Picture of the box

Picture inside the box

Hardware is nicely labeled and laid out for assembly

The boxes with rails and outfeed table. (too lazy to make an outfeed table this go around, workbench needs building first)

Gratuitous picture of one of my most recent projects, wall storage. I made two of these, the other one is on the opposite wall above the mitre saw bench.

Bored through at a speed that surprised me with not a lotta effort with a number 14 bit. My 10 year old son managed to bore a hole as well with no effort. The set is missing a few bits, but I can pick those up at the flea market. On the flip side, why are Spofford braces (the ones with the twist screw thing) so darned expensive? I have been trolling ebay for months trying to pick one up and they always wind up at like 50-80 bucks. I figured one with the least features would be less expensive, and I think they are very nice looking braces. I may have to give up on getting one for now until I can justify the expense. I could always just go with another $2 brace from a garage sale I suppose to have two braces bitted up during a project.

My wife is holding an eggbeater drill for me for Christmas. I got to test it once before she hid it. Christmas is a long way away…

Crafting without power tools, for some reason, is hugely rewarding to me. Now that Thanksgiving has passed, I can focus on doing a few more projects. Got to get that work bench built first. Tore down my old one as I am remodeling my garage. Boy do I miss it…

Here are some pictures of the case. As you can see it is in bad shape.

Picture of the front and clasp which will not secure.

Picture of the bottom. It is hard to tell from the picture, but this side is in the worst shape. The 2 middle pieces are floating and warped like mad.

A picture of the box opened with the small auger bits and holder removed.

A better picture of the bits and what I have ahead of me to make them shiny. They are actually not in that bad a shape. I am going to pick up some evaporust and try that first (after giving them a bit of a degreasing) and then see how much of a polish I can put on them. They bore well though, so I will not have to (shudder) sharpen them I think.

And finally, a view of the cracks in the top (which look worse than the bottom, but they really are in much better shape than the bottom.

Incidentally. The pictures get cropped up all sorts of bad from photobucket. Not sure how to fix that.

I am digging this mdf idea, so I continue with the bevel side now. I sand out the nicks in the blade (found a staple on a prior project, first time I used it, many hours of attempts at sharpening have been wasted thus far). I sand it down, knock off the burr, sand it down, until I finally have a straight edge. I move up to 400 grit and start to see a nice reflection, and then finish on 2000 grit. I take a pass across my arm and have a clean bald spot now, awesome. I can brush my teeth in that reflection!!! Time to test it. Being I am pretty dang inexperienced with planes, I must have put that chip breaker on too loose because when I went to adjust the depth, it came over the blade. Uh oh. I readjust, and try again in some really dry old pine I had laying around. I got some beautiful curls!!!, but on closer inspection, the wood is not flat. I look closely at the blade (admiring my teeth) and notice, I have nicks in the blade again…

Time to shorten my blade some more, but now that I know the mdf thing works I may try to make it easier than placing a 2 ft by 3 ft hunk of mdf on my coffee table in the living room. I am not getting a quality plane until I get the hang of this planing and sharpening thing.

Without further ado, my first project. This started just after we moved into the house about 12 years ago. I am an avid reader and I love my books. I am the guy you hate to borrow from because I don’t like people opening them enough to crease the spine. We had many of those particle board pseudo-bookshelves you get from the big box stores or garage sales, and they looked like yuck. It took three years of dropping hints to the wife before she allowed me to allocate budget for it.

She finally gave the ok, and I went at it full bore. Now I am not going to claim it is an upgrade, because I used MDF, but we were painting it, and I hate hiding wood. I way overengineered these suckers, but I am sure there was a reason for this, since I was pretty smart back then. They are permanently mounted to the wall, and I with my 250 pounds, can scale those suckers like a monkey and they will not budge.

MDF proved to be a bear to paint so I wound up using sheetrock mud to go over all the cuts and that seemed to paint better. I used dowals on the front and back lip because I refused to use any screws or nails. I did find studs and use 10 penny nails to nail the back lip to the wall.

The work was done in the room, cutting, sanding, routing, every bit of it. Conceding to my wifes wishes I taped some plastic painters tarp over the doorways to confine the dust, but I knew I was safe to work in there without any sort of breathing protection. The coughing, hacking and wheezing I suffered over the week or so of the project did nothing to disprove my brilliance. I had to make one shelf removable because the air filter for the heating and air was in the way, but other than that and a few small shelves in the middle, it was permanent.

Above is a picture of the shelves, but bear in mind, photography is not my strong suit. That shows about two thirds of the shelves and gives you a feel for how basic the project was. The bear was routing the molding to match the existing baseboard. I probably should have just found a match, and faced the baseboard with that or redone all the baseboard.

Next we have that cursed filter vent I needed to access. It does not have the same strength as the rest of the shelves and does not have the seamless look of the rest. Just had to run with it though.

Last we have the molding at the top of the shelves. That was a last minute addition, but really made a huge difference in the overall look.

I learned that cutting in a straight line with a cheap table saw using huge whole sheets of mdf sucks. I had the big box store cut down any big sheets from that point on to a more manageable size. I started to reconsider my no face mask when working with mdf stance. It was not until this year that I finally adopted that strategy full time. I also started to consider the merits of purchasing a biscuit joiner.

My next project, an arcade cabinet…

This evolution series of blog posts is essentially me showing my misguided woodworking attempts over the last 10 years or so. I knew everything and the answer to all my problems was always getting a new tool. I have gotten dumber since then. I do not know as much as I used to know. I am doing more research and trying to catch up to genius of my youth. That is where Lumberjocks came in. After the Evolution series I will be switching to current projects, primary of which is finishing my garage into a functional workshop. Right now I am using my garage projects as a guinea pig for testing out woodworking techniques.

A recent, long overdue change in jobs allowed me more free time to spend with my family, and my boys (10 and 5 years old) have shown a strong interest in working with wood next to me. I have learned how much I enjoy it, and this most certainly will make a wonderful hobby for when I retire. I watch my father, who has worked hard all his life, and never taken the time take up any sort of hobby, and feel genuine concern for his frame of mind as he tries to figure out how to spend his free time.

So now, my free time is shared between my family, my home, my cub scout den, and woodworking. I look forward to feedback from all the folks more seasoned than myself on here as I post my projects, because dangit, I got a lotta relearning to do!