Shop Season!

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Finishing touches


With warm Spring breezes and longer days comes more opportunities to find myself out in the shop making cool things or thinking up cool things to make.

 This year's projects include illustrating and finishing last fall's five-board benches and making an additional nine more for a total of twenty.  The idea is to have a sale out of my driveway this summer.  I think that will be a fun experiment. and who knows? I might even sell some benches.

Bookends, with historic themes, are also on the agenda this season. More will be revealed as things progress.

This week I installed what I'm pretty sure will be my last machine, a little 1" x 36" Grizzly belt sander, perfect for detail work and smaller stuff.

I mounted it on a very sturdy wooden wall bracket, leveled it, hooked it up to the dust-collection system and turned it on.  Runs great, works perfect, makes no dust.  Boom!

Machinery row is now complete and the only thing that's missing from this picture...

is me!

I'll rectify that by this weekend.

Loving Spring, in the Cumberland Valley,

Mannie



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Small House repairs

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Historic Home Preservation

A friend asked me to fabricate some missing pieces for her 1930s folk-art bungalow.

This looked like the perfect project to both kick off the shop season and to distract me from my homework; a win-win as they say.

Originally assembled with tiny brads, many of the components of this house were loose or missing entirely.

Using scrap wood, I first fabricated the missing railing and post.  

Once assembled, as a component, it was glued and clamped into place.

This was followed by tackling the missing chimneys.  By ripping a small piece of stock, I matched the dimensions of the chimneys based upon the pattern left in the paint by the originals.  I cut the resulting pieces at a 20-degree angle to match the pitch of the roof (fine tuning done on my sanding wheel).  Chimney caps, modeled off the one larger, original chimney, were cut and then beveled on my sanding wheel.  Everything got glued and clamped into place.

Aside from these major components, two smaller issues were taken care of; the cutting and shaping of a missing piece of window frame,

and the replacement of a small piece of missing wood on the front wall.

Once primed and painted, this will be up to the standards of those cool kit homes sold by Sears in the1920s and 30s.

Ready for occupancy.

Happy shop season!

Mannie

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