penney dot org

Made another trip to PALS for the rest of the lumber, and seeing as my lumber rack isn’t wide enough most of it is on the floor or just propped up at the moment. Here’s all the 8/4 stock waiting to be butchered.

I ran all my stock through Cutlist Plus and here’s what it came up with, not too much waste which is nice (and I’ll use whatever is left over eventually anyway)

You can click the Cutlist Pic for a bigger view. Some parts are doubled up because I need to glue them up for final thickness (like the legs).

So now I’m all ready to start some actual work :)

One thing I’m awful at is taking a cutlist to the lumberyard and figuring out which boards to buy, I either end up with too little or too much. Yesterday I’d picked up the boards for the base, figuring I’d build that first then swing by and get the stock for the top.

I’d heard some good things about Cutlist Plus so figured I’d use it to see how best to cut the pieces for the base from the stock I’d bought. Turns out if I use the pieces I bought for the base, and then go and get the stock for the top I’ll end up wasting about $200 worth of wood! So looks like I’ll be making my second trip to the lumberyard sooner than I thought… It really does go to show just how important optimizing your cuts is though, and I thoroughly recommend Cutlist Plus.

– I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso

So after looking at all the options I decided to just go ahead and build a bench. I really liked the look of Chris Schwarz’s Holtzapffel bench

So that’s what I’m going to build, ordered the “24 Veritas Twin Screw vise from Lee Valley for the front and like Chris’ the large quick release steel vise for the tail

Yesterday I went to PALS and picked up the lumber for the base which I’m going to build first. Building it all from maple, and it’s going to be a beast, just the 12’ x 5” 8/4 board I’ll be using for the stretches weighed a ton :)

Now for my question (I’ll post this as a forum topic too). Chris glued up the top using pieces that were 1 3/4 wide (so it was all 8/4 stock) to get the 24” width, but I saw that PALS had 12/4 stock, about 8” wide. Would I be better off using three of these huge chunks for the top, or will the smaller laminated strips be more stable (I’m guessing the latter)

Hopefully I’ll get some shop time this afternoon to start building the base :) Will keep you posted with pics a plenty.

I’ve addressed a couple of issues surrounding the last release and I’ve tested it against the name…@test.com type addresses in Topic & List view as well as testing a number of topics and it appears to be working correctly.

So please download the latest script Google Groups KillFile 3.4.3 and let me know how it goes. If you have any problems please let me know the URL and the name you are trying to block and I’ll look into it.

Happy Blocking :)

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 :)

After subscribing to Make magazine I got the electronics bug again (way back when I was an EE guy) and picked up an Arduino which is a really fun little micro controller.

My project idea is to hook an optical mouse sensor and an lcd up to it and then attach it to my table saw fence to give me a digital read out of the cut width. The fanciest mice have a resolution of 6000dpi, which translates to 0.04mm which is crazy accurate… So far I have the LCD part of the equation working so all I have to do now is hook up the mouse.

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.