All of us probably checkout the Friday sales at the Tool Bin. But did you know that Amazon has an RSS feed that has super deals? Only problem is that it is an “Everything” feed.

I came across a page today that describes how to take the Amazon rss feed and then use a free service from Feed Sifter to filter the Amazon feed for the stuff you want. All you need to do is paste in the URL in the Amazon rss feed and then enter some filter terms “tool, power” “planer” and subscribe.

Original page with good instructions.

Smartflix (found via Make Magazine's website) many on a variety of topics. Turning, carving, cabinetry, you name it.

Well, today in my travels I found a link from a steampunk site (yes, my old hp laptop is going to become wood-clad and steam driven very soon) for a DIY powered mask.

This is another Jake Von Slatt project. He used a car air filter, though I think I am going to use a cabin air filter since almost all of them are HEPA rated now.

I for one, really like the way brass looks with a rich background of mahogany or dark oak. I also love engraved brasswork.

This morning as I drank my morning six-pack of diet coke, I was checking my regulars and came across a link to a person who does steampunk stuff and had a procedure to do brass etchings of anything you can photocopy. It’s relatively simple, and can be done with materials you can get at the borgs.

Below is the photocopy “negative” (left) used to create the etched image:

For those that aren’t familiar with steampunk, it is a psuedo-victorian style based on a culture that uses steam, rather than electricity, to do everything. And, here’s the cool part, steampunk uses plenty of wood and brass!

So enough of my rambling. Cruise on over to Jake von Slatt’s Steampunk Workshop and check out the etching process. Take look at some of the other projects, too!

Once I found the tool stuff, this is the first video that caught my eye:

Cutting Inlayed Dovetails using the Leigh D4, by Al Navas

I have a D4, but haven’t tried doing anything fancy yet, but maybe at lunchtime….

The tutorial is three videos.

I also noticed David Marks and Wood Whisperer videos.

Other than the search, which is pretty broad, you’ll find wood working stuff here:

Fine Art - Wood Working
Home and Garden - Building and Repair
Home and Garden - Tools and Equipment

I think everyone will find something useful here. I sure have!

Cian has gathered information from numerous sources and archived them for our reference. If you need to know something about hand tools, from using them, to who makes them, this is the spot to start.

I started my search on ebay, progressed to various forum site member ads, watched craiglist, checked auction sites, newspaper classifieds. Then I began looking for new items in catalogs/websites/stores.

The prices I found for old tools were not that good. Old beater’s with rust and knicks were about the price of cheaply made stuff from harbour freight. Prices for decent old tools were more than the price of semi-decent new tools from the big boxes. Prices for good old tools were about as high as those for new tools.

This is why hand tool cabinetry is dying. It seems to cost more to setup for hand tool woodworking than it does to simply buy a power tool wood shop.

So the talk about the delight of doing mortise and tenon joinery, or hand dove tailing? It’s all hot air to me.

I can make dovetails faster and easier with a jig and router, I can make mortise and tenon with a router.

Why did I want hand tools? Just to be able to woodwork longer hours.

/begin rant mode
There are too many people collecting hand tools. KNOCK IT OFF! You are creating artificially high market prices, by inflating the value of tools, just in the exact same manner that oil speculators have driven the price of crude oil to $110 per barrel. Now stop it. If you aren’t going to use it, don’t buy it.
/end rant mode

Whew. It was a short night and I’m tired. Sorry.

Now that the lumber is moved, I had room to finally unpack my DW735. All I can say is wow. I can’t wait to run some nice maple through for the faceframes of my kitchen cabinets.

I am curious, though. Why did Dewalt ever think that this thing was “portable?” Going by that reasoning, my tablesaw is portable, too! Once I get that planer planted on a rolling table, I’m never going to lift it again.

A few more hours of rearranging and I’ll be able to start breaking down the 1/2 ply I’m going to use for storage cabinets. It’ll really rock having enough flat space to put everything. The two big piles storage system I’ve been using doesn’t really work. I can’t recommend it to anyone. Especially if they want to actually get anything built.

My basement flooded last year. It was pretty bad. I was doing fine until late on sunday night. Then the water started coming in. I couldn’t keep up with the in flow. Home Depot was out of any kind of pump. My little drill pump fried.

The lowes near me are closed on sunday (local BS), so monday morning I was there at 0530. I managed to snag a couple sump pumps and a great shop vac with a built-in pump. Great vac, BTW.

Anyways, now to the good part. Over the winter I was shifting things in the basement and managed to break off the hose connector for the pump’s outflow.

I called shop vac trying to find a replacement part but it isn’t a customer replaceable part. I was thinking I’d get by with some epoxy and a prayer. But the CS lady at shop vac said no. They’re shipping a whole power assembly (the top piece with the motor) to me!!

All I can say is, they rock! There is no way I’ll even consider a craftsman or rigid vac after this.

Just call me Mr. Shop Vac.