So I started the improvements in the left corner of the shop where the Revolving Tool Station lives.

My Air Compressor line comes down from the loft in this corner so that was the first thing that I worked on.

I am using a RapidAir based solution here.

I then proceeded to clean up the Tool Station itself and finished up securing the electrical run up under in the storage area. Next up was the Dust Collection for the station. This one was tough, I spent a good amount of time noodling this solution in my brain. Here is what I came up with, with this just being the hard line.

I attached a hose from an old, burnt up shop vac and I am supporting it with a tool balancer that I picked up on the cheap from a liquidation sale from shutdown of the Dell Assembly line here in Austin.

When I need to use the line on the station I can just pull it down and when it is not needed it up and out of the way. You may be saying where is the blast gate? Well that is next on the list of improvements. The main line for my dust collection is down underneath the bench.

Well here is where the blast gates will live. They too will be up underneath the miter bench. Note that I am using no clog Blast Gates, I found these at Woodcraft a while back, I like the idea, and I’ll let you know how they work over the long haul.

Other items of interest is that I have pulled the copper grounding wire from the inside of the pipe. I am still planning on wrapping the outside of the pipe with the copper wire again just to keep the static electricity away. I now know static electricity will not start a fire in a wood shop, I just do not like getting zapped! I managed to get the left bench backup against the wall and leveled before running out of time this evening. Here is how things look at the end of the day.

You can see the threaded rod running up from the blast gate center right of the picture. I will detail this solution once I am done working out the kinks.

Wish me luck!

I am using birds eye maple for the box of the dump truck here is the bottom and the front

Here are the sides, I finally get to use all of those itty bitty clamps given to me when I started my wood working odyssey several years back.

and without the clamps

And finally the body of the truck:

Today after wook I am hoping to get finnal assembley done. I will then put this to the side and move on to other projects for now, it was 112 degrees yesterday (in the shade) and I am quite sure that whatever finish I choose will harden in mid-air and bounce right off of the wood…. :)

Here is a couple of pics of my first attempt. You can see one of the ways of working with small pieces is to mount you hand held tools like my ROS upside down and bring the piece to it.

The fenders turned out very nice but then the router ate them.

On the final attempt I then decided to glue the blanks together and then cut and shape them as one. This worked like a champ…..so here are attempts 8 and 9 at the bottom of the pic….

To resolve the issue with pieces tipping into the router bit I mounted a scrap piece of thin plywood across the router table and slowly raised the bit through the ply to make a zero clearance insert. I still got a small amount of cross grain tear out, but nothing that a little sandpaper cant clean up.

I got started with the chassis and the hoist support. Since the dump truck was a bit smaller scale I had to do a bit of and upsize the hoist support. The next challenge was the one inch notch in the hoist support. You can see how I tackled it here:

I marked my edges, setup a temp tall fence, cut the outside edges first and then nibbled away between. Note I made a small mistake by not pushing all of the way through on my right check cut and when I went back to clean it up I added an additional 1/32th of an inch to width. I will have to make that up later.

You see in the complete pic I am using a hand screw to hold my work. This is my first project that uses small parts like this and since I have typically done case work in the past I have gotten away with not having a vise in the wood shop (still needs to be moved from the garage).

The next challenge was the hood. It was a big thick square to begin with so I used two maple turning blanks I had on hand to glue up to a large 3×3 blank. The parts were over sized, but the biggest challenge was how do I glue up four squares and not have them slide all around while drying. Here is what I came up with:

I drew a line across all four pieces and brought that line around to the appropriate sides of each piece and since they were all 1 1/2 X 1 1/2 I was able to draw the X at 3/4” from the edge (trying to use the same edge on each block). I then drilled 1/4” hole a 1/2” deep on the marks and cut a 1/4” dowel at 3/4” lengths and placed them in the holes and glued the sides first (T1 and T2 – T3 and T4) let them set for about 10 minutes and then glued top piece to bottom piece. Unfortunately for me and my plans this is when my kids were dropped off and I didn’t catch the fact that I had a diamond shaped gap towards the middle. I didn’t find this out until a hour had past. So I now had to do what I was trying to avoid in the first place, fix up crappy glue lines. Let’s just say more glue, more clamps and a couple more clamps fixed the issue.

Upon my return to the shop after the heat of the day and looking at my glue ups I wasn’t happy the lay out of the end grain (I didn’t pay attention to this bit earlier). I then decided to face grain to edge grain glue a board to the front of the hood assembly. I let that dry an hour or so worked on so other pieces and here is where I am at when I rolled up last night…..

Both my Father and Father in Law are woodworkers, we have decided to split the set up amongst ourselves. I am taking the Crane and I am going to make a Modified Tractor Trailer into a Dump Truck. He will get one from each of us for Christmas and the other for his birthday.

First up the Dump Truck.

ps It is nice to get back in the shop!

So some more sanding and it was time to shoot the 1lbs cut of shellac. Sorry no pics and onto the first coat of Waterlox.

Tomorrow I will sand it one more time with some double aught synthetic steel wool and apply one more coat and she will be done! Woohoo! I will post the project when it is done.

First stop though is a look though the reviews here on LJ’s of course!

Opinions and/or recommendations are appreciated.

I know this might be best posted over on the forum, but really wanted to keep the conversation centered around this blog…

The Rounding Jig is based upon Norms, however my little 9” BS was not up to the task so I modified the design to work with the router table.

The Quarter Round Jig is also Norms, after testing I added the hold down clamps and the handle. The blanks are cut to rough size using the Jig Saw and then put on the sled and the rounding is completed at the router table.

Here are the shelves, almost to final size (Left some room to play with)

The nice thing afterwards was I able to add to the wall-o-jigs! The handle and the hold downs came off of course.

Next up the Sockets and Pins!

I only made one mistake the top fence I put the Dado on the wrong side (for a piece of T-Track). I have filled that dado in with a piece of scrap walnut and will put the dado in the proper side this afternoon. This is also my first go at putting Laminate on solo, and thankfully that was successful. I do have to say that contact cement is quite messy though. Most of the MDF has glue sizing on it already and hope to have it assembled and painted later today. In the second pic you can see that I painted one of the blocks already to test the resulting color, also you can see the results of the glue sizing on the fence face at the bottom, the strip you see there does not have any of the glue sizing on it.

It is working as planned, I have freed up an entire shelf on my Rack that is on my wall.