My self imposed exile from the shop will be ending soon. My crazy training schedule for this event will be over and I’m itching to smell sawdust again. Hope you can stand it when I get start yakking again more often.

The reason I’m posting this is to ask for the generosity of my fellow LJ’s. Some of you expressed interest in donating to the cause when the time came. Well this thing is for real. We are deep in the planning. If you are interested in the ocean, the environment, and care to help you can read more about what I’m planning and will find the donation form here.

http://www.capecodbaychallenge.org

Just in case you’re wondering…this isn’t a local event benefiting just a local area. Last year the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup was 378,000 volunteers from 76 countries and over 6,000,000 pounds of trash was collected.

Even if you can’t donate I’d like you to pass along this story to anyone that you might know that is struggling with health issues. Especially if they are like mine, balance related. Less than a year ago I was wondering where the downward spiral would end. The doctor’s had done about as much as they could…...then I got lucky. You can read some of the details here.
http://www.capecodbaychallenge.org/Standup/standup.html .

The moral of the story is don’t give up…don’t take the easy route. I almost had when a strange twist changed everything. Try something different, push yourself harder than you thought possible. Here I am 9 months later with my head feeling almost normal and the rest of my body in better shape than when I was 30. Not because of anything the doctor’s recommended, just my brother thinking it might help.

Anyway, sorry for the rare post asking for donations. It is for a great cause. If any of you are interested in standup paddle surfing and live in the area let me know. We can get together and you can give it a try. If I can do it anyone can. If you’re interested and don’t live in the area take a look at the links listed on the page link above. Lots of great info available. And for anyone on the north shore of Boston, listen to WBOQ 104.9 FM on June 21st. We just taped a show for their “North Shore Now” radio program about the event.

Thanks….hope you can help.

Can’t wait to see the winner. Of course you’re all to be commended just for entering. Again, Good Luck all!

Let me know if there are any sketchup operations that you are having problems with and I’ll create tutorials as I have time.

Shaker Knob

Associative dimensioning

Cabriolet leg

Boxjoint

I’m organizing a charity event for late this summer. The Provincetown to Plymouth Paddle Pilgimage to Prevent Plastic Pollution…...LOL…long winded but catchy….7P’s for short. Those of you that know me here know that I’ve taken up paddle surfing as therapy for some health issues. Well I decided to push a little further. Late this summer I will be doing a marathon 22 mile paddle across Cape Cod Bay to help raise money and awareness for charities fighting plastic pollution in our oceans.

Everyone that has gone to the beach sees the plastic that has washed up but that is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. From the plastic bags that turtles choke on thinking they are jellyfish to beaches in Alaska 3 ft deep in plastic trash we are creating a mess that will not go away unless we do something about it. It’s also coming right back into the food chain in the seafood we eat along with the toxins it is so good at absorbing. This article shows some pretty disturbing numbers.
http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/travel-leisure/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we.shtml

I haven’t left out the woodworking though…I’ll be using one of my paddles and hope to build this hollow wood paddleboard for the trip.

This is going to be a lot of work on a number of fronts…organizing the event (I hope to have 20 or so other Standup paddlers join me), training, and hopefully building the board. Unfortunately it will mean mostly lurking on LJ to see what my buddies are up to but not leave much time for contributing. I will blog the progress of the board if I end up building it (training will take up most of my weekends so we’ll see)

Here is the route if you’re interested. Wish me luck…I’m going to need it.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=1090887&t=k&om=1

Thanks for the opportunity to participate Martin. This one pushed me to try out wood burning which I really enjoyed and found what seems to be a new skill to hone. Now I’m thinking of starting a small side business since a number of people have been requesting paddles from all the publicity. It also may create a new friendship which would be the most valuable benefit.

I still have to shake my head in amazement when I consider the things that LJ has brought into my life. It’s an honor to be part of this community.

I’ve got 5 paddles in the works at the moment but #3 is different from my earlier ones. Straight shaft, teardrop, no laminations, dovetail. I added some geometric woodburning, somewhat primitive looking. It also has a channel, kind of the reverse of a dihedral feeding into the dovetail.

Paddle #3

I put in 8 3/8” dowels for strength along the blades.

The Dowelmax is awesome. This is just the most basic of uses for it but it made perfect indexing easy. I can’t wait to test it out on some more complex geometry.

Glued and clamped with mahogany banding.

Handle glued up

Primitive shaft grip

Blade graphic

Channel and dovetail

I need to shape the handle and I plan on glassing the shaft. The blade will just get epoxy. Then the whole thing a marine varnish for UV protection..

Paddle # 4

Paddle #4 is a 5 strip cedar and 1 strip mahogany laminated shaft with a 12 deg bend at the blade. The teardrop blade is poplar. I’ve removed a lot more material from this one and it’s the lightest by far. This one is intended to be my surfing paddle. I’ve built in a slight concave to the face of the blade to catch the water more (at least that’s the idea). I’m testing a lot of blade face shapes. I want this light, fast and able to accelerate the board quickly for catching waves.

It has a nice flex but is still plenty strong. I pulled and pushed on it very hard to see how it will stand up. Well beyond what it normally be pushed to on the waves. I figured it would be better to know how tough it is before I bother doing any epoxy and glassing.

I still have the handle to do and the finishing work but I think I’m really going to like this one. Not only the performance but looks as well. I haven’t decided on any woodburning yet.

It would be even lighter done all in cedar. That’s the plan for my wifes which will be #6

Slightly concave blade face

I put a coat of epoxy on the back of the blade since I had some left over from gluing the handle.

In the spirit of giving thanks I wanted to bring this up. What better time to consider others less fortunate than when we spend the time to reflect on our own blessings?

I’m kind of surprised and concerned by the lack of discussion of the Save the Children event. Only two projects posted? Hopefully the lack of discussion is because folks are hard at work finishing up their items to sell/auction. I’ll be posting my paddle and getting the auction underway tomorrow. Come on, let’s show what 2000 lumberjock’s can do!

OK…consider yourselves kicked in the pants. You’re running out of time!

http://lumberjocks.com/stc

Hope you all had a great day. Remember to lock up tonight…..:)

Long time no blog.

I borrowed a friends Burnmaster to try my hand at pyrography for the blade of my paddle. I’m a decent sketch artist but this is a first for me and woodburning (unless that done while a cubscout counts). I’m fairly pleased with the result.

I should have the epoxy and varnish done this weekend and get started on the auction shortly after that.

Humpback cow and calf

I’ve put it on the paddle on the left. My 1st paddle….tough to let it go but a good cause and all that.

I’m planing on doing the auction myself and focusing on the standup paddleboarding forums for advertising. I’ll try that 1st before trying eBay. What do folks think is a reasonable starting price?

Regards,

You’ve been missed.

A long string of circumstances has kept me away for awhile. It started with a nasty computer virus ( a new one spreading through PDF’s) that hosed both my home and work computers. Coincidentally I started a rigorous balance training/therapy regimen in an attempt to get myself back to normal (or as close to it as possible). It seems to be working and that has allowed me to get back to doing many of the things that had previously been difficult. I have a extremely long list of things that have added up over the last few years and I’ve been able to finally start getting them done. It’s also resulted in a rekindling of an old love for the water. Part of my therapy is using my standup paddleboard as frequently as possible. 8 hours plus of paddling/week, another 6 of workouts, and all the other things (damn that work thing gets in the way) doesn’t leave much time. The end result is that I’ll be spending less time on LJ.

I’ll still be here when I have time and hopefully once I get caught up I can start to be a frequent contributor again. LJ has become one of the premier woodworking sites on the web and I’ll always consider many of you my friends. I’‘ll see you around.

My daughters think i’m a little weird. My oldest daughter went to Salve Regina in Newport for awhile and during every visit I would walk the campus admiring the extraordinary tree collection including some european beeches 8-10 ft across. We would be walking along and my daughter would say “don’t get too excited Dad, there’s a big tree around this corner”. Newport is filled with grand old trees, many transplanted full size to their current locations when the mansions were built ( they certainly spared no expense).

Then I was reading Frank's blog with his pictures of an “ancient one” and thinking of the grove behind my house and thought about this table design.

Thanks for the picture Frank. I’ll be sure to get some of the grove soon.

I think this would be a very heavy table.

The trunk was created by using the freehand tool to define a path and then using the follow me tool with a circle.

The textures are pine bark, bubinga, ebony, cherry, birch, and olive. The olive is obviously exaggerated but it was so pretty I didn’t want to reduce it.

I included some surroundings to illustrate how easy it is to create an overall design feeling in Sketchup. I’ve also added a view embellishing the surrounding of the Jaws table.

Still more surroundings. You can simulate an outside view adding a landscape photo. It’s subtle but it helps add to the reality to match the angle of the sun with the outside picture. By removing the glass from a door or window placed in the wall you create the clearest view or the glass can be left in and tinted any color.

If you look just above the image upload pulldowns you’ll see some small text “Max image size ### x ###” next to that is a link to set the options. Set it to message board 640×480 and all your future pics will fit perfectly. You can also edit previously uploaded pics and resize so that they will show up correctly by using the edit link above each photo.

I’ve recently become very interested in Standup Paddleboarding. Most of you have also seen the gates I built for my brother at his home on Maui. My brothers home is a short distance from arguably the most famous surf break in the world….Jaws. All that coupled with my recent paddle building experience led me to create the Jaws Dining Table.

The creation of the model was very simple. I first created the outline of the wave. Then push/pulled it to 3/4”. Each segment was then moved 1/4” in front of the preceeding segment and then each segment was scaled on the blue axis (.995, .99, .985, .98…and so on) to create the wave effect. 1/2 the table top was outlined using the arc and line tools and then a copy was mirrored using the scale tool and typing in -1 while scaling along the red axis. I removed the line separating the top to create one continuous plane and the push/pulled it 2”. I had created the paddle model previously as part of my design study for building the paddle so I just imported that model for use here to tie the base together at the bottom. I offset the top to create some contrast and applied walnut and cherry textures.

The table is 12’ long. I felt it had to be massive to attempt to match the overwhelming image of Jaws…..see below. The intent would be to build the table top in the same manner as a surfboard. EPS foam shaped and then veneered with wood. The top would weigh only about 20-30 lbs that way. The bottom would be 3/4” plywood, much heavier, providing stability.

View1

View2

View3

I added this glass/wood version. See comment below.

To get a feeling for the outrageous immensity of Jaws. The table is positioned in the front of this life sized illustration, remember the table is 12’ long. Imagine the rush of surfing this monster as a few of some of the best athletes in the world do.

Hope you enjoyed it….Good Luck all…time to get back to work.

I added this view with the duke looking on approvingly.

Here are the finished paddles….actually I still need to varnish them but they shouldn’t change much. The one on the right is the 2nd one. Much lighter than the 1st and likely to be the one my brother chooses.

Blade fronts…I really like #2…I hope it performs well with the rolled edge.

Rear…I wish I had used a piece of dark cedar instead of the mahogany on the rear of #2.

Isurus oxyrinchus

The Face. Both front and rear are book matched on #2

You can’t see this detail in the outside pictures. I scalloped the blade using my ROS.

Lots of fun to make. I’m considering going into production. I could justify the buying of about 30 12” clamps that way…:) I’m at least going to make some for the rest of my siblings.

What an amazing treasure trove of knowledge that is sitting on a tray in my laptop. If you don’t subscribe to FWW online, and even if you do, this is a great library.

It’s a very straightforward interface. You can search by keywords, or a simple set of pulldown menus.

For example:

Skills and Techniques, Joinery, Dovetail Joints

Yeilds 26 articles on dovetails and you can list by title, author, and date.

I didn’t take as many pictures of the process on this one…basically the same as the 1st with some minor variations. I did do some steam bending for the compound bend needed for the edge banding on the blade for this one.

LOL…my steam “system”....Sue was not impressed.

I wrapped the paddle blade in plastic and used it as the form for the bending. I didn’t get any picture of the actual clamp up.

Here are the results though. I’m pretty pleased with it. Still need to get the epoxy haze off but was getting tired of the hand sanding.

The back of the blade.

I shaped the handle for comfort and good grip.

Here are the two of them side by side. The second is about 2 inches longer with a slightly smaller blade. It is lighter and has a lot more flex than the 1st since it has only 5 laminations instead of 6.

I should have them done next weekend and then they’ll get tested the weekend after. Hope they perform as well as they look.

One caveat…I use Sketchup Pro…the free version may not have all these settings. I think it does but I’m not positive. I’ll be installing the free version on my other computer shortly so I can check these things.

There are two areas where you will likely want to make changes. The Preferences window and The Model Info window.

First Preferences.

You’ll want to set the Template that Sketchup uses for its default drawing setup

You’ll also want to make sure your General settings are something like this. These are personal preferences that work well for me. I don’t remember if I edited this or if these are the default.

You can also set the Shortcut keys in the preferences. I have all the basic editing commands shortcut, for example to make a component I simply press the c key, g for group, s for scale, etc… Click on the command on the left, then enter the shortcut key in the Add Shortcut box, click the + sign to asign it.

Other settings are edited in Model Info

I set my units to make sense for the precision I need…adjust as necessary.

I set my Location to the closest place listed. You can also give exact lat/lon in the custom location. These settings are used when you turn shadows on. Useful for siting landscaping features for shade studies and such.

These are the basic settings that you will want to set 1st. You’ll notice that there are a number of other settings that can be adjusted. We can get into those later. I can answer any specific questions you may have about them if you need to know now.

One other thing that many of you that are just starting with Sketchup will find helpful is the Instructor. It gives context sensitive help in the form of mini animations based on the tool you have selected. Wish they had it when I was just starting.

Let me know if you have any questions.

1st…I took some photos of the slab grain and bark and edited them in Photoshop to crop out any extra.

Slab Grain

Bark

Here’s how to use them in Sketchup