Sticky situations

As part of the original design for my big storage cabinet, I envisioned a big door with a drafting board mounted to it. The door has fallen by the wayside, for now, but I did get the woodwork part of the drafting board done today.

It's 6 feet long, and four feet wide, and built basically like a hollow core door...

Well, maybe a little better than that. This is a picture of a hollow core door that was taken apart by a guy I knew in my old building. He had sawn it apart to make a train table for his son, and this is the piece that got cut off. It's just corrugated cardboard, hot glued into place, in a hurry. Probably by some poor 8 year old in China. God Bless Home Depot. It's a random picture I've been waiting months to have an excuse to show.

Anyway, So, I built the board today, it's ribbed inside with plywood, with the gaps filled in with polystrene foam board. (otherwise known as styrofoam, you can buy 4x8 sheets of it to use as insulation, believe it or not. Again, God bless Home Despot.)

So, the last step that remained was for me to glue down the self-healing vinyl board cover that I'd purchased form Charrette for the purpose. To do this, I used contact cement, which is vaguely like rubber cement on steroids, and at the same time, not really.

The essence of the process is, you coat the mating faces of the two items to be joined. Wait 20 minutes or so, until it's dried to the point of being tacky, and then touch the two things together. What I wasn't really thinking about was that I'd just turned my 4 foot by 6 foot piece of vinyl into a 4 foot by 6 foot piece of tape with the adhesive strength of duct tape. Ever have a piece of duct tape fold into itself while you were trying to tape something? Well, imagine that, but worse.

About 30 minutes later I managed to untangle the mess that I got after the vinyl folded into itself a few times, and half of the adhesive came off and stuck to the board, leaving a rougher surface than before. 10 mintues later, knee deep in the process of removing the remaining contact cement from the vinyl, so I could give this all a second shot, I called my girlfriend to let her know I'd be another half hour or so. (Oddly enough, this was the most accurate estimate I've given her to date on how much longer I'd be stuck at work. )

The contact cement stuck, but it was willing to come off, much like rubber cement... and rolling it around resulted in small balls that grew into a larger ball that I could roll around to pick up more. So, the sheet of vinyl is clean, but I'm now confronted with the realization that I may have to fabricate something interesting to make this process more predictable for that second go around. There won't be a third go around... I was exhausted after my bout of duct tape wrestling tonight, and I'm not gonna do it again. So the 'something interesting' better be good. Because I want this drafting board to be Very Good.

First things first, though. I need to get the gunk off of the board, so I have a clean, fresh surface to glue down to...

Baby's first steps...

So, the baby falcons are learning to fly. First steps, leaping tall buildings...

And massively overshooting old chimneys, only to land on slanted tiles.

I know that Peregrines are supposed to be this fearsome predator, fastest animal, etc, etc. But watching the kids learn to fly is a really poignant reminder that even the fastest, fiercest hunters are awkward when they're first starting out.

On a separate note, the word is out, apparently... we regularly have a small gaggle of bird watchers in the parking lot. But I still feel better than they are. You know, because I'm 6 stories up, and I get to watch these critters all year long.

A good day

First thing this morning, I got my clamp racks installed. I wasnt' able to get all of the clamps under the bench, but I moved enough of them that the ones remaining on the old table don't bother me as much... a few days ago they were wrapped all the way around 3 of the 4 sides of the table. Now most of them are at either end of my workbench, with some of the larger ones at the ends of the table. That's good enough for me.

For another hour or two I put away small things, and swept, and cleaned. And just as I was running out of things to do, Don yelled over to me that we should work on the doors that we built a month and more ago to separate the machine room from the bench room. Really, we'd planned to have the doors from the beginning, but here, 9 months later, we still hadn't gotten them into place. They've been leaning against the door jambs since we made them, and that's been pretty much it. So, Don had the right idea.

Being slow on the uptake, I resisted at first, since I knew that it meant taking them apart to work on the hinges, but once that was done, we proceeded to trim them down and mount them.. .and the difference was amazing. The space looks done, in a way that it hadn't before. We've been most of the way for a long time... but this felt really good. It looks like it was supposed to, way back when.

Last but not least, there is good news... there are new falcons. I don't know how old they are, but when I looked over at the building where they normally perch, I counted three. I don't know if it's two new ones and the male, or three new ones... but since we only had two before, and the female wasn't there, we have at least two new peregrine falcons in the world. I looked through my binoculars for a minute or two, and saw one of them walking around with his wings in the air, looking intently at something through a cloud of what must have been flies over a not so recent meal... so I'm guessing he was hungry, but not that hungry. Or maybe he's just the goofy one of the clutch, I don't know.

I wound down the afternoon by looking through a book on Nakashima furniture with Don, while we had a beer and tried to come up with a few ideas for new projects.

All in all, a good day... and my work space is officially cleaned out and organized, and ready to get back to work.

New clamp holders

One of the things I planned to get rid of in this reorganization is a small table that my grandfather made way back when.

Well, let me rephrase... I don't want to get rid of it, I just don't want to use it to hold a pile of crap anymore. Until this past weekend it was used to hold the big parts bin, a tool chest for sockets and wrenches, all of my smaller clamps, and carrying cases for hand held power tools.

Well, the cases are in the shelves of the cabinet now, the parts bin is in the bottom section, and while the tool chest is still looking for a home, the clamps are the last thing to get moved.

Since I took my big wooden tool chest out of the bench, it's become a bit lighter, which isn't really something that's desirable in a workbench, so yesterday I dovetailed a couple of cross-pieces into the frame underneath, and today I'll attach my small clamp racks to those. It'll put the clamps closer to where I need them, so I won't have to walk around things to get to the cart/table that's been holding them. And, it'll add weight to the bench, which is a good thing, too.

More reorganization

So, now that the big cabinet is together and in place, and the shelves are up, I've been going through the process of sorting through things and deciding where they're going to go. And I decided that part of that process would involve going through the metal parts bin that used to belong to my maternal grandfather.

The parts bin is basically a big metal chest of 24 small drawers, to organize small parts. And like too many parts bins that I've seen that belonged to grandfathers, or anyone who had a shop for a long time, there was almost no way to know what was in it. At first, it wasn't really very approachable, since none of the drawers were labeled, and almost every one of them contained a mix of bizarre things, from screw and nails to wheel bearings for a truck, a pair of small, hand carved bronze roosters, screen door parts, or electrical supplies. It was an adventure every time.

After a while, it became something like my own personal oracle. Many traditional oracles, like tarot cards, or the I Ching, involve some activity on the part of the person seeking answers, like shuffling a deck of cards, or flipping a series of coins. It always seems to involve an element of chance, tempered by the belief that somehow, some metaphysical part of...whatever... is guiding hte actions of that person, and helping them to shuffle or flip correctly, to give the proper result. The result is then translated into a given answer. Sometimes the answer makes sense, and sometimes not, but the process of trying to understand it will usually help the seeker understand more about their thoughts, hopes, and feelings. And after some thought and introspection, the seeker is supposedly better able to handle whatever it is that they were concerned about.

Grand-dad's box of old parts was like that once in a while. I'd pull open a drawer, filled with mixed parts, in the hopes of finding something to help me fix whatever I was working on. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, and sometimes I had to scratch my head for a while to figure out how to make something work with whatever was in there. And sometimes the brass roosters would pop up. I'm sure he knew what was in there, more or less, where it came from, and which drawer held what, but I had no freakin' clue. And finding usable parts in the bin has been like that for just over a year now.

Well, no more. I finally got around to pulling out all the drawers, sorting through the stuff that's in there, and organizing it into something that made sense. And after that, I labeled all the drawers. Nails, screws, random fasteners, and so forth. It's not quite as fanciful as the system that I had before, and it's probably not as interesting to write about. But it certainly makes it easier to find what I was looking for.

Measure once...

There's an old saying, "measure twice, cut once." (Or, measure three times, depending...)

But as I was taking measurements for the built in job (which is now fully completed... finally!) I used a sliding bar gauge. Basically, it's a kit that I bought with two collars to hold two wooden bars next to each other, and they slide past each other. Then draw a pen line where one bar overlaps the other. It's a quick way of taking a physical measurement without numbers, and it's surprisingly accurate, and incredibly simple: Loosen the thumb bolt that clamps the bars together, and slide them past each other until the alignment marks line up. It can be a little too simple, sometimes, as there aren't any numbers involved, and once in a while, shop work does require math. But the measure twice rule makes sense because sometimes people read the numbers wrong, for whatever reason. No numbers to screw up with this method... until you measure it at the shop, anyway.

But, the point of the post, I've read various methods for taking notes on site. But in this case I simply made a couple of dedicated bars to go with the gauge setup, and I have to say, I'm impressed at how well it worked out, and how much I was able to scribble on it in the way of notes as I went along... (you'll need to click on the picture to see that I actually wrote on the thing) so it ended up as sort of a combination measuring device/ notebook.

It still amazes me sometimes, how well the simple methods work.

Re-arranging...

So, one of the things I noticed recently was that I had filled all the spaces around my bench and on the shelves with stuff I rarely used... so my work space was filled with dead weight, rather than usable space or usable objects. So, I've been working to address that, starting with building a huge cabinet to hold all the drawer boxes and other things that are basically storage for once in a while things. Then I pulled the wall shelves down and put up newer, bigger ones. I did notice tonight that my first instinct was to fill them right back up again, but it's mostly the top shelf, which is out of the normal "active" work area, so I guess that's ok. I'm still moving things around, and working on making it a usable space, but it's moving right along.





























The real progress isn't visible yet, because there's still a lot of junk in the picture. Once everything is actually cleaned up, there should be more available space to store parts and bits of things, so they won't be directly in the way when I'm working.

I'm also debating the virtues of getting rid of the table that's against the wall, since it's primary role in life is to act as a crap catcher, in the hopes that my workbench doesn't get hopelessly overrun with crap. That's usually a futile mission anyway. But one of the things I like about that table is that it started life in the mobile robotics lab at MIT, where genius kids did amazing things... and using it now to hold piles of junk just seems like a misuse of something with such a cool history. Or, maybe it's just a tool, and I'm over-romanticizing its significance in the grand scheme of things. I'd like to put it to better use. But I can't think of a really good use for it just yet... other than to use it as a bench, but I already have two or three of those kicking around.

The real problem may simply be that I have an affinity for collecting things that are cool, or at least cool in my own mind, to work with and it's reached the point where I simply have too much stuff for one guy to be able to use productively. So, either the table will continue life as a crap catcher, or I'll move it into the finishing room... or do something else with it.