Woodworking

iVac Switch Review

My simple shop-vac dust collection system works very well for my small shop, but one annoyance is turning the vacuum on and off every time I turn a tool on and off. I finally bought an iVac switch and my only regret is not buying it sooner. You plug both your vacuum and your tool into this switch. Whenever your tool turns on, your vacuum will turn on. When you turn the tool off, the vacuum runs for another 3-5 seconds and then shuts off. It’s incredibly convenient.

It has two plugs so that you can source power from two different electrical circuits. This would be useful if the tool you are using takes around 15 amps. You’d blow the circuit if you turned on a shop vac too. I don’t use that feature yet but I like knowing that it exists.

There’s a switch on the front that lets you choose from Auto, On, or Off so you can still flip the vacuum on without a tool or stop it from coming on when you turn on a tool. The whole thing seems simple but it’s very well-designed.

Now I don’t have to reach under my bench to flip the vacuum on and off. I can hide it away and let this magic switch do the work.

benmartens January 20, 2016 Gadgets, Woodworking

Family Sign

I’ve had a couple laser cutter project posts recently, but the real reason I learned how to use it is because Tyla wanted a family sign. She found some on Etsy that she liked but we didn’t like the prices. My first thought was to cut them out on the bandsaw but I quickly realized that would take forever and I wasn’t sure I could cut out the smaller letters.

The laser cutter made quick work of the letters and then it was just a matter of painting them and painting the backing board. It has been really cold and wet around here but I managed to get it all done and assembled.

The dimensions on the sign came out as planned, but it feels pretty big now that it’s in place. It’s growing on me though. The nice thing is that this was made out of scrap wood with only a few hours of work. Most of the time was just doing the painting and letting that dry.

You can’t see it in the photo below, but the letters are made out of 1/8″ wood so they are raised up from the backing board. It’s a nice 3D effect and gives really crisp lines.

benmartens January 14, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Push Sticks

My table saw stand is full of different push sticks for safely guiding wood through the blade. One of my favorites is the MicroJig that Tyla picked up for my birthday. It is easily configurable to handle a lot of different situations and it really protects my hand.

If you don’t want to shell out the money, the other one that I grab often is probably something you can build for free out of scrap wood. It holds the piece down well and has a replaceable stub of wood on the back to help guide the wood through. And it doesn’t matter if the blade cuts into your push stick. It’s just scrap wood so you can easily build another one at some point. Jay Bates has a good video about how to build one: http://jayscustomcreations.com/2014/03/the-best-push-stick-ever-invented/

benmartens January 7, 2016 Woodworking

Printing Tiled Images

I’m working on a new decorative sign for our house. After I had drawn it at full size in Photoshop Elements, I needed to print it full-size, tiled across multiple sheets of paper. It seems like there are a lot of ways to do this, but it took me long enough to figure out that I figured I should write it down.

My approach was to save it as a PDF from Photoshop Elements and then open that PDF in Fox It Reader. (I think Adobe Reader has a similar feature.) There’s an option when printing to print it as a tiled image. You should get some extra marks on the paper to help you line up the multiple sheets and tape them together. One easy way to accomplish that is to hold it up to a window when it’s light outside and then you can easily align the sheets.

If you do this regularly, you might want to check out Big Print. It costs $22 but check out the videos and you’ll quickly see why it’s probably worth the investment. On a side note, if you have an engineering mind and you enjoy woodworking, check out the rest of that guy’s site and his YouTube video. He makes incredibly complex tools and projects out of wood.

benmartens December 22, 2015 Links, Woodworking

Tool Cart

I’ve been dreaming about a workshop rebuild that will probably happen next summer. My original plan was to build a bench down the side of the garage to hold my tools. Then I realized that it could be more convenient if I had a few rolling carts to hold the tools. They can be rolled into place when needed and then pushed off to the side when they aren’t important.

I designed this one out in Sketchup and that worked extremely well for me. After designing it out, I also laid out the cut list and cut ALL of the pieces before starting to build. It was a leap of faith but it worked out great! I didn’t have to recut anything. I was almost completely done before I realized that I had made a big mistake. When I put the tools on top of the cart, they didn’t fit!

In a bonehead maneuver, I had never actually put the tools in the position that I would have them on the top of the cart to measure the total space. I just measured the individual tools and when I did that, I forgot to include the part that sticks out of the back of the jointer. ARG!

Thankfully, the jointer and the planer only overhung the edge by about an inch. I resolved this by running a 3/4″x3/4″ piece of leftover cedar all around the top edge. I also trimmed out the rest of the cart so it looked more intentional. It looks fine and everything fits without hanging over the edge.

The drawers came out pretty nice. This was my first time using drawer slides and they work wonderfully! They were really easy to install and I got the full-extension drawer slides so I don’t have to fuss with stuff hiding in the back of the drawer.

The final touch was to build a simple attachment to hold a power strip on the back of the cart. This means I only have one plug to power the cart and I also have some extra power ports if I need them.

I want to build one more of these to hold the drill press, spindle sander and belt sander. I’ll probably use a very similar design but this time I’ll make sure that I lay the tools out and measure the total space!

benmartens December 14, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

Wooden Snowflakes

A few years ago, Steve Ramsey posted a fun video about how to make wooden snowflakes. I decided to give it a shot and it was harder than it looked! I had a strong suspicion that my first attempt would fail so I did it out of cheap pine. I made a bunch of mistakes and thought I had it figured out so I moved on to maple for my second attempt. Nope. He clearly says in the video to glue the face grains together. I don’t know if he misspoke or if I just understand what he means but when I do that, I don’t get six evenly distributed points. I won’t explain the whole thing here, but if you build this, make sure you hold it all together with rubber bands and make sure it looks right before you apply glue.

The third time was the charm and they came out pretty nice. My only failure was that even after the third attempt, the pieces still didn’t form a perfect 360 degrees so there are gaps between some of the pieces. Oh well, I was tired of the project by the time I got to this point so I called it good enough!

We only put a few on our tree. Some of these will go out as gifts to Elijah’s teachers, but if you want one too, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

benmartens December 8, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

Oscillating Spindle Sander

I’m really enjoying my Grizzly band saw. It comes in handy on almost every single project. Now that I have the band saw, I find myself cutting a lot more curves. Curves were tricky to sand with my existing tools so that meant a lot of sanding by hand. With pine or other soft woods, that’s not too bad, but sanding walnut and maple can take a lot of effort.

To speed things up, I purchased an oscillating spindle sander. You install cylinders of various sizes into the machine. Each cylinder is covered in sand paper and it spins around. That’s the basic idea, but if it stopped there, the place where the sandpaper connected with the wood would fill up with dust very quickly and reduce the effectiveness of the sandpaper. In addition to spinning, this machine also moves the cylinder up and down which gives the sandpaper a chance to “breathe” and throw off some of the dust. There’s also a dust collection port which pulls in dust right around the cylinder so it keeps the air pretty clean.

This setup is really handy for sanding curves. Even if you don’t have a cylinder that matches your curve exactly, it will still be better than using a flat sanding surface.

I picked this one up at Harbor Freight for $99 with a coupon. I figure this is a great tool to buy from them because it doesn’t need to be super precise or perfect.

My shop is pretty well-stocked for tools now. This was the last power tool on my list. Obviously there are always more tools you can buy, but I feel like I’m well-equipped to handle most of the projects that I’m interested in. I’d still love some kind of a CNC machine or 3D printer, but I keep reminding myself that I have access to them for free through work and I haven’t even taken advantage of that yet. Those purchases are going to be a ways down the road which is fine because it will give the technology more time to mature.

Now I need to get started on some shop furniture. My jointer, planer, router table, drum sander and this new spindle sander don’t really have a good home and they each alternate between the floor and a folding table. I’m planning a few more rolling carts with storage underneath.

benmartens December 1, 2015 Woodworking

Amazon Handmade

When you think about buying handmade craft projects online, you probably think of Etsy. They’ve been around for a long time and they’re the uncontested leader in the market. However, Etsy has left a lot of angry makers in their wake. You can read a good write up about that on Wired, but for example, Etsy made a change to allow companies to sell their products. So if you’re thinking about selling a few of your crafts on the site, you’re going to be competing with a company doing a million dollars in sales. Not only does it make it really difficult for the individual maker to survive, it also dupes buyers into thinking they are buying something handmade when really it might be just churned out by a company.

Amazon is capitalizing on that frustration with their Handmade section. They emphasize that items must not come from a factory and they must be genuinely handmade. Products on Amazon Handmade aren’t cheap but that’s viewed by many makers as a good thing because hand making items is not cheap. The prices seem to reflect actual costs for someone trying to make a living doing this type of work.

It’s just getting started but they already have over 80,000 items. That’s a small number compared to Etsy, but it’s worth checking out when you’re looking to purchase, and it might be an interesting option if you’re looking to sell your crafts too.

benmartens November 30, 2015 Links, Woodworking

DeWalt Planer

One of the last (haha) tools that I had on my radar was a thickness planer. If you have no idea what that is, it’s basically a machine that will make two faces of the board parallel with each other and will also thin a board down. In the past, Tim was nice enough to loan me his for a month or two while I worked on Tyla’s jewelry box, but I didn’t want to keep borrowing his every time I needed one.

My original plan was to save my pennies and probably buy one next spring. But on the woodworking discussion list at work, somebody offered up their DeWalt DW-733 for about 30-40% of the price of a new one. He said it was barely used and came with an extra set of blades. It’s probably not the model I picked (and you actually can’t even buy it anymore), but it was in the same category and the price was right. I also prefer buying used items from people at work because it’s more likely to be a good/easy transaction than when you go through Craigslist. So I went for it!

I’ve been using it on my latest project to plane down maple and walnut and wow, this thing works great! I think it would work better if I had a better dust collection system to pull all the chips away from the board, but still, it’s a great machine. I love how easy it is to dial in the exact height and to see how much wood you’re going to take off with the next pass.

It’s a great tool to use in conjunction with my bandsaw. I can take a 3/4″ piece of wood to the bandsaw, saw it in half (the thin way) to get to 3/8″ pieces and then plane both down to 1/4″ or whatever I need. Without the bandsaw, I’d be planing off 66% of the wood and that’s a lot of money being turned into wood chips.

I’m quite happy with this purchase. One of my next projects needs to be a cart for this thing though. At 80lbs it’s a beast to pick up off the floor.

benmartens November 17, 2015 Woodworking

End Loader

For the past years, every few issues of Wood Magazine have had plans for a construction toy. I recently purchased the plans for the End Loader and completed it. It was another big learning experience for me. Aside from the quick planes I did recently, this is the first toy that I’ve built. The biggest thing I learned is that precision matters. You can’t be too precise. I made a large number of these pieces twice just to get them perfect. I also spent a lot of time sanding to try and get it as clean and smooth as possible. Because it’s so small, people look at it very closely and even small flaws will stand out.

Along with the plans, I also purchased the kit that contains wheels, smokestack and the hardware needed to complete the project. I don’t have great equipment for making those circular pieces so buying the kit let me focus on the rest of the loader.

It took me about two weeks to complete and I’m thrilled with how it came out! One of the hardest parts was getting it all sprayed with lacquer. Lacquer is supposed to be sprayed above 65 degrees or in low humidity. I couldn’t spray it in my garage since the fumes are so intense and they can actually ignite from the pilot light in the furnace. I set up a pop up tent on the back patio, hung tarps from three sides and hung a space heater from the top, pointed down at the table. I also brought all the pieces and spray inside to let it warm up to room temperature. That setup might have been overkill, but I didn’t want to screw this up after all the time I put into it.

I’m very happy with how this turned out. It will end up being Elijah’s Christmas gift. Last year I built him the table and this year he gets a toy. I think it would be fun to build something for him each year but we’ll see how that holds up.

The next project or two will be quicker and easier but I think I might do one or two more of these toys. I have plenty of walnut and maple leftover from this project.

benmartens November 13, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.