitchen counter

Flooring install time lapse

Time lapse video of the hallway on sunday.

Time lapse of the bedroom on saturday.  Took a while to get used to

Decking - Epic 2

Sarah and I decided to replace our carpet and put in hardwoods, while we were at it, we decided to replace the decking too.  What the hay, can't be that hard could it?  Wrong!

The old deck, only 6 years old but looks pretty bad.  We hated that there were so many different kinds of fasteners and holes that were haphazardly (irregular) made for the fasteners

 Lifting the deck was much harder than we expected, 2 different screws whose heads were clogged with debris.  We had to clear the debris before we could back them out with a drill with whatever we could find that was pointy.  Three different kinds of nails, including super long screw shank nails which were pure evil.

Bigger pile than it looks and only about 1/2 of the debris created from the removal of the railing and deck boards and "benches".  Some of those boards are 16' long. 

The 20 lbs of screws and nails that were removed with the decking and railing, seriously a bunch of hacks who built our deck.  (posts held down with toe-nailed brads.  5000 18ga brads are equivalent to a single lag bolt right?)

Constantly rejiggering furniture, deck boards, etc in order to have a place to walk and let the finish dry while being able to work on the next section of the deck.  Lots of planning around the weather too, we lucked out this Oct, although it was HOT! 

Stinky was perfectly comfy though and did a lot of watching and meowing through the window, when not sleeping. 

Completed deck with the railing saved for next year.  Still have some fascia to put up, but that should be easy (knock on wood).  Doesn't look like much, but our deck is over 40' long.  

The hidden faster system was worth it but took 2-3 times as long to install (cutting biscuit slots, getting the fastener inserted along the entire length, the correct gap).  The boards are all clean single board runs except in the middle where we ran a board perpendicular (hard to see).   Straightening the 18' long boards for the main part of the deck were a bear.  Sarah and I are both glad the hard work is done.  Ipe is always what we wanted, already much better and cleaner looking while providing the durability that cedar can't even come close to.  I've already dropped stuff on the deck and there isn't even a scratch this stuff is so hard.  I think we would do it again to, I don't think we could pay someone for the level of attention we paid while building this deck.

What an epic and HOT project.  I don't think I've ever sweat so much on a project.  Maybe the next project will be to finally build some furniture.

Pergola finished - epic 1

Started the project late June.  Milling the rough redwood from the previous post.  Finished the pergola over the weekends in what must have been the absolute hottest days we've had in Oregon, ever.

Sarah working on joinery 

Ledger and posts for one half of the pergola 

Ledger, post and beam for the other half of the pergola 

One of the completed pergola and hints towards Epic 2

This was an incredible amount of work.  It took a tremendous amount of work to mill the redwood from rough, green slabs into the wood used for the beams, rafters and lattice.  Probably emptied the dust collector over 10 times (35 gallon).

I have a lumber problem

This time it's for the pergola.  It was a good deal for redwood, what can I say?  I have projects for the black walnut...  13' long clear boards from the same tree, lots of possibilities.  Curly maple with lots of character?  I'm sure I can find something to do with that!

Needed some redwood, why not get some walnut and maple while I'm at it?  Redwood is pretty nice, a little short, but it's just so hard to find dimensional.  I'll make good use of it for the pergola's. 

Looks messy, but it was a lot worse.  French cleat wall just to hang up stuff and get it off the floor.  Used to store lumber here vertically, but it just didn't seem to store much and boards were hard to get to, especially if they were right at 8'.

Went to the plywood store to find some cheap plywood.  The cheapest they had was pre-finished birch plywood.  Guess what was on the other side?  The nicest cherry I've seen on plywood.  Felt a little guilty about making a french cleat wall and a router table with cherry plywood, but I'll get over it.

William Ng School and Dutch Tool Chest with Chris Schwarz

Was at the William Ng school of woodworking to build a dutch tool chest.  Fought a cough and cold the whole time there and for some time afterwards, but learned a lot and discovered neat little details everywhere.

My completed tool chest.  Used copper nails and hardware from Lee Valley.  Some of it was pretty crooked (the hinges and the hasp) but oh well.  I really like the copper nails.

Decided to french fit all the tools in the chest so they wouldn't bang into each other.  Making the wooden holsters for the block planes simply took forever.  Used all sorts of scraps which was kinda nice, some of those pieces I've been saving forever.

Decided to put a drawer in the chest for the bottom part.  The section without the drawer is plenty tall enough for planes and such, but a drawer allowed the use of the space left without having to stack things on top of one another.  It really does hold a lot of tools.

Aerangis time lapse - sort of

Shot this over something like 2 weeks and went though quite a few batteries.  Canon 70d kept turning off, still couldn't get to the bottom of that one...  Gave up on the movie because I simply bumped into the tripod too often and had to change the shot as the spike moved.

Macro shot of the shop

On a 10mm? sigma lens.  Can't see the lathe and some of the stuff by the table saw, but a picture of the garage when I used to be able to park in the car in there.

Dendrobium time lapse

Sounds like some thriller novel doesn't it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRysKMfZWZ8&feature=youtu.be

Night photos are a little funky because I deleted the frames where the neighbor's port light interfered.

More pictures of the French Oak Kitchen Roubo

Better pictures of the French Oak Kitchen Roubo after replacing the broken memory card in my camera.

Notice the leg vice is asymmetric in order to fit the drawer underneath the benchtop

Glad that I glued up the dovetailed drawer right away, the french oak which sat in my shop for almost 1 year, moved quite a bit after resawing (particularly the shelves)

Notice how the leg veneers hide the zambus casters while allowing them to rotate on the less visible sides

Everything is drawbored mortise and tenon and the leg vice screw thread is built right into the leg

A dendrobium and coelogyne

Some orchid pictures after some really cold days, and a spike in my electric bill

Coelogyne specimen - regular bloomer.  Yes, that's gorilla glue holding the pot together.

A dendrobium kingianum that forgot to bloom in the fall (I forgot to withhold water)

French Oak Kitchen Roubo

Got a new camera, that and some memory card issues caused me to lose some pictures.  A real bummer.  I'm going to have to retake them and post them again.

The point of the Kitchen Roubo is to give Sarah a lower, solid work surface when working on dough.  What better workstation and platform than a roubo?  Got some pretty expensive French oak from Moxon Hardwoods that were rejects from the wine barrel making business.  Turns out some of the stuff and heavy figure.  However, most of it was quite case hardened (improperly dried), making it really difficult to work with.  The stuff that was good however, was a dream to work with.   About 28" high, 20" deep and 4' wide.  Nice 4" thick legs, but could only manage about 1 7/8" thick top.

Basically after breaking down the lumber and picking and choosing the best boards for the top

Lots of jointing and keeping track of parts

Here are all the legs and stretchers with joinery cut.  Note the legs have a notch for the casters, and the veneer on the legs attempts to hide as much as they can.  Used zambus casters that were quite expensive - Jury still out on whether they were worth $100 paid.

Laminated top set aside ready mortices

Then I switched over to the new camera and lost a lot of photos....  The highly figured top with crazy ray fleck.

No so great picture, was testing the memory card because it appeared to have some issues, these were supposed to be test shots.  Lost the keepers...

Don't know what happened to the WB.  But the hand turned screw and hand shaped garter.  Putting thread on the screw was a nightmare, despite the expensive Beall jig.  Don't think french oak is a good wood for the female thread.

Hopefully, I'll have some better pictures coming.  Camera is in the greenhouse right now doing some time lapse on some orchids.  They seem to only want to bloom and open when the camera isn't looking.

Picture frame time 2014

I don't remember how long this took, but boy do picture frames take a long time to build.  Built a miter cutting jig for the table saw and a split jig just to do these things.

Here are some pictures

Ready for glue up

First some glue blocks

Edge cleanup

Then lots of finishing, in the living room of course