Home » browse » tools

tools

  • The Basement-
    The basement was, well, a basement. Besides the obvious, the concrete floor had worn away to dirt in several places, there was evidence of severe termite infestation and the main beam had a serious looking crack. After adding a lally column for temporary support, the basement was so filled with obstructions that it would have been almost impossible to make it a functional living space (or in my case, a functional shop).

    Click on any picture to expand it

  • Got a shop? You need this stuff!- Last weekend, my boss and I made the trek to the annual NJ Woodworking Show. Jeb has a pretty nice woodworking shop but his passion is car and motorcycle restoration. He's done several old bikes -- Velocettes and Moto Guzzis -- but his current project is a 1955 Land Rover. The Rover looked like it had been parked at the bottom of a river for the last fifty years but after two years he's nearing paint and finish, which means he needed supplies, which means we both needed to hit the show.

    I've been looking for a decent steel tool deck cleaner for a couple of years. Nothing I've tried worked much better than WD40, #00 steel wool and carnuba wax. Jeb told me that he'd had good results with Boeshield and, sure enough, we found it at the show. It's expensive but it was worth a try.
  • Skim Coat (almost) Like a Pro- Most people seem to like the flat, clean effect of drywall. Drywall is cheap, goes up easily and doesn't take much acquired skill to learn how to tape, mud and finish the joints. Even drywall repairs are relatively painless. So what's not to like?

    Maybe I'm just weird (well, there's probably no contesting that regardless) but I like plaster. I like the way side lights create shadows and textures over the natural unevenness of a plaster wall, giving it density and bulk.
  • Ten gallons of sawdust later...- I finished cutting 208 feet of bolection moulding for the wainscotting in the bedroom reno and guess what? I needed 216 feet to complete the job, dammit! I knew I was cutting it close (literally) but I only had a couple of (expensive) red oak 1x8s left which I need for the wainscotting shelf. I'll dig into my red oak scrap pile and cut the remainder this afternoon.

    Anyway, I was right. A bolection moulding is just an inverted base cap profile with a rabbet. After my router bit quest, I settled on a $28 base cap bit from Woodside.

    So it was back to the shop to rip a bunch of red oak to the 1-1/4" width I needed for 26 eight-foot blanks, which I thought would do the job if I planned my cuts carefully.

    Man, this shop needs cleaning and reorganizing after six months of this renovation!
  • Shop Stuff-

    Shop Stuff


    This isn't my house. I mentioned on the home page how tasty the original woodwork was in these houses and how the previous owners of mine inexplicably ditched it all. This is the dining room in my neighbors' house. It's hard to believe that a hundred years ago this was how formula homes were built. You wouldn't find woodwork like this in a modern house costing seven figures.

    Originally, I wanted to replicate this without the dark stain but as I got into the project I decided to be a little more creative and a bit more practical.

    The Cabinets

    Labor Day weekend, 2002 was a rain-out so I holed up in the shop.

    I'm constructing the two built-in china cabinets for the dining room. One will be a media cabinet and the other a display cabinet.
  • Yet another "cool tool" article- I've blathered a lot on the blog about the coolness of routers but another tool I use quite a bit is a biscuit joiner.

    Wuzzat? A social dinner roll? Bread glue?

    It's a tool I first saw TOH demigod, Norm Abrams, use back in the 80s. Okay, let's be honest: Norm has a shop full of bizarre, narrow purpose tools. But a biscuit (or plate) joiner is really useful, especially for edge-laminating boards as I'm about to do here. It can also be used to strengthen mitered corners or to insert alignment pins. I did the latter when I installed the heavy mahogany header in my garage door surround.
  • Tool Show Post Mortem: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly- I'm glad the Somerset Tool Show moved back it to the Exhibit Center because it was suffering at the Ramapo convention center. There were lots of new vendors this year, and lots of new tools.

    My primary misson however was finding a router bit to cut the bolection mouldings for the wainscotting in my bedroom reno. The router bit yodas I was counting on for enlightenment were no help. One guy even told me I needed a shaper to get that profile. He must have noticed me looking at him like he had two heads because he followed up with, "...but maybe not."
  • The Somerset (NJ) Woodworking Show - any NYC area bloggers going?- 
    Feb 16-18, 2007
Garden State Exhibit Center
50 Atrium Drive
Somerset, NJ
(exit 19, Route 287)
    Sponsored by Wood Magazine

    This will be like my 8th or 9th visit to this show. It's like a crack house for woodworking junkies. Every conceivable tool, useful or not, is on display and usually being demonstrated. At least half of my present shop was purchased at one of these shows, including my Delta X Unisaw and Dewalt SCMS. I also load up on all my sandpaper, nitrile gloves and other consumables for the year. The prices are that good.

    If there's an answer to my still unanswered question, "what router bits do I need to make bolection moulding?", this is where I'll find it. All the router bit gurus are there from CMT, Freud and Whiteside.

    I've never done a seminar there but there are two that are particularly timely for me at this stage of the bedroom reno: Doors & Drawers and Understanding Finishes. Most of the seminars are free, BTW.
  • Labor Day Snoozer- This was the first Labor Day weekend since I got this place that I wasn't knee deep in some h/i project. Last year I was in the middle of the guest room renovation. Now, I'm waiting for lumber estimates so I can start on the master bedroom rehab. I took the opportunity to hack on my Drupal software here and to play with the Categories and Views modules on a private Drupal instance. Nice software but, man, does it need a coherent manual.

    We got some of Ernesto on Friday/Saturday. The wind down here on NY Harbor was pretty fierce so there was clean up to do, which is about as clumsy a segue as I can make to my house topic o' the day: compressors.

    I've got a 20-gallon compressor. It's one of my favorite tools in the shop -- not just for what it typically does but for some of the oddball uses you can put it to, like drying off a washed car and blowing out the shop after a sanding marathon. It can even take out a mosquito at six feet. Today it was my broom.