penney dot org

So it’s been a long time since my last post, had a bit of down time where I went on vacation and did odds and ends but I’d been making slow and steady progress on the top.

I can’t believe how much trouble I had gluing a bunch of sticks together :) All my issues stemmed from the fact that I didn’t have a good way of surfacing such long pieces. My 6” jointer just wasn’t up to the task so I faffed around trying to do it other ways. I eventually used a huge 9 foot straight edge clamp thing that I use for cutting ply to run the strips through my table saw which got me one reference edge, then I glued a bunch up and used a router on a sled (the white piece of melamine in the background is the sled) to flatten the resulting slab.

Anyway, here’s the top, it’s still in two pieces here, just getting ready for the final glue up but you get the idea.

So I have to glue the two halves together, trim the ends and then complete the joinery for the base, but I now feel as though there is light at the end of the tunnel :)

I also have to trim my short stretchers a bit because the depth of the top is about 3/4” less than I’d originally planned.

So it’s been pretty slow going as of late. The top is proving to be trickier than I’d anticipated. The main issue is being able to effectively mill such large pieces.

I got hung up trying to flatten the faces of the top; I’d been using my jointer to do this but the bed simply isn’t long enough to joint 7′ long boards.

I came to the realization that I didn’t need it perfectly flat along it’s length though, I just needed it flat enough whereby I could clamp it flat during the glue up. So my new tack is to just plane it so that both faces are flat-ish, and parallel to one another, then ‘joint’ it with a rip cut on my tablesaw. I’m using the tablesaw with a 9′ straight edge attached to the fence. Using this technique I’m slowly but surely getting the top built.

I do have the parts for the base milled though but I’d really like to get the top out of the way before doing any more work there.

So this afternoon I tried to shimmy my blades around a bit so that the notches in my jointer blades would offset one another. Here is a pic of the knives in question.

Well the results were less than satisfactory (this was taken in raking sunlight)

So I’m going to head to Standard Saw Works in Oakland to get them sharpened on Monday.

Well after poking around a bit I found all kinds of broken bits and pieces in the script and this release should work as you expect it to.

As always update your script by clicking on this link which will update your script to the latest and greatest.

Apologies with the bumpy release, hopefully it will be smooth sailing here on out.

Greasemonkey introduced a change in 0.7.20080121.0 that was preventing new entries from being added to the Killfile.

I’ve gone ahead and updated the script. So click here to update to 3.4.1 and you should be back in business.

Let me know how it goes.

Jeff Urs made some great enhancements to the killfile script which you can grab here

You can now filter on the topic and the author matching has been greatly improved so it will no longer block tommy tomcat and tommo if you block a user called tom :)

If you don’t already have the script installed click here for full install instructions

It should update with no problems but check it didn’t install twice by right clicking on the Monkey > Manage User Scripts and make sure there aren’t two entries for the KillFile script, if there are, remove both of them but make sure you don’t select the delete preferences checkbox and reinstall.

Any issues let me know and we’ll strive to fix it asap. Enjoy!

Well, it didn’t work :) At least I couldn’t get it to work. The issue I had was in repeatability, I’d made a little harness to move the mouse forwards and then return it to the same spot but the values I was receiving weren’t consistent making it useless as a tape measure. When mousing these slight variations wouldn’t be important but it was a deal breaker for this idea. Ah well :)

So a few weeks back I stumbled upon www.lumberjocks.com which is a great site for the woodworkers amongst us to showcase their work and chat about all things woodworkery.

Here is my profile page on there along with my most recent project, good stuff and a real nice bunch of people.

Check out the bench with some finish on it. Starting to look pretty nice :)