Riverbend Journal

  My last post left you at the above picture of a lot of router bits and a pile of scrap wood. The mornings were a bit brisk this past week forcing me to put on a jacket and wait until late morning to get any gluing done but there is still time to do something productive out in the garage so I started in. Most of the scraps were cut from undesirable sections of the lumber, most containing large defects. Back in the day, these would have been thrown into a burn pile and torched but in modern times, things like epoxy render even these boards salvagable. So I taped up the back sides of the defects, mixed up a batch of deep pour epoxy, tinted it black and poured it into the defects. The epoxy was left over from a project my oldest had done years ago after finding a skeletonized mouse in in the garage. We suspended the skeleton into a silicone cube mold and poured epoxy around it to turn it into an interesting paper weight which she still keeps on her desk. Anyway, I had leftover epoxy ...

  Above is my reconfigured wall with my bandsaw and drill press swapping places with my hand tool cabinet. This allows me to move my drill press out of the way and have easy access to the attic should I need to do so with no contortion necessary. At some point in the future, I would like to replace that folding workbench with perhaps a flip down wooden one and clean up the mess of tools underneath it so I can store my rolling chair there but that won't be this year. With my rolling tools out of the way, you can see my replacement for the peg board which was a simple sheet of plywood. All the tools could be organized in a much denser pattern and all the tool holders which I fastened from scraps of wood are screwed to the plywood so they will no longer fall out. I hung up tools mostly related to home construction or repairs that I rarely use and don't care if they get dirty or exposed to the elements. By moving all my batteries to hanging up near the charger, I freed up a drawer ...

  When I last left off talking about this project, I noticed that it was blocking a good chunk of my attic access above it. Due to the perspective of the camera, it doesn't look like it but the cabinet depth is 28 inches and the attic opening is maybe around 36 inches and it maybe 18 inches above the cabinet. The geometry adds up to a really tight squeeze despite how it looks in this picture. I did test out the strength of the cabinet and it did hold my body weight meaning it could be used as a step in accessing the attic but it just wasn't convenient.  To move it, the ideal solution, would require shuffling all my tools around. Not shown but underneath the cabinet in the above picture is a small table that is a catch all for things. It is quite handy since it is right next to the door entering into our house, but it also means that it is usually cluttered with lots of things since it is so close to the door entering our house. One of those proverbial double edges swords. So t...

I received the funniest phone message I believe I have ever received. The pretext is that the message is from an elderly couple in their late 80's who go to my church and have a mole problem in their yard. I've been using my traps to help rid them of their problem. This is the message left on my phone: (Ed) it's (Bob). The trap that you sat down closer to the fences looks like it's tripped so I thought I'd let you know. Talk to you later. (Some mumbling in the background.) Yeah. (More mumbling) Can I see your boobies? (More mumbling) Do you need help covering them up? (More mumbling) You need help covering your boobies up? (Yeah) I'm leaving the kitchen and in the hallway. I was calling (Ed) to let him know about the sprung trap. (More mumbling by both) (50 seconds of silence before it finally hangs up.) I will probably wait an hour before going over to take care of the mole and reset the trap to make sure all boobies are covered up.

  Above it the wall where my former sheet of peg board has hung for nearly a decade and a half. It served it's purpose well but I never really liked it from the moment I hung it up. The hangers that inserted into the peg holes always had a tendency to fall out whenever I removed a tool requiring me to locate it and find the location where it went all over again. The tools that hung on the peg board were always coated in dust which was fine for some of them and not so much for others. Then there were other tools that I use frequently that ended up in various drawers that required rummaging around to find. So after some inspiration and a desire to try something new, I decided to make a cabinet with hand cut dovetails to house all those hand tools I would like to keep dust free. After removing the peg board, I was left with a clean slate above. I assembled the final doors onto my cabinet and oiled it with a coat of some leftover tung oil which I had leftover from some project a long t...