Week Two: Friday & Saturday

In which I answer the question "Will he finish by the deadline?"

Friday

I left off Thursday afternoon with the dovetails cut on the 1:7 book rack, and a severely runny nose.

The runny nose yeilded to a Claritin.

Friday morning I started early to cut four mortises, two on each side of the book rack.  The first pair took me well over two hours, but, once I had the first pair finished, the other pair went fairly quickly.  I had all four mortises finished not long after lunch.

Drilling for mortises

Chopping

Checking alignment

First pair finished

Then I started cutting the matching tenons. This was not a difficut, but somewhat tedious.  Each of the four tenons had to be cut to fit into a matching mortise.  My mortises were fairly uniform, at least by measurement, so it should follow that the tenons would also be fairly uniform.  Cutting them to rough size was the easy part.  Then came the job of carefully trimming off slivers of wood on the order of 1/32 or even 1/64 of an inch. I did the first one totally with chisels.  Then I got smart and got out my shoulder plane.  That simplified the job somewhat because I could set the plane to remove a minute sliver of wood from a tenon cheek, and be fairly well assured that it would be consistant from one end of the tenon to the other.  The method was to trim the long dimension of the tenon cheek so that the ends could be angle fitted into their respective mortises.  Then the short dimension ends of the tenon were cut to fit the whole thing into the mortise.  This process worked pretty well, and I finished about 7 pm.

First tenon shoulders cut

Cutting cheeks of tenon

One tenon cheek cut.  7 to go.

First tenon fits!

Two down, two to go

All four tenons fitted and the whole assembly put together

Then, I put the whole thing together, and had my first look at the 1:7 book rack, without the 1:7 pieces cut away.  It was a pretty tight fit all around, but it did go together without any serious hammer "wacking."

However, the whole assembly "racked" slightly so that it would not sit flat on the table.  One side had its rear end raised about 1/16 inch.

By this time, I was too tired to try to figure out what was causing the problem, so I put everything away and went home, not having achieved glue-up by the end of the class.

Only one student, Pam, actually had her project glued up when the instructors left.  The rest of us will have to wait until Monday morning.

Saturday

This morning I slept in until 8:15.  My landlady had left the house an hour or so earlier.  She and her son are on their way to meet her daughter in Australia.  I have the house to myself for a day or so before her friend arrives to house sit.

Locked out

So, after breakfast, I spent some time tidying up, washing dishes, and collecting accumulated trash.  I bagged up the trash and went downstairs to dump the trash into the recycling bins in the garage.  Then back upstairs to... a locked door.  I had forgotten that the door is self-locking, and I didn't have my keys with me.  I spent several minutes wracking my brains trying to figure out what to do next.  I am extremely fortunate for two reasons.  Firstly, there is a back door onto a porch from the apartment, and, secondly, I hadn't latched the porch door!

Kicking myself for my stupidity, I wrote myself a note to check for keys on the way out and posted it on the inside of the door.

I buy a "Cheap" HP printer

Then I left for errands, including taking my broken camera to the UPS store to send it off to be repaired.  Afterwards, I went to the Staples in the same shopping center.  Going through the printer aisles, I noticed that they had a small HP printer on sale for only $30.  At that price, it would almost be a throw-away.  So I bought it. The checkout person pointed out that it would be a good idea to purchase ink cartridges since the ones that come with the printer don't last very long. Of course, the cartridges were $51.

This was not the first time I've encountered a printer that actually cost less than the ink. I have a color laser printer at home for which replacing the toner cartridges costs twice the original price of the printer. HP is also the culpret on that one.

After I got home from grocery shopping, I ate lunch, and afterwards began setting up the new printer.  Nowhere on the box or in the instructions does it mention that you need an A-B USB cable to connect it to your computer. It's been a while since I bought a printer, so that didn't occur to me until I got the printer home and attempted to hook it up.

So, I drove back to the same shopping center to the Radio Shack (yes they have one of them up here) to buy a cable that I've probably got a dozen of at home. A three-foot cable cost me $7.57. But a longer cable would have cost almost as much as the printer.   I could have ordered a cable from Amazon.com and paid far less, but wanting instant gratification, I bought the short cable.  Bottom line: not including gas and tax, I now have almost $90 invested in this "cheap printer."  And I refuse to look it up on Amazon!  It works, I can use it, and won't take up a lot of room in the truck on the way home.

Back at work

I went from the Radio Shack directly to the school to pick up where I left off last night.  After some messing about with the joints on the book rack, I was able to reduce the amount of racking to an acceptable amount.

Then, I started preparing the whole thing for a potential glue-up Monday morning. It quickly became obvious that manipulating the book rack, glue cauls, and clamps, requires more hands than I have.  I left it as you see.

Bevel gauge set at 1:7 ratio

The assembly tipped at 1:7 

The first book in the rack!

The template that will be used to trim the sides

I also cut a template in preparation for cutting away the angled sections of the sides.  And, I played with the book rack to convince myself that an 8 degree angle ** wouild be sufficient to hold books and/or CDs/DVDs.  It looks pretty good to me.

** A 1:7 ratio works out to approximately 8.1 degrees (arctan(1/7) = approx 8.1 degrees)