Dining Table Design and Top

Well, I got the top glued up, finally.  I sliced the base of my thumb up pretty good while disassembling a handplane, so there was a week of nothing accomplished while that healed.  This is by far the biggest panel glue-up I've ever attempted.  Ten pieces were jointed by hand and glued up one at a time into a 7' x 3' panel.  I used four Rockler 3/4" pipe clamps (with cauls) and a biscuit every 12" to help with alignment.  The biscuits probably could have been further apart but I was cautious.  One mistake I made was gluing the two halves together separately (into 7' x 18" sections) and then trying to glue that joint down the middle last of all.  Hoisting one of the 50 lb halves up to test the joint while I planed it to match was no fun.

Top all glued up. This is the underside - the top has slightly fewer defects.

My wife thinks it looks good, but I think it looks like a bunch of 2x4's made into some kind of fancy picnic table.  I'm planning on inlaying some dutchmen to hide a couple of knots and other ugly bits, and it will have breadboard ends, so I might be happier with it in that context.

There's around 3/16" of cup across one end, and 1/8" at the other.  Cumulative errors of all the jointed surfaces show that I made a systematic error while jointing, since the whole top curves the same way.  Or maybe it was the way I clamped it during glue up.  I can flex it flat pretty easily with a couple of clamps and a piece of lumber, and I know a top this size will move some on it's own even if I planed it perfectly flat now in it's unrestrained state.  I'm not entirely sure how to proceed though.  How flat does it need to be before I put the breadboard ends on and screw stringers underneath to get it the rest of the way?

Here's the plan.  I'm going to plane the bottom side with my #4 smoother and jack.  That won't straighten it fully, just level the joints and smooth the surface.  Then I'll install the breadboard ends and attach the stringers with figure-eight connectors, as it will be when the table is assembled.  Thus, all the physical flattening devices will be on, and I can use my long planes to get the top properly flat so it looks good.  As long as I don't feel like things are super stressed out when I assemble it, I think this will be ok.  And like I keep telling myself - worst case, I blew $40 worth of framing lumber.

The rest of the table plan is still a little fluid, but will look something like the Sketchup rendering below.  I picked up a 5/4 cherry board to make the breadboard ends and butterfly patches for a couple of spots on top, and I'm going to use walnut for a few small bits like the breadboard pins and the wedge that will hold the trestle together.

A fairly standard trestle table design

El Cheapo Dining Table

I'm making us a new dining table, out of Douglas Fir.  I started with 2 x 10 framing lumber from Home Depot...  I found a couple in my outdoor wood pile that had been temporary supports during one of our remodeling projects.  After two years outside and a trip through the planer they looked too nice to cut up for the fascia boards I had intended them for.  So I went to the big orange store and picked out some more decent pieces of green, soaking wet framing lumber, and let them dry outside for awhile, then brought them to the basement for a couple of months.  Then I ran them all through the planer, bringing them down to 1-1/8" thick.  Today I ripped the pithy centers out of them, leaving strips of quartersawn grain ranging from 3" to 5" wide.  Now I get to joint all the edges in preparation for glue-up.  I don't have a powered jointer, so I'll use the tablesaw to even up the worst of it and then fine tune with my new Veritas jointer plane.

Ten planks ready for jointing

Design?  I don't have a design yet.  Well, it will be a trestle table, and the top will be about 7' x 3'.

Panoramic Head - prototype

A friend recently sent me a link to a panoramic photo of Mars, stitched together from a bunch of images from the Curiosity rover that landed last week.  It was as close to I'm likely to get to the experience of really seeing the place, and that got me interested in making panoramic images of my own, of cool places that I have actually been to.

There is free software to stitch images together, but it works a little better if you take all the photos by pivoting the camera around a particular point in space, usually called the nodal point or entrance pupil.  That point is generally near the center of the camera's lens, so a regular tripod doesn't quite cut it because it rotates around the tripod socket under the camera body.  It's also typical to take photos with the camera in portrait orientation (sideways) to capture the vertical dimension as widely as possible.

Enter the panoramic head.  Yeah, sure, you can buy them, but that's not how I roll.  I made a bunch of sketches and here's the first iteration of a working design.  The goal is to have two axes of rotation that intersect at the nodal point of the lens.  This prototype is nothing fancy, just some scraps of plywood and some nuts and bolts from the hardware store.  I tacked it together last night and took a quick set of pano shots of our living room.  They stitched together nearly perfectly, much better than a similar set of shots I took with the tripod alone.  So yay.  Not so yay are some of the details.  The base plate needs to be bigger, and the elevation arm can't swing down to 90˚ to take a shot straight up because of the way the camera is attached to it.  I also didn't take time to rout the groove in the elevation arm that will allow adjustment for different nodal point positions.

Canon 50D with 10-22 zoom on my plywood panoramic head.
The idea is to allow pivoting about the nodal point (white) in two axes: azimuth in red, and elevation in blue.  The green rotational axis is fixed.

Round two of the design will be a lot better.

Why I Love Hand Tools

There seems to be a movement going over the past several years toward hand tools, at least for woodworking.  So I'm definitely not the first to try to say this, but there really is a simplicity and elegance to taking care of a job with the simplest and most straightforward tool.  And it's not more work.  It's less.  Less screwing around trying to get the height of your dado blade just right to cut the joint you're working on, and no time or materials wasted making test pieces to run across that dado blade.  Less time is spent worrying about how precisely square your cabinet opening is.  You can cut everything a little fat and shave parts down to perfection with a plane or chisel.  You don't have to figure out how to set your miter saw to that weird acute angle, you just cut to the line with your hand saw.  And on and on.

I wouldn't expect a production line environment to benefit from most hand tools.  Jigs and big powerful machines are the way to go when you have to make lots of copies of anything.  For the artisan or home craftsman, however, you gotta love hand tools.

My first personal example is fitting tenons.  I make a lot of cabinet door frames with bridle or mortise and tenon joints.  I don't worry too much about the width of the tenons.  I cut them a little oversize on the tablesaw (with a tenon jig) or on the band saw, and shave them down to a nice fit in their particular mortise with a rabbetting block plane.  Sort of a block plane / shoulder plane hybrid.  It cuts right to the corner and shaves off a wide swath of the tenon cheek, which helps keep the surface flatter compared to a shoulder plane.

I'm currently working on a table top.  At 7' x 3', very few of us can afford a drum sander or other power tool that would take on the job of flattening a slab this size.  I've seen plans for a track system to run your router on, or I think there are baseplates for handheld belt sanders that help flatten large areas, or maybe you could rent a floor sander,  but with a jointer plane it's a straightforward process to get it extremely, accurately flat.  You may work up a sweat, but that's not a bad thing.

Bosch MX25E Quick Review

I just replaced my Dremel 6300 Multi-Max oscillating saw, which failed horribly after about an hour of runtime over several small projects.  Home Depot was good enough to take it back (within the warranty period) and not make me deal with Dremel as directed on the warranty form.  I took the credit and traded up to the Bosch MX25E.  It's much heavier than the Dremel, which I take as a good sign.  The tool was made in Malaysia, the blades were made in Europe, and the storage bag was made in China.


It came with several blades (what you get will depend on exactly which specific kit you buy) and an adapter plate that's supposed to let you use accessories from other manufacturers.  The adapter plate just presents a bunch of hard, somewhat sharp points to a non-bosch blade, so you should be able to use it with anything that fits over the mounting screw regardless of the pattern of studs it was designed for. Unfortunately, you do have to completely remove the screw to change blades. Even the Dremel had a slightly faster option. It also came with a nice box to organize accessory blades in, and I prefer the heavy cloth storage bag over an inflexible plastic clamshell case.

I used it last weekend to cut the lath in the ceiling of our upstairs bathroom for a new ventilation fan.  So far, so good.  If you work with lath and plaster construction, these oscillating saws are great.  Score and chip off the plaster with a knife, and cut the exposed lath with the saw.  The high-speed oscillating action doesn't vibrate everything and damage the adjoining plaster like a sawzall or hand saw.  It's house surgery with one of these things.

Bosch Rotary Hammer Angle Head Review

This here is a little writeup of the Bosch 1618580000 Angle Head for their line of rotary hammers.  I bought one of these not too long ago, but had no luck even finding a decent photo of one on the web before I gave up and ordered it.  Bottom line: it's solid.  Made in Germany no screwing around solid piece of Bosch equipment.  The body is some sort of reinforced resin casting, and what I can see of the guts is crisply-machined metal.

Bosch Angle Head

After removing the front handle, it slips right over the head of your Bosch rotohammer and a shaft inside engages with the chuck like a bit, except that doesn't lock in.  You tighten a hex bolt to clamp it onto the body of the drill, and it can be rotated to any angle to help you reach in tight spots.

Angle Head Attached to My Rotary Hammer

There are some caveats, one huge and the others worth knowing about.  The big one is it doesn't fit all of their rotohammers.  I wound up having to go buy a whole new drill to get my job done!  The verbage is confusing, so either check your model number against the list of drills it says it fits, or measure the diameter of the collar behind the chuck.  The inside diameter of the angle head is 42mm.  My "Bulldog Xtreme" (model 11255VSR) is 50mm...  So now I have two rotohammers, which makes me a tool badass, but I think I'd rather just have the extra money I had to spend.

Another issue is runtime.  After ten minutes or so of continuous use, the head will get hot and you have to let it cool down.  It also reduces the impact action, so don't expect to go as fast as you can with the drill itself.  I think it took me about 30 minutes to drill a 5/8" diameter hole 13" deep in decent concrete, including breaks to let the head cool down.

So there you go.

Installing Euro Mudguards on a 2012 Prius

We finally got a new car.  A 2012 Prius 3.  Three tanks of gas in, and it's getting right about 51 mpg overall.  As long as gas stays above about $3.25 a gallon, my math says it will pay for itself vs. reasonable alternative cars.

I've always put mudflaps / guards on my cars.  They don't keep the dirt off, but they do reduce the amount of rock chips and tar that winds up on the side of the car.  There are two styles of guards available from Toyota.  The ones for the U.S. market are smallish, for some reason, but there are folks on the internet importing and selling the European version, which look much more like normal mudflaps to me.  I got a set from www.juicedhybrid.com, mainly because I found a 10% off coupon code on a forum.  A lot of people seem to be concerned with how difficult it will be to install these mudflaps, and what they will look like, so here's my experience.  They were very easy to install, and... they look like mudflaps!

Here's a before shot of the front, with the existing fastener points indicated.  VERY easy.  I used a small flathead screwdriver, and a 10mm socket on a small 1/4" drive wrench.  The screwdriver is used to pop up the center of the little plastic connector, and the socket undoes a couple of screws, which are re-used to attach the mudguard.  The mudguards come with a new, longer plastic connector to fasten in the top hole, and that's it.

The rear is slightly more of a pain.  I did it without taking the rear tire off, by using a really stubby screwdriver bit holder.  If you jack up the car and pull off the tire, this job is trivially easy, and you can use regular screwdrivers and a drill to make your holes if you're more comfortable.  The tools shown are a couple of stubby #2 phillips screwdrivers and a homemade tool called a birdcage awl.   It's just a nail, set into a wooden handle and sharpened to a square point with a file.  I use it for scratching marks, and the corners on the square point will cut a quick pilot hole in wood or plastic if the tool is twisted.

Hold the mudflap up against the car and carefully make sure it's located properly.  Use the awl to reach through the lower mounting hole and scratch a horizontal line through the paint on the plastic fender / bumper.  Slide one of the little metal screw clip thingies onto the plastic fender at your mark, and make a pilot hole in the center with the awl or whatever you're using.

With a short awl and really stubby screwdriver, you don't need to take the rear wheel off.

Put the guard in place, drive a screw into the lower hole, and then locate and mark the upper hole in the same way.  I know this seems fiddly, and doing them both at the same time would be faster, but this way you know everything will line up.  Finally, drive the third screw in from the bottom of the guard, into the underside of the bumper.  Now go find a rally course and try to spit some gravel at a Subaru.