The final machine for the workshop
January 28, 2011
In some ways I’m a late adapter. After fifty-five years of woodworking I have finally bought a table saw. For most of that time there wasn’t room – table saws are space hogs. And there was the Sears radial arm saw I bought with my income tax refund after second year of university. My room-mate and I needed shelves and furniture for our apartment, and Dad had a large pile of lumber at the farm.
While most woodworkers shy away from the radial arm saw for ripping, I’m used to setting the anti-kickback mechanism, and can do safe, if not very accurate work, with my old Sears saw.
But the new shop is warm, with properly-seasoned lumber already inside. The radial arm saw is set up in a dark, cold shed. Love of comfort may have been the deciding factor. The tools section of Kijiji Ontario received more and more of my Internet time.
A cabinet saw is basically a high-end table saw. The motor is mounted beneath a massive cast iron table, and a steel cabinet surrounds it. Extension tables and guides protrude out at various angles, the options limited only by the depth of pockets of its owner.
Internet research on cabinet saws kept me quite busy for a week or so. A good saw in Hawkesbury sold before I had learned enough to realize that it was a fine specimen for a great price. Three others disappeared from Kijiji hours after their ads appeared.
I haunted the Internet, looking for a 3 hp Delta Unisaw or comparable General 350. One ad had no photos. The guy didn’t answer my emails. Experience told me that this saw might not have sold due to the lax presentation. More emails. Eventually the owner got back to me. I drove up to Belleville to discover that this model requires a substantial counter attachment to its right side as part of its top. Without the 48 by 27 inch sheet of laminate the saw looked pretty odd with this long aluminum arm pointing accusingly off to the right. Though paint spatters did its appearance no good, the basic components were in solid condition, so ahead I went with the deal.
We overturned the top-heavy machine onto my trailer, tied it on, and I hauled my prize, a Delta 35-457, east on the 401 and up Hwy 15 to Seeley’s Bay without incident.
A rough road is a lot more than a slight inconvenience when you are hauling a heavy and reportedly fragile machine with a hundred-pound motor suspended in space only by a set of expensive cast-iron trunions which were not designed for road shock. I couldn’t get more than forty miles per hour on that dreadful stretch from Seeley’s Bay to Elgin for fear of gutting my new acquisition. That road has got to be fixed.
The trunions survived the final fifteen miles to Young’s Hill, and I dragged the saw off the trailer and into the shop, plugged it in, and it ran beautifully. So I shut it down and cleaned off the road grime.
O.K. I admit it. I was afraid of the thing. All these years with a radial arm saw and I was used to having anti-kickback fingers constantly touching the board when I ripped it. I had never worked without them. And this thing didn’t have any kind of guard, not even mitre gauge, just a fence for ripping. It was a commercial saw, used exclusively for cutting laminates, to judge from its blade and the dust accumulated inside.
So with great trepidation I selected a substantial board (more to hang onto) and ran it through the saw. It ripped beautifully, without any drama at all. I discovered that I could, without ever releasing my grip on it, push a board through half-way from the front, then step around the left side of the saw, reach back and grasp the board at the end of the fence and pull it on through from behind the saw. After the first few cuts, my fears evaporated.
I had glued up a number of boards into 1 by 17 inch blanks for door and drawer panels in a large bedroom cabinet. Ripping these relatively rough boards down to the width my planer needs proved laughably easy, compared to the tricks I had had to play on the radial arm saw for the same job.
Because George Sheffield sold me this white ash already dried, there has been little movement in the material as I sawed it. Nonetheless I was ready for the unguarded blade to pinch at some point. The first time it did it, though, the 3 hp motor just burned its way on through as I held the end of the board. Sometimes there’s no substitute for horsepower.
After a week in a shop now dominated by the Unisaw, I have become a believer. The machine’s no beauty, with coffee stains on the cast iron, paint oversprays and drips all over the cabinet, and my jury-rigged extension table of scraps of plywood supported by a pair of unsanded ash legs. But the thing is solid, smooth, and accurate. What’s not to love?
A Real Garage Door
January 7, 2011
That’s the one we’ll use to visit the garage and to fix the fire, not the one reserved for whatever mechanical pet is currently occupying the service bay.
The new door’s made of white oak grown locally by Ed Rowswell and sawn on his mill. The planer had no trouble with the wide planks, but my old tenon cutter had its work cut out for it, and I had to stand on the foot pedal of the mortiser for each of the many cuts into the dense, stringy wood. It was good to get my woodworking tools back into operation. They’ve been in storage ever since we moved into my shop of 30 years, a stone house on the property.
Now my beloved Poitras shaper and 8″ General jointer are snuggled neatly around the box stove. No more damp barns for them. The band saw’s just to one side and the tenon cutter’s back in operation for the joinery projects involved in the final touchups on the house — primarily armoires in the bedrooms. The other tools can stay out in the cold.
A 1.75″ oak door is incredibly heavy to lift around. Once it’s mounted on hinges, of course, it swings just like any other, though perhaps with more authority.
Suburban homeowners discover they can take their entry doors apart and replace the muntined thermal panes with opaque glass for privacy. Then the rejects sit around their garages until they put them on Kijiji for a few dollars. I bought two last summer in Ottawa. The current glass in the door cracked when I drove a screw into a mortise in the door frame to tighten it. Then the sledge hammer did it no good when I whacked the prehung door into position. I’ll drop the second one in a little later in the process.
Normally I fit a sheet of 1/4″ plate into doors like this, but I decided a replaceable panel would be better for a door likely to be used as an entrance from a woodshed. Surely enough, as soon as I make a replaceable window, I end up replacing it.
Abuse of Power
December 28, 2010
The most upsetting abuse of power that I regularly see from Stephen Harper is his authority to name. It started with his angry reaction to the Dion coalition. Against logic and constitutional law he condemned his opponents as traitors, separatists and socialists, and Canadians by and large bought it.
Then he declared that losers don’t get to lead coalitions, and the media accepted his word on it. His phrase “Canadians don’t care about…” enables him to dismiss concerns which ordinary Canadians in fact do have, but it takes a confrontation with his Stephenness to get an alternative point of view recognized.
I could go on, but my point is that Stephen Harper has managed to become the voice of authority in Canada, and he will be very hard to unseat for that reason. What worries me is how quickly and easily he will convince Canadians that a coalition with Duceppe and the Bloc is a reunification of disparate wings of the Conservative party, should the results of the next election put Harper at a disadvantage.
Like inhabitants of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984, we will doublethink our way into a belief that it was always this way. That, Canadians, is abuse.
January 7th: Sue Riley in The Ottawa Citizen this morning listed the newest perversion of truth to come from the Harper Government. Over the last few weeks in the media it has been well documented that CEOs of companies in Canada make on average 155 times the salary of their entry-level employees. But to justify corporate tax cuts, all Stephen Harper has to do is change their names from fat cats to the new and flashy JOB CREATORS.
Now, magically, Canadians smile upon another Harper initiative to give us hope. Thin gruel indeed for the Tory faithful while this government makes corporations rich at the expense of the very voters who maintain them in power.
January 8th: He just keeps doing it. In an interview with David Akin of Sun Media today Harper spins his government’s foreign policy foul-ups of the last year in a way that had me trying in vain to adjust my bifocals. Didn’t work. Harper’s logic in this interview was “distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction,” to misuse an American master.
He said, “When we, as a country, offer to be part of a international mission to help protect global security then somebody comes along and uses that to try and leverage demands on our domestic airline industry, I don’t think that’s a situation we as a country want to be in,” Harper said. “What this teaches us in future and when we’re looking at other options is: Don’t get in a place where somebody’s going to try and use it to leverage some unrelated issue.”
This, I assume, is meant to justify isolationism: if Dubai, and the whole United Nations, for that matter, doesn’t want to play nice, we’ll just keep to ourselves. Blame the other guys, always. And why not? 30% of Canadian voters will buy it and with that he can form a government because the rest are too put off by politics to care.
January 12th: Newly-minted minister of the environment Peter Kent has redefined the biggest and messiest environmental issue in the country. Kent has taken a page from right-wing gadfly Ezra Levant’s book on the subject and has named the Alberta tar sands with its emissions, animal kills and water quality problems, “ethical oil.” Changing the paradigm from environmental stewardship to a battle between the forces of good and evil renders rational arguments and scientific evidence irrelevant, and seeks to sell Alberta oil to the fearful. This is pretty cheap.
The Garage Door Spring
December 27, 2010
The design for the new garage featured a single ten-foot garage door. It needed to be that size because I have a trailer almost eight feet wide.
But it couldn’t be just any door. It had to be a bit special. Internet searches proved fruitless until I finally spotted the perfect 10X7 in a Kijiji ad in Lakefield. It claimed to be a mahogany-paneled door, but the two-tone photo made it clear that it had luan panels and some white wood I couldn’t identify for its rails and stiles. Nonetheless, it looked good, though the price was steep.
We towed the trailer to Lakefield and bought the door from a custom house builder who had it left over after a change in plans. Considerable research traced it from Stewart Garage Doors Ltd. to its original builder, a small factory in Toronto. The wood other than “mahogany” turned out to be hemlock, admired by the builders for its strength and resistance to rot.
I spent two weeks applying the latest opaque stain to it in preparation for installation day. But then came the sheetrock which dragged on until Roz fitted and screwed the bottom foot around the walls on Christmas Day.
So yesterday we began. The door went together quickly and well until we came to the spring-loaded gizmo that mounts above the door to serve as a counterweight.
The instruction booklet from Stewart’s was obviously never intended for use.
“Professionals install these doors,” the builder had told me. Nonetheless I resolved to rely upon the burnt-fingers method and twenty-five years of experience repairing an ancient 17′ plywood monster. It didn’t have this spring-around-a-shaft mechanism, though.
The Internet provided several good videos on the subject, most of which emphasized the sheer insanity of torquing the spring with anything except a pair of purpose-built 1/2″ steel rods. Pieces of rebar and screw drivers were uniformly dismissed as insanity likely to maim, if not kill. I took that part seriously and made two fine bars, even marking the ends with tape to indicate when they were fully inserted into one of the four holes to turn the end of the spring.
Stewart’s let us down at a critical point. By following their instructions to the letter, I was doomed to fail. When I tightened it, the spring eventually gave a terrifying lurch and crawled up both of its hubs, jamming against the adjusting mechanism on one end and the stationary support on the other. Now what?
Charlie and I managed to pry up the door and escape the garage, but a night of worry produced no real alternatives. By morning, though, tractorbynet.com contributors responded to my plea and explained that I had probably assembled the thing backwards. They suggested a couple of websites which provided good information. Charlie returned and we went from there.
The spring was partially blocking one of the four holes into which I needed to insert the two winding bars in turn. A couple of seconds at the grinder created a flat 1/8″ deep area on the other end of a winding bar. This allowed it to slide by the offending spring and deep into the hole in question. We were back in business, only this time on the right side of centre, rather than the left. (Conservatives reading this will no doubt clap with glee at the irony.)
Winding this spring is difficult and dangerous. Fastening the little gibs on the hubs is equally stressful, as they must be torqued with a tiny wrench to between 22 and 44 pounds, but the hollow jackshaft keeps collapsing underneath them, so it’s very hard to know how tight to make the screws. Then try it with the end of a large spring up against the square gib so that it makes a loud “sproing” every agonizing quarter-turn.
Part of the burnt-fingers methodology involves frequent stops for feedback. This meant many attempts at raising the door to see if the spring was tight enough yet. Each time we had to fasten the shaft again with the vice grips, inserting a rod to hold things, then back out the gibs and torque the spring yet another turn or two. Force required and stress created increase exponentially throughout this process. Misadventures with these springs resulting in amputation or death are widely reported on home improvement sites.
By the middle of the afternoon, though, Charlie and I were still very much alive with all of our fingers, and the door operated acceptably. On we went to the remote opener. Charlie had never installed one of these before, so he watched a bit bemused as I whipped the familiar parts together. I had installed two.
But he was on hand for the heavy lifting. The simple way to install an opener involves assembling this long beam, bolting one end to the opener mechanism and the other to the garage wall above the door. Then you lift the unit into place and fasten it with metal straps to the ceiling. This is a breeze if you have someone to hold the unit in place.
After the stress of the counterweight, the electronics can wait for another day. The safety beam can be tricky, and training the cars to talk to the opener requires Charlie’s brand of patience.
As for that infernal spring, by the time we’d figured out how to deal with it, the job was done.
The Christmas Column
December 19, 2010
Last year at this time I wrote a piece about my beloved wife’s strange fondness for Christmas decorations and all of the frippery associated with the holiday season. Ever the seeker of balance, I tend to drift into the role of the “bah, humbug!” figure in the family narrative.
Mind you, in the early years we did have some epic expeditions “up home” to the area of the old Croskery homestead on MacAndrews Lane, where we found pine boughs in abundance. It was the journey, rather than the product, which we sought. Our VW Beetle made many runs up to Brady’s Lake with trailer attached in search of greenery for wreaths and centre-pieces.
Of course Christmas morning took on new interest when our son Charlie grew old enough to catch onto his mother’s enthusiasm for the morning of discovery. Fueled by the daily chocolate treats in an Advent calendar, he had shown considerable interest in this Santa Claus character.
But then he slept in.
In frantic-elf-mode Bet doesn’t sleep much on Christmas Eve, and as the morning wore on she only had Grover, our springer spaniel, for company. She couldn’t even open her own gifts, because I never seemed to get around to putting cards or tags on the things I had wrapped.
Finally, in desperation, Bet brought me coffee at 7:00 and woke the kid. “Oh. Is it morning?” Down the young mother dragged her son to the decorated tree by the wood stove below. Charlie obligingly accepted the wrapped box Bet handed him, opened it, discovered a desirable toy, and set about to play with it.
Striving hard to learn patience, Bet waited for his attention to veer off to other wrapped parcels, a pile of which were arranged suggestively around the boy’s seat on the floor. But Charlie’s considerable powers of concentration were focused on this new toy, and he saw no reason to look further.
But Bet was not without her wiles. Grover’s attention span was much shorter than Charlie’s, and when bored, Grover liked to amuse himself by latching onto one foot of Charlie’s sleepers and dragging him around the house to the accompaniment of his own growls. Grover was one garrulous mutt. I don’t know what Bet did to remind Grover of this charming habit, but before long Charlie skidded by the door, laughing, dragged by a large, growling spaniel. Soon both were back at the tree and the stack of gifts was attacked with renewed interest.
Grover’s gift this Christmas turned out to be a leather harness. Charlie received a red plastic sled to go with it – the kind with a moulded seat and two hand brakes at the sides. We plunked an oversized helmet on the kid, loaded him into the sled, and led Grover down a trail left by my snowmobile. Most dogs love to pull, and Grover proved untiring in his enthusiasm for this game.
The dog discovered that if he responded to my shouted instructions from behind, he would be allowed off the leash and he could really pull his little master along. It turned out that all the dog needed to know was “Gee!” “Haw!” “Whoa!” and “NO! Grover! NO!” (squirrels). The problem with a dogsled, of course, is the pileup which frequently occurs when the dog unexpectedly stops to sniff something. Three-year-old Charlie developed very quick hands on the brakes, and as a result Grover grew quite confident in his role. I still remember him a year or two later pulling Charlie through six inches of powder one day as we made our way from one set of trails to another.
This travel arrangement put considerable pressure on the father to keep up, so for three winters I did a lot of running on snowshoes along trails behind that sled.
Over the years not much has changed at Christmas. Bet still overdoes it on the presentation of Christmas treats, and a succession of spaniels have in their turn emptied a full pound of Turtles out of the dish on the coffee table – without ill-effects beyond a scolding.
Snowshoes and the Ranger have replaced the dogsled at Christmas now for the traditional hike in the woods, but if a grandchild comes along I have my heart set on a Bernese Mountain Dog. They use them to pull carts in Switzerland, and they’re known to be slow movers. I might just be able to keep up.
Ice Reports, 2010-11
December 18, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010:
So it begins. From Hwy 15 in Portland today I could see snow covering the ice out as far as visibility allowed. The snow appeared to reach the large islands in the middle of the lake, though this may have been an illusion. One enterprising soul has placed an ice fishing shack out in the wide, shallow bay next to the park/boat launch ramp to the east of the village.
On Otter Lake I could see open water in the middle of the pool nearest the road, and open water in the larger pool to the northeast.
I’ll copy this post to a page which will appear on the right margin of my website. Updates will be there.
A Year in Forfar
December 12, 2010
It’s been an exciting year on Young’s Hill. The landscape has changed a bit, new toys and buildings have arrived, and we ended the year with a puzzle left to us by a surveyor in 1956.
The most prominent event in the scrapbook seems to have been the Canada-Russia gold medal game on the first day of sugar-making. Robert Ewart’s photos of the crew chewing knuckles in the living room during the overtime period will remain in our memories as long as these remarkable photos survive online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rewart/sets/72157623383980467/show/
Sugar making ran for five weeks at the farm. The guests provided great entertainment during cabin fever season. I trust Dr. Armand Leroi returned to England and the BBC without ill effects from eating venison cooked on the corner of the maple sugar arch. Chef Matthew Swift has continued his experiments with salty pork in Toronto, winning contests on a regular basis and gaining column inches from appreciative food writers.
After sugar making Derek Dunfield dropped in to help pour the garage floor, then headed for Boston to post-doctoral studies in behavioural economics at MIT. Charlie and Roz are at Derek’s on a Christmas shopping expedition as I write this.
Martin and Charlie came back to put up the trusses after Bet and I lifted the wall panels into place with the tractor. Putting the roof on was a grind, but the rest of the garage project has gone well. Along the way Bet assumed the role of event photographer, and to her delight Howie Crichton ran one of her shots in the Review-Mirror. Bet had joined the rest of the gang as a published photographer.
In late April Jane McCann and her crew planted 8000 new seedlings at various locations around the property in a single frenetic day. These little trees provided many happy hours of mowing last summer, and the excuse to buy yet another diesel tractor.
On the subject of gardens, the toy-of-the-summer had to be the ancient Troy-Bilt tiller I found near Peterborough. As long as I followed the 180 page manual’s advice and walked one row over from where it tilled, the machine created a “dust mulch” on the surface which weeds seemed unable to pierce. For the first time in memory the garden remained quite neat throughout the year without extraordinary efforts on Roz’s part, hand-weeding.
This summer the raccoons did not raid the corn patch. At the time I credited the electric fence, but in retrospect it was probably the family of coyotes defending their field adjoining the garden. Petless dog lovers are easy marks for young coyotes, and Erin and her two siblings kept us amused all summer with their antics in the field and nocturnal concerts.
Just before it got cold we poured a second concrete slab for Charlie’s workshop. All of the Kingston crew were in the fall-madness phase of their working year, so we had some tricky scheduling to do. Graduate students seem to have the most flexibility, so Martin and Jess showed up to help Charlie and me with the initial pour. Jess had earlier impressed me with her construction smarts while shingling Martin’s roof in Kingston. At the farm she gave an excellent account of herself with shovel, rake, and trowel, as well. But she and Martin had classes in the afternoon, and Charlie had a meeting in Toronto, so they had to leave before we were finished. So Rob Ewart came to lift the power trowel onto and off the slab and do the hand finishing. Rob’s massive strength came in very handy that afternoon, as we couldn’t get the concrete to set up to where it would support the trowel. It took many tries, but then late in the afternoon the mix set and smoothed up to Charlie’s specifications. The frame and roof can wait until spring.
Last August for the first time I left the farm to do an interview for this column. The day on Michael Ignatieff’s bus had to be my highlight of the year. In person the Ignatieffs are a delightful couple, and I greatly enjoyed the day as part of their entourage.
Since its first adventure at the Santa Claus Parade in Westport last year, the Ranger has dutifully performed in seven more parades, culminating in the season’s finale in Merrickville this coming Saturday. Marjory Loveys and her husband Tony Capel have become adept at decorating the long-suffering brute. Evening parades mean the decorations have to go on and come off in the dark. Hours of idling in line are the hidden cost of parade participation. After the snow for the Mallorytown parade last Sunday, Marjory sent me an email: “The decorations are spread out to dry all over the basement floor.” Tough work, politics.
Transfer of the title to the farm meant a look through deeds, PIN diagrams, and a treasure we discovered in a file in Smiths Falls, a 1956 survey of the property. Then I tried to make sense of the documents with the help of Google Earth software. Over three days of puzzling, the surveyor Mr. Berkeley’s work has gone from bewildering to puzzling, to generally competent, but with a couple of gaps or errors which need correction. Maybe in a couple of more days it will all make sense, if the snow hasn’t covered the iron bars by then.
the Walnut Diary 