Watcha doing?

[RabbiKnife]

I predict candlesticks as Tango’s 2026 Christmas gifts to others…

[tango]

I predict candlesticks as Tango’s 2026 Christmas gifts to others…

Funny you should say that, had I got the lathe and a bit of practise in before Christmas I was planning on turning Christmas tree ornaments.

My wife and I were discussing Christmas with our new daughter, figuring what kind of gifts would be meaningful, and she suggested making some kind of Christmas ornaments each year for the children would be interesting. The youngest are too young to appreciate them just now but she figured if every year they had a new ornament, signed and dated, from Pappy (who may later become Pap) it would be something special for them.

Because getting a lathe sorted before Christmas didn't work out the youngest got trees, the teenager got the K box and she got the P box. Maybe next year I'll have enough practise on the lathe to turn something to hang on the tree. It seems odd using a lathe five feet long to turn something less than five inches long, but there you go. As one woodworker told me, you can turn small things on a big lathe but you can't turn big things on a small lathe.

[tango]

Yesterday's fun was sanding. Again. So far I've been over the floor with coarse sanding belts and given it a single pass over with a slightly finer grit. Today's job is to get the shop vac and separator out and use 80 grit, then 120 grit.

Yesterday I spent enough time on my knees that I got a blister. Ordinarily in a Christian message board that would sound very spiritual, but in this context I had a belt sander in my hand rather than a Bible.

I also figured that if I can get my lathe working I can make corner pieces to match the new baseboards I'm going to need in these rooms. In the past I cut a kinda sorta tapered thing on my table saw, but now I have a lathe maybe I can take a square post, turn a pretty finial on the top, and cut it into four so it will fit into the corners rather than having to try and match everything with the baseboards. Maybe I have my first lathe project, once I've figured out where I'm going to put a huge lathe in my anything-but-huge woodshop.

[tango]

This morning I sanded the floor with an 80 grit belt and then 120 grit. I used the collection bag on the sander rather than the shop vac, simply because it makes it easier to move around without extra stuff in the room, and I wanted to be able to look over the floor as I sanded it to avoid missing sections.

I don't know how long the first pass took but the second one was slightly shy of an hour. I wanted to go for a run this afternoon but my legs strongly urged me to reconsider, so I went for a walk instead. It's surprisingly demanding on the legs, kneeling and running the sander. I hadn't appreciated just how much work my legs were doing until I came to the conclusion that running would be a really bad idea.

I still have a large lathe sitting awkwardly across the middle of my woodshop, and a large stand for the lathe sitting in my garage because I have yet to figure out what I want to do with it all (beyond the obvious "use it"). I have some ideas, I just haven't yet figured out if they are workable or not. I can hope....

[IMINXTC]

And another January 6 passes. Awful memory!


Okay. Out.

[RabbiKnife]

Yes

The day the speaker of the house and the FBI conspired and entrapped hundreds of US citizens after a series of election frauds across the U.S. and then arrested and hunted down thousands without due process

A truly tragic day

[tango]

Harbor Freight have their 36 grit belts on clearance. I suspect that means they are discontinuing the product, so I'll probably get out to buy a few more to have them on hand. It's hard to know how many I'll need, I thought I'd go through several doing my latest room's floor but ended up using less than two. I say less than two, in the sense i used one until it was spent and then started on another but finished while it still had enough life to keep it. The previous room, which was smaller, went through three belts. It seems to be down to whether the floor is painted or lacquered - the paint chips off easily while the lacquer melts and gums up the belt. I don't know what I'll find in the rest of the space I want to deal with.

I'm thinking today I'll run over the floor one last time with an orbital sander and 220 grit paper, fix a couple of holes in the floor where radiator pipes once went (the radiator needs to move, since I restudded the wall) then clean up the floor and the room ready to lacquer it, and then maybe think about some work in the room below it. There's a bit of repair work I need to do to the walls. Now I have my car dolllies I can hopefully move the radiator in that room fairly easily.

[Cloudwalker]

Yesterday I went to see the movie David.  I highly recommend it.  Naturally, due to the medium, they had to abreveate the events, and skip over some others. But they did a very good job and stayed very true to 1st and 2nd Samuel.  They even referenced 1st and 2nd Samuel in the opening credits.  My only real complaint is that they didn't use more of Davids poetry in the music.

[tango]

Massively unproductive day today. I think all the sanding from the previous days has left me more tired than I thought. I got the holes plugged and got a run in but didn't get much else done today.

Never mind, tomorrow is a new day.

[RabbiKnife]

Massively unproductive day today. I think all the sanding from the previous days has left me more tired than I thought. I got the holes plugged and got a run in but didn't get much else done today.

Never mind, tomorrow is a new day.

Never put off today what you can put off putting off tomorrow.

[tango]

Massively unproductive day today. I think all the sanding from the previous days has left me more tired than I thought. I got the holes plugged and got a run in but didn't get much else done today.

Never mind, tomorrow is a new day.

Never put off today what you can put off putting off tomorrow.

"I'll procrastinate tomorrow" - Garfield

An old friend of mine, who was a terrible procrastinator, often used to say that if a job is worth doing it will still be worth doing tomorrow.

[tango]

Today's alternative to running a final sanding pass over my floor was to try and organise some stuff in my basement. I have a large lathe diagonally across the floor that's a bit of a nuisance, and I really want to set it up and see if it works. But I can't do that until I can clear a space for the stand and get the stand hauled down there, so I've been moving stuff around and getting rid of some wood scraps that need to be burned. Part of the process is rationalising what wood is worth keeping, part of it is taking the pieces that aren't and cutting them into small pieces so I can dump a whole bagful into my burn barrel and get rid of the whole lot at once.

I've cleared some space, soon I can move a table out of the way and maybe set up the stand where the table once was. Then I can fire it up and try turning my first piece with it.

[tango]

An unexpected detour into building stuff in my woodshop. Yesterday I was moving stuff around and ended up with a load of dust hanging in the air. Today I ran my basement vacuum to clear some sawdust out of my bandsaw and rapidly ended up with sawdust hanging in the air.

The first order of business was to empty my separator. That's not a trivial job, since it contained something like 30 gallons of sawdust. Next up is to build a wheeled platform for it, and a platform above the lid to mount a shop vac. That will let me move it around to where it's needed, rather than having to run hoses around the place and hope I can reach what I need.

I'm debating whether I should get another shop vac. The one I have in the basement doesn't have bags that fit it, it sounds like a thousand angry banshees, and blows dust right through the motor and out into the air when anything gets past the separator. I already have two shop vacs, although one of them sounds like it might not be with me much longer. But when I do my renovation work it's handy to have a vac available that's not tied to a specific location in the basement. Maybe I'll just use one of my existing shop vacs for it, and replace the old one when it finally gives up the ghost.

In unrelated news I unwound the cable for my new lathe and fired it up. It turns, and it doesn't make any unexpected noises. Now I just need to find a way to work it somewhere other than awkwardly propped across the middle of my floor.

[RabbiKnife]

In unrelated news I unwound the cable for my new lathe and fired it up. It turns, and it doesn't make any unexpected noises. Now I just need to find a way to work it somewhere other than awkwardly propped across the middle of my floor.

It would probably fit nicely on the kitchen table

Close to snacks is a bonus!

[tango]

In unrelated news I unwound the cable for my new lathe and fired it up. It turns, and it doesn't make any unexpected noises. Now I just need to find a way to work it somewhere other than awkwardly propped across the middle of my floor.

It would probably fit nicely on the kitchen table

Close to snacks is a bonus!

There are two problems with this theory....

1. It won't actually fit on the kitchen table, it would protrude quite a long way off the end of the table, and (more importantly)

2. I'd really like to still be married this time next week


My plan to mount a shop vac on top of my separator is thwarted by a lack of headroom in the area I had hoped to store it. I may press on anyway and accept I need to keep it in another part of the room (i.e. not under the air handler for the heat pump), or I may decide to keep the vac and the separator separate. I really want to level the floor but I'm not sure how best to do it, levelling compound seems like a handy option but it's a major drag having to remove every single thing from the room and not use it for however long it takes that stuff to dry. But it would mean I could wheel tools around easily, which in turn would mean I could simply mount everything on a custom wheeled base and tuck everything out of the way when not in use.