hanging bikes and reclaimed mahogany

This weekend I helped a friend make some hangers for french cleats we recently put up in his garage.

French cleats holding bikes and garden implements.

By the way, one big hook at the right height makes a pretty effective way to store a bike.

Sawing plywood on ikea sawhorses, as part of an effort to suss out any big gaps in my friend's small tool collection.

I also scored some mahogany (I think) from a shoddy hutch type thing sitting in his garage from the previous owner. Thanks Kevin!

...at least I think it's mahogany. Whatever it is, it's nice medium hardness with roey grain.

I stripped some of the ugly brown stain of the reclaimed boards, just enough to preview it's beauty. It will be fun to see what I can turn it into.

Lots of ash for a future workbench

Continuing the recent theme of lumber aqcuisitions, here's one from a couple of years ago that I never posted. I forget how many board feet of ash I got, but I remember that I figured out it was about 400 Lbs.

Not a bad haul

shorter, wider boards will become legs

 I'm planning to build a Roubo-style bench once I finish some other projects. I was pretty impressed at the massive selection at Highland Hardwoods in Brentwood, NH (no affiliation). They didn't mind me picking through the pile for about an hour to find all the right widths. There were other choices in the running, but the emerald ash borer may have made my decision for me, as I ultimately could not resist this ash at less than $2 per board-foot and few flaws. Certainly a nice species for a workbench. 

The 7' lengths after arriving in my shop. Yeah, that looks like enough for a workbench top.

Visiting the lumberyard is more fun with a friend

Today I took my friend Frank on an exploratory mission to figure out what type of wood we might want to build a rather odd portable bar. We ended up finding a nice purpleheart board 12" wide and 17' long at Anderson Mcquaid (no affiliation) in Cambridge, MA. I had no idea those kind of sizes were even available, but we found it reasonably affordable. I always like my trips to lumberyards enough to prolong them, but even more so with a friend along.

Scott: "We must look like a couple of yahoos right now."
Frank: "Scott, we're using this lumber to build a purple and yellow glow-in-the-dark bar-top to bring to [...]. We *are* yahoos."

OK, readers, I'm heading back down to the workshop. Don't forget to smile.

Splitting oak, day 2

Last night I showed up with another friend to help, and some additonal tools. We got it down to a science, finally. Warning, one of these photos is intentionally misleading.

Splitting something this thick is quite different that splitting firewood, I think mostly because it cannot deflect away from the wedge nearly as much.

Here's the recipe that worked for us:
1. score the line with a machete, lightly tapped with a dead-blow mallet
2. reinforce the line with several passes of axe & sledge, until about 2 inches deep
3. at 1/3rd and 2/3rds of the way across, bury the axe, pull out, and get a wedge started in its place before the wood swells and closes the gap. Use the wedges with powder coating right up to the edge so they grip instead of bouncing out.

4. Advance the wedges a couple inches, until the whole line starts to get visibly wider
5. add more wedges.
6. beat the wedges until the log is mostly split
7. lever with the froe down low to save a bunch of wedge work
8. reach in with a machete and snip a few fibers bridging the gap.
9. drink some beer.

We figured out that these eights weigh a little over 200 lbs. each.

YMMV, of course.

There was another more general lesson I got out of this too. It's a corrollary to that old one about the right tool for the job: It's not always obvious which tool is the most efficient. The best splitting wedges were the ones I bought at the last minute and I thought would be terrible. Certain whacking implements were useless at certain moments, and perfect at others. A few times, the log just laughed at us while bouncing a wedge out after we tried hitting it with steel. Other times it was a dead-blow mallet that induced wooden laughter. Having a couple to choose from was absolutely necessary.

Thanks to Seth for the rare opportunity, and to both him and Matt for the extensive help. And to Mikki for delicious food!

Splitting oak, day 1

My cousin offered me this oak log from a tree-removal the other day. I got over there in a hurry and found this chunk at about 40" in diameter. It took me about an hour and a half to split it the first time, taking advantage of some checks that had already formed. I'm going back to expend more effort on it tonight.

I'm really looking forward to having radially split oak boards, but this is a learning experience I never bargained for. I broke my club/beetle, my froe, and severely degraded one hatchet handle in the process. leap-frogging a pair of splitting wedges is a nice theory, but I wish I had 10 sharp ones. (the 2 I used yesterday are sharp for today).

Enjoy the pictures.

The first step is scoring a line. I used a machete (not pictured).

This froe was still useful after it broke. I'm pretty sure breaking it was my own fault. I should not have hit it with steel after the wooden maul broke.

Finally it's in two. For bonus points, count the broken tools.

My cousin and I struggled with one half for a while. It was harder since there were no existing checks to take advantage of.

small lumber rack

 

Here is a lumber rack that I made over a year ago now. It has proved very useful for holding offcuts and all manner of small pieces. The trapezoidal shape and different lengths of dowels make it very flexible.

lumber rack, holding 2' - 4' boards

1" dowels are removable.

Construction was fairly simple. I stacked pairs of 2x4's on each side, and tilted them at a 15 degree angle. I put lag bolts through where each side happened to cross in front of a stud. Also, I screwed it to the cieling beam and a horizontal rail on top of one of the built-in worktables in the workshop.

Main supports are attached to the structure of the house wherever possible.

1" holes at regular intervals hold various length oak dowels, which can be swapped or removed as needed, depending on what is being stored at the moment.

This rack can hold a lot. In this picture you can see where I put a horizontal member in the frame with extra dowel holes.

High speed, low-bandwidth wood transportation system

I just bought some clear pine for a toolchest (and some extra) at my local lumber purveyor. I got it home fast ;-). I'm stacking and stickering at home now. Since stickers need to come fom wood that's handy, very dry, and expendable, I'm cutting strips from a scrap of 5/8 plywood.