Brews you can Use

I finally got my second woodworking project to the finishing stage. The little walnut mail basket is getting (fittingly) a walnut oil finish. Nice, non-toxic (suitable for food use/salad dressing, actually), and unlike Linseed oil, it's non-yellowing and non-spontaneous-combusting...

I was just floored while wiping it on. I've seen "finishing porn" on TV woodworking shows (Wood Works on DiY is the most reliable for this), but seeing it in person is just something else.

Then Max jumps up on the workbench and starts licking up the spare oil. Wierd cat, that one. And another benefit to non-toxic finishes :-)

I've finally got off the couch and started making something out of the walnut stock gathering dust (not sawdust, of course, just normal house schmutz) in the basement. Hopefully, a board-foot or two of it will become a nice little mail basket/key hook for our front entryway. It will be either that, or some firewood, depending on how bad I screw things up. My basic skills are quite lacking due to a very un-crafty childhood.

I spent a couple hours of the first day just "milling" some 3/4" walnut stock. Of course, I'm doing this without power tools for the (relative) quiet and exercise. I worked up a serious sweat the first session "milling" two 9" lengths of 3" wide 3/4" walnut for the sides of the basket. I got some extra exercise from the fact I can't aim a saw, meaning that I have to cut about 1/8" from the line and plane to the line. That's good fun on side grain, but planing the endgrain took most of the work.

It's also the weakest part of the process for me. I've managed to get an edge planed flat and square within a couple thousandths of an inch, but haven't had as much luck with endgrain. It's always pretty rounded, and I can't seem to get it flat when planing freehand. I think my next mini-project will have to be a shooting board....

Tonight, I started cutting the joinery on the side pieces, as well as cutting out some 3/4" stock for the back of the basket/to hold the key hooks. The side boards have a notch to hold the back board and a 1/4" dado to hold the bottom of the basket. I tried and mostly succeeded to cut the dado using just a chisel and a utility knife. I still blew out the ends of the dado (on the outward side, of course, grr..), and split off way too much wood around the edges but I think the joints will actually be functional, even if ugly.

Cutting the notch went smoothly at least. Cross-cut with backsaw, rough out most of the waste with a rip saw, and pare down to the line with a chisel. I can apparently aim the backsaw pretty well over a 3/4" length, and paring along the grain was quite enjoyable. Some of the paring work was actually smoother than my earliest attempts at planing :-)

And now, to sleep....

Sigh. I don't know what I was thinking with the whole woodworking thing. I used to think I could get a little bit done in the evenings after Grace goes to sleep, but recently that's been pretty late, and I've been rather unambitious by that point. Part of the problem is that I have no projects in mind, and disappearing downstairs for a long sharpening session just isn't turning me on for some odd reason....

And now I'm watching an episode of Wood Works, and thinking "yeah, I was going to start doing that at some point." Of course, I'm mostly noting the absurdity of the host using a planer and jointer to make a basic hand plane. It just seems wrong, and I can't quite figure out why. I mean, I've used a halfway-decent workbench to make sawhorses, which is about as wrong. Doubly so, in fact, as I haven't used the sawhorses to make anything of note so far, or really made anything else wood-y on the workbench (I did wire up some pumps for the brewery, and used the vise to hold some plumbing fittings, but otherwise, it's just been storage for idle tools).

Maybe I'll just have to convert some wood into boxes until I think of something better...

One of the reasons I remember the bad brain days is that I did not used to have them. Or, rather, I used to have a somewhat better excuse than general spaciness. Back in college, I often taxed my brain to the point of getting an endorphin rush from the "brain burn." It's probably a lot like a runner's high, but without the associated health benefits (and quite the opposite, as brain exercise is often fueled by beer and pizza, adding more calories than running burns). It's been a while since I've had that feeling, and I sometimes worry about my brain getting out of shape, since work (of late, especially) and everyday life are not nearly as intellectually challenging as those few brain-busting college courses.

My brain got a bit of a refresher this week when I pulled out the coolest CD ever (CD-ROM, that is): The complete 20th century collection of the Amateur Scientist column, including the early Telescoptics and Amateur Astronomer columns. Since Scientific American pulled the column in early 2001, it's nearly a complete archive going back to 1928.

There's a lot of good stuff in there. The old columns profiled some very ambitious amateur projects, from homebuilt lasers to particle accelerators. Yes, accelerators, as in plural. There were at least three homebuilt particle accelerators profiled. Two were the comparatively simple van de Graaf style¹, but one was a cyclotron built by a group of high-school boys (September 1953). Another amazing high-school entry was a supersonic wind tunnel (October 1966). It was built using discarded water-heater tanks to hold a mild vacuum. The vacuum was then opened to the air through a specially-designed tunnel holding the model. The vacuum was enough for a three-second supersonic run, the results of which were captured by a Schlieren system.

It almost makes Dexter's Laboratory sound like not so much of a stretch....

I remember wasting (er... "using") several weeks one summer combing through these Amateur Scientist columns in the UW-Stout library's collection of Scientific American. Most of them were on microfiche, so I spent many dollars getting waxy, messy, dim, low-quality copies of these gems. I read them, learned a fair amount about how these advanced gadgets worked, and and daydreamed about making similarly amazing things. And here I sit, over 10 years later, re-reading the same articles now on CD-ROM, having built none of it, of course.

This time, I'm finding the more basic items more interesting. The November 1966 column details two homebuilt welders, one a simple carbon-arc torch, the other a spot welder. The spot welder is built around a bank of capacitors and a rat-trap, which it uses to close a knife switch fast enough to avoid welding the switch. I also found the October 1942 notes on how to grind mild steel to an optically flat surface absolutely fascinating.

Of course, all of this requires building stuff, which I was never very big on. During my high school days, I was more interested in programming computers (mostly screen hacks/fractal images, algorithms cribbed from another Scientific American column, "Computer Recreations") than building things out of actual matter. Origami was about as close as I came to building. I have been trying to fix that recently by cultivating a woodworking hobby, with some small success.

So far, I've built a workbench, a simple pine box to hold some of Grace's toys, and most recently, a pair of sawhorses (now I don't have to balance boards on top of kegs to saw them -- most unstable). The workbench and box were definitely beginning carpentry work -- cut, nail, glue, screw; the workbench is particularly hackish looking, except for the pre-fabbed top I had lying around.

The sawhorses, on the other hand, actually qualified as a woodworking project for me, however basic. It wasn't just cutting and fastening at simple angles, there's actually a compound-angled joint for each leg. Cutting the notch for the inset legs is good practice cutting to a line, kerfing, and chopping and paring with a chisel. The best part is all of this happens on a low-cost, low-stress project. A pair of horses takes barely $10 of lumber (a little over half of an 8-foot 2x4 and 3 8-ft 1x3 strips), so if you screw up too bad, it's no big loss. Better still, the sawhorses are a elegant design, and are quite sturdy for their materials. I'm kind of proud of them. They're the first good-looking and useful thing I've made.

Now, I'm wondering what to do next. I have a need for storage crates, shelving, maybe a utility table (I've started on the last one), and other similarly boring stuff, but I also have about 10-20 bf of some nice 3/4 walnut that needs something worthy... Ideas?

¹ If you've ever wondered what the big tank outside the Tate Lab (Physics building) at the U of M is, it's one of these.

With my combination of hobbies (Brewing: established, Woodworking: just starting at the carpentry level), hardware stores are almost a daily thing. I've had streaks of several days where it feels like everyday I'm buying a plumbing fitting, a tool, or some wood. Mostly plumbing fittings. I don't even want to know how much I've spent on those over the last few months, always tweaking my brewing setup.

I usually try to frequent mom-and-pop, local hardware stores not run by evil companies, but alas, I work blocks away from a Home Depot, so I wind up going there for most of my commodity stuff.

I went there today to pick up the $5 worth of stuff I need for my latest project. As I was walking in, in encountered the greeter. I smiled and nodded, said 'hi' like I do to, you know, humans. Before I could even get out 'hi', the greeter launched into "No payments, no interest for 10 months with the new Home Depot^(tm) credit card!" Of course, I said no thanks, and started shopping, but was quite unsettled by this.

I mean, I'm used to people trying to sell me stuff and all, but the way the greeter launched into the sales pitch, robotically almost, with no pretense of providing human contact. It was almost as impersonal as a spam, or a poorly-written 'bot, except we were there, face-to-face. And the face... uninterested, until I came into view, then fake-smile, sales pitch. It reminded me of the scene from the "Stepford Wives" trailer where the robot wife opens its (her?) eyes... It was as if the greeter had checked her soul at the door, and became a human billboard.

I'm sure somebody thought that having human greeters advertising the store credit card was a good idea, but really, a paper billboard would have been more effective, and cost less than minimum wage.