Jamie

Disappointing news on the sander. They originally told me of an arrival date to grizzly on may 15th. Called them today to check and see the progress, shipment never came in and as far as the lady could tell they haven’t even left the factory. New date is July 30. The good thing is they shipped the $350 worth of sandpaper out to me right away.

The cabinet box sides, tops and bottoms will be 3/4” ply. The backs and drawer bottoms will be 1/2” ply.

For me it’s the fine dust that sticks to the walls and settles on any flat surface. When you kick that up it can make quite the mess.

Why have I never done that? I might be heading to the shop yet tonight.

The leaf blower is the best shop cleaning tool made! I like using that trick as well, usually takes a few different sessions with it to get all the dust out as it stirs so much fine dust up that settles out.

Got a few hours of shop time in today. Spent some of the day moving the boat out of the shop and putting it in my wife’s garage. Which she didn’t complain to much about and actually gave me a hand cleaning her garage up some. Her garage typically stores her vehicle, kids bikes/toys, golf cart and a fridge. I guess I also have a wall mounted lumber rack in there as well. Also in there at this time there is a small chicken coop in there. That will be moving outside once the chickens grow a bit. Anyways on to the project....I am waiting for a few orders to come in on supplies. Mostly waiting on some smaller headed pocket screws to put the face frames together. Found when using the washer head screws that they are a little to big when going through a sander that you will sand some of the washer off. Sparks in a sander probably isn’t the best idea and it wears the paper out pretty quick. Decided to work on getting the door panels glued up. The stack of cherry I have to pick from. The board on the right was 13” and really flat. The board on the left with the sap wood is the worst board in the stack. Did take a couple minutes and put all the door panels and drawer fronts into a spread sheet. Makes for easy sorting by length and width. Couldn’t get my printer to work so took the computer out to the shop with me. With these boards all having one straight edge I started with the boards narrower than 6” and rough cut them to 1” longer than the finished size of the panel. The reason I go 1” longer is that when cutting to size it makes it easy to know your final length if for some reason your measurements get removed from the piece. I made a quick little measurement scale on the edge of my bench. Did tack a piece to the edge to have a stop block. Doing it this way makes it quick to see if you have the width you need for your panels. After getting to a wider width than needed the boards then go across the tablesaw to clean up the rough side. Then select the best grain orientation and if the joints aren’t tight a quick pass over the jointer. I would say about 30% of the joints needed to be jointed. Glue up is pretty straight forward, apply the glue with a bottle and spread with a rubber titebond brush. This is a painfully slow process for me, the cabinet shop I worked at had a foot operated glue spreader that you would push your foot down on and it would lift an aluminum grid up that you would set the edge of the boards on. Would take 3-4 boards at a time and made it a quick process. Especially with the rotating clamp rack and panel flatener. This project has really shown my shortage of clamps. I currently only have 10 pipe clamps, when you use 3 clamps per panel it takes some time to get these glued up. I do have 8 more clamps ordered and should be here in a day or two. After the panels come out of the clamps I like to get the glue scraped off. I use just an old paint scraper. Like to get it before the drips are completely dried. Seem to come off a lot easier if they are a little tacky yet. Basically the outside of the drip is hard and the inside is soft yet.

That’s good to know. I’ve seen many videos on them and some clamp and others don’t. I think I’d be money ahead using my homemade one. Which is kinda a “L” shape. I only have to clamp the long end as the short side of the L provides enough friction to keep it in place. Not knocking track saws but don’t seem worth the $ to me at this point. Maybe just to many other tools on the wish list.

You shop being a disaster is still cleaner than mine after I clean it! Great progress! Love the look!

Question for you guys on the track saws........do you have to clamp them in place or can you line it up and let it rip?

Well am planning on using the tablesaw to do the bulk of it. Thinking I might build a cabinet extension table for the left side of the blade to help support some of the cross cuts. Have been thinking about this quite a bit actually. Ideas are get one of the neighbors to help, build the extension table, or do some cross cutting with the circular saw and homemade track. If I go the circular saw route I would count them a tad long and finish cut to length on the tablesaw for the consistency factor. Really wish I had the room and the pocket book for a nice sliding table saw.

Nope I didn’t get to pick. Out of the whole stack I didn’t find much that I was disappointed with. I shouldn’t say disappointed....I didn’t find a single board that I wouldn’t use 90% of. Has really been a nice stack. Less than a handful of knots and very few pitch pockets. All in all very happy with it. I like the idea of buying the best lumber I can get. Just makes much less waste.

That thing is looking great!

I’d have to put you to work busting up 24 sheets of plywood!

Did find a little time to go get the cherry for the cabinets. Tried a new source about an hour from home. Called them up to just check a price and to see what they offered. I did check around on cherry prices and the had quite a bit of range. Priced select and better 4/4 planed to 15/16” and straight line ripped. Highest price was 5 min away at $5.33, $4.75 was an hour north of me and $3.75 was an hour south. I decided to go south and give the new company a try. They are a pretty big lumber dealer, send about half their lumber overseas. The salesman told me that they have moved 9 million bf in the past 10 months. It took them a couple days to process my order of 275-300 bf. When I got there a couple guys jumped on a couple fork lifts and loaded it up. One forklift picked up the bundle and another had a pusher type attachment that slid it right in. Not sure if I mentioned that the black truck I had has now turned red. Picked it up a couple months back. 19 ram bighorn with the 5.7. Few more options than the old truck which I’m really enjoying. I did have to stack all the boards by hand when I got home. Leaned them up against the wall to be able to sort through them. Did get the door stile and rail material along with the face frame material ripped up tonight. I rip all the parts 1/8” over finish width. The door parts will all get 1/16” removed when cutting the grove and another 1/16” will come off with the door edge cutter. This can make it a little confusing when cutting door parts, have to add 1/8” length to make it all come out to size. The face frame parts being 1/8” over sized will allow me to remove around 1/16 of each edge to remove saw blade marks. Will do the bulk of the removal with the planer. Will leave about 15 thousands to take off with the drum sander. The critical dimension in building face frame cabinets is the stile width. Mine are all 1 1/2” wide except when they are against a wall, then they are 2” to allow for scribing. If your width is off on these measurements it can make your whole run of cabinets shrink or grow a bit. It’s not really critical on this kitchen but in a case when going wall to wall it can really make it tough to put them in. Also wanted to point out that there has been very little waste so far. The widths of these parts let’s you utilize almost all the available width. When ripping I start with the widest parts and work my way down. If I’m ripping off a piece from a wider board and get down to around 3” remaining that board will go back on the pile to be used for panel glue ups. I didn’t get a picture of the waste pile from all the ripping but the off cuts are really just slivers. One thing as well, none of these parts have hit the jointer. For the face frames if there is a bow the plywood will take it out. Don’t get me wrong the pieces are fairly straight. I won’t use a piece that is really twisted up for a long piece. Cut the bowed or twisted pieces down shorter to use them. Did get the parts run through the planer on one side to finish up for the night. One thing I should also mention is this cherry was pretty sap wood free. The piece you see going through the planer will be a door part, sap doesn’t go through to the front so will be the back side and the sap side will be the grove side of the door. With the stain going on these I can use up boards like that.

Sorry guys have been pretty busy lately, working 10-14 hours a day 6 days a weeks, along with lining materials up for the kitchen project. I did come home to a nice surprise one night laying on my pillow was a thank you card from my daughter for the desk. Not gonna lie it hit me right in the heart. Made me pretty proud to be her dad.

Neat! I get some of my Fert from Koch

Nicely done! Not showing my wife this one!

Plans are 95% completed! Hopefully they are correct! Going to get the cherry ordered soon.

Hell with them that tight together you had to save a ton on electrical. Only need one plug in!

Wow that looks awesome! I see no flaws whatsoever. Great job!

You will thank her when you slam your head into it! 🤣

That’s some expensive wood shavings!

Was the wenge 4/4? Looks awesome!

I can go with that!

Thanks! I use my little delta all the time, probably abuse it more than use it. Just way underpowered for my needs. Like the idea of having the double head. Talking with grizzly today they are expecting arrival of these drum sanders May 17th, so should have it hopefully by the end of the month. Plan is to have the electrical in place by then. Not much to do on that end, other than to switch out the current box from a 20amp 220 to accept a 30amp plug. Happy when I built the shop that I put in plenty of 220v circuits.