Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
Hey everybody!
Guess what?! I just (and I mean less than 5 minutes ago) got off the phone with Tommy MacDonald. If you are reading this you should be ashamed if you don’t already know that Tommy is one of the first people to ever successfully turn a freely available podcast into a national television show.
Tommy was very excited to tell me that Woodcraft just signed on as the exclusive underwriter of Tommy’s new show, through WGBH, called ‘Rough Cut Woodworking with Tommy Mac.’ Where, up until now, there were still some loose ends to be tied up that may have hindered the show’s existence, Woodcraft’s signing on as the underwriter has solidified the deal.
I want to add something that perhaps many of you do not know. ‘Rough Cut Woodworking with Tommy Mac’ was signed to a 3 year contract. This just doesn’t happen with unproven shows on PBS. WGBH found something, something we are all familiar with, in Tommy that showed he was definitely the person to make this show work. And with a 3 year extension, I’m sure he’ll make it work for a long time to come.
Shows are expected to begin airing around October 3rd, 2010.
I can’t happier for Tommy, Eli, Al, Rachel, Neil Lamens, David Pruett, Scott Oja, the local 207, and everyone else that has supported Tommy’s efforts and made this a reality.
Good luck Tommy! And Congratulations!!!
Tags: david pruett, Local 207, neil lamens, Rough Cut Woodworking with Tommy Mac, scott oja, Tommy MacDonald, wgbh, woodcraft, Woodworking
Posted in Woodworking | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Hey everybody it’s Rick Waters for the Splintered Board Podcast. This 3rd annual Wood Workers’ Safety Week was organized by the ubiquitous Marc ‘The Wood Whisperer’ Spagnuolo.
In this episode I want to demonstrate something that MicroJig sent me last Fall. It’s their safety tool called the GRR-Ripper. I think the GRR-Ripper is one of the most safety-centric tools on the market today. Now everybody has push sticks or push blocks, but the GRR-Ripper protects your hands and give you a place to guard your fingers just by holding something that grabs your stock and pushes it through your tablesaw, jointer or router table. So in this safety video I’m going to be demonstrating a little bit on the use of the GRR-Ripper, but also, I wanna do a little bit of Where’s Waldo. I want you to be able to identify all of the safety hazards that you see in the different clips of me cutting the stock for a project that I’ll be doing this summer.
So here I’m frozen on a picture of the face of the GRR-Ripper and I’m showing you that because I want you to be able to see that there are 2 channels and 3 legs. What you see is the leg on the left which will grab the stock and provide balance for the tool; a leg in the middle which will stabilize the GRR-Ripper, and also grab the stock; finall the leg on the right serves as a thin wall that is attached to a handheld outside fence that also provides stabilization because it rides on the top of the table saw bed.
So, the reason you have these channels is so that the table saw blade itself can pass between two of the legs. If that’s confusing, it gets easier to understand when you see it in action. So, let’s go ahead and take a look at how this works.
OK, so hopefully you can see from this little demonstration that from my actions, I’m acting like I kind of don’t really know what I’m about to do, but I really want to cut something. So I turn on the table saw, I get the wood in place, but I don’t know where to put my hands… So, indecision is what I’m trying to show is a very unsafe thing to have around spinning or rotating blades. If you don’t have a plan ahead of time on what you are going to do with a tool, Stop, Turn the tool off, Sit down and come up with a clear plan. Come back to the tool and Execute. Never turn on a tool without clearly knowing what you are going to do.
OK, here’s another. You can see that the stock is giving me some trouble moving across the bed of the table saw. There are 2 really good reasons for that: The wood is a little damp – it’s been sitting in the garage after a particularly humid few days; Also, the table saw bed is not lubricated well – it hasn’t been used in months and is dry as a bone with dirt and debris all over it. Clear off your tablesaw top and lubricate it, hopefully with wax. The next segment will show that the table saw top is waxed and the stock glides very well. I just want you to know that the GRR-Rippers have nothing to do with this inability to move the stock, they are definitely doing their jobs as best they can.
Hopefully you noticed that when I first put the stock on the table, that it wasn’t being supported behind me. You’ll see that again at the end of the clip because it won’t be supported on the outfeed side either. Both of these are safety problems for heavy boards (which these are).
OK, here you see me forcing the board, just pouncing on it to get it moving. This is NEVER a good thing, please don’t ever do this. Even if you do have GRR-Rippers, what if the board suddenly gave way and as you pounced on it it flew forward? If you didn’t have very sure fotting, your arm or even your chest could land on the spinning blade. Never pounce on a board to get it to move. If anything, turn the tablesaw off, take off the stock, and lubricate the bed of the saw.
At least with this clip and the entire video, I have a couple of good things going for me: I’m wearing hearing protection and the dust collector is going.
The last criticism I have for this clip is something very basic to the procedures of using a table saw, and that is to push your stock completely free of the blade before turning it off. This is a habit that I’m trying to break, but haven’t completely gotten rid of yet.
One of the great elements of the Micro Jig GRR-Ripper is that you can adjust the position of the handle. They did this (I assume) because your center of balance should mainly be centered over the table saw blade itself. This makes moving the stock much easier too – and here I demonstrate that. All it takes is a few seconds, a short twist of a philips head screw driver and the handle slides very easily. Another twist and the handle is locked down.
See how much of a difference a waxed table saw table can make?
Here I’m visually check to make sure that the table saw blade is going to pass through one of the channels of the GRR-Ripper. The table saw blade should not be digging into the GRR-Ripper. This isn’t a problem if it does – some people do it on purpose. The components of the GRR-Ripper are replaceable, so there’s no problem there, but for my intentions, there’s no reason to damage the tool.
Has anybody pointed out the fact that I’m not wearing safety glasses yet?
Now that was quick, did you miss it? I locked down the fence again just to make sure that it wouldn’t move while I was cutting and pushing against it with the stock. This is very important, I posted something on it last year that my fence’s locking mechanism is loose and will mess up my cuts if I don’t put a lot of weight on it when I lock it down. Those people who say you can’t make a curved cut on a table saw have never used a table saw with a loose fence.
Now, if you’re about to point out that I vary the speed at which I rip, there’s actually a good reason for that. I was trying to determine the best speed to feed Lyptus into the saw to avoid burning. It turns out you have to go pretty slow to burn Lyptus.
Right there, did you catch that? As I was putting down one of the off cuts, I got a couple of big splinters. One of the dangers of using a dull blade, which this is, is that the cuts aren’t the cleanest and you have to be careful with handling all of the stock.
Learning from my mistakes, I’m double checking to make sure that the board was seated fully up against the fence and that the GRR-Ripper’s channel will go fully over the blade.
It was pretty quick, but did you catch that? I pulled up my sleeves once again to make sure that they didn’t get caught in the blade. I just published a safety podcast on that, so if you haven’t seen the dangers of getting your sleeve caught in a table saw blade, check it out.
No what just happened there was that the wax on the table saw bed has worn away. What I acutally need to do is put down a nice spray lubricant for the table, but when I was shooting this I was counting on the wax holding out for the entire video. The jumping of the stock actually serves to proved the point that pouncing on a board to get it to go through the blade is a bad bad idea.
What am I doing here? I’m checking the GRR-Rippers to see if they actually did hit the table saw blade. It turns out that when I was removing one of the GRR-Rippers from a board at the end of a cut, I twisted the GRR-Ripper instead of lifting it off. That resulted in a minor cut taken out of the bottom of the green foam material that grabs the stock. So, remember that whether you use a push block or push stick, or even a GRR-Ripper – which I very highly suggest – keep it fully engaged with your stock and lift it straight off and back as opposed to twisting it.
Here I’m just showing off a little bit. I wanted to show everyone what figured Liptus looks like once it’s been planed, and before it has been card scraped. This stuff is extraordinary! I couldn’t believe the flame figure on these boards. I have 7 or 8 of them and only 2 didn’t have any figure at all. Stay tuned this summer so you can watch me turn these boards into another X-Leg Table.
So that’s it everybody! Please stay safe working wood this year, and I hope to be talking to you all again real soon!
Tags: grr-ripper, Micro Jig, Safety, Tools, wood, Woodworker, Woodworking
Posted in Garage, Podcast, Safety, Tools, Woodworking | 1 Comment »
Friday, March 19th, 2010
I just left the kitchen here at work. For the past several days someone has been leaving one of those free daily newspapers on one of the tables. I don’t read them, generally because they are gossip rags and I could care less who’s sleeping with whom, or who’s overdosing on the latest designer drugs. Nevertheless, I glanced down at the cover as I walked by.
At first glance, I was taken aback to have seen a naked woman on the cover. It shocked me enough that I stopped, backed up and took another look at it. I could have sworn that I had just seen a partially naked woman on that paper. But it wasn’t – not by a long shot.
What I realized was that I was looking at the paper upside down. There was a large man on the cover with his sleeveless arms folded across his chest. Somehow the upside down, naked and muscular forearms, and bony elbows made me think of a nude woman.
Granted, I’m just as prone to thinking of nude women just as much as the next guy, but I don’t normally associate mustachioed, overweight, sunglasses and black t-shirt wearing thug-like bald men with beautiful naked women. In my book/brain, the two are as polar opposites as oil and water.
So my only recourse is to think that my spacial/dimensional perspective on the picture, with only a split second to observe it, was to blame for the misinterpretation of the image.
What does that say for how we approach our craft? About how we regard it? About how we view other woodworkers’ designs before they are built?
I have always had preconceptions about other people’s designs. Especially Arts & Crafts, Shaker-esque, and designs derived from Greene & Greene (as it seems G & G is becoming a very popular sub-culture in Arts & Crafts). These preconceptions haven’t been favorable.
While some of the designs may be appealing to my eye, they generally feel soulless to me. Soulless, because they’ve been over-done in my book. But that’s my perspective. I’ve been known to look at things from a very skewed point of view. Often! So please take my personal preconceptions as just that – my PERSONAL preconceptions.
So this revelation, if you can call it that, calls into question something that I’ve been focusing on lately. ‘What is good design?’ And ‘What does it mean to be a good furniture designer?’
I wonder if my questions are now going to be answered similarly to the well-known and dubious answer to ‘What is Art?’ – ‘Art is what I say it is.’ or ‘Art is what I point at and say This is Art.’
Posted in Design, Furniture, Woodworking | 3 Comments »
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Just last night I started making some changes to my life. No, I didn’t buy a plane ticket to Edge-of-the-rain-forest South America so I could chain myself to a tree in order to stop deforestation. Though I think deforestation is an unnecessary and unfortunate byproduct of uninformed and newly capitalistic societies, I think my energies are well focused elsewhere.
No, the changes I began to make last night were much more simple. For the last 5 months I’ve been growing my hair out for the cold weather. Last night, I had my wife shave it all off (again) for a couple of reasons – it’s getting warmer, and I’ll be biking to the train station for the Spring, Summer, and Fall, so I don’t want my hair to get messed up by a helmet.
I had just returned from the local sports-focused big box store with a shopping bag full of bicycle-related goodies. The change that I made this morning was actually getting on the bike and riding to the train station. I know some people might not see that as much of a difference from my first change (the haircut) but actually DOING instead of planning to do is a major feat.
What I’ve come to realize this morning is that our woodworking endeavors sometimes mirror the desirable and undesirable traits that we exhibit in our lives. Many of us plan to do great things in our shops. We talk to our friends and neighbors, our spouses and our contacts online about the next big project, or the new design we come up with – or even, that new jig that we are going to build that will solve all of our problems in the shop.
But, what are we really doing. Paying lip service to our passion. The jig never gets built. The new design remains either on paper or is fading from your memory. That big project becomes a small spice rack or new shelf for the coat closet.
In contrast look at what those energetic young people are doing outside right now. Go ahead, take a look. Well, I’m assuming that you’ll read this during daylight hours, while people are still up and about. Anyway, what I’m talking about is look at all of those people who enjoy jogging, walking, biking, swimming, orienteering, whatever… They are out there doing it every day. Actually doing it.
It’s Spring in the Northern Hemisphere right now. It won’t be for long. Soon it’ll be Summer. Then Leaves will start to fall and then it’ll be bone chillingly cold again. When it gets that cold, that’s it for me. I spend at least 3 months making excuses for why I’m not in the shop. But right now, I’m getting back in the saddle.
I spent an hour in the shop two nights ago just milling up the lumber for my next iteration of the X-Leg Table. This was supposed to be my Winter project, but it has become my Spring project instead. What got me out to the shop at 8pm on a Tuesday night? Me thinking ‘I can sit on my butt watching TV, or I can DO something. DOING is better than doing nothing.’ So I got out to the shop and jointed and planed 6 boards of Lyptus.
I’d love to show you this Lyptus now, because it is some amazing wood. But, that’ll have to wait for a podcast.
Tags: Balding, Exercising, Motivation, woodwork, Woodworking
Posted in Hobbies, Woodworking | 3 Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Tommy MacDonald and Laurie Donnelly announce that WGBH has signed a deal with Tommy for a new woodworking television show!
Stay tuned for the details.
Tags: laurie donnelly, Rick Waters, Tommy MacDonald, wgbh, wood, Woodworking
Posted in Furniture, Podcast, Woodworking | No Comments »