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Day 3 of Kitchen Tower Construction

The day started as the last one, fixing the broken tools.

We opened up the oscillating spindle sander and took apart the drive assembly. This was a bit of a pain. Everything is expectedly tight in there, so it was hard to get everything together in the right way. Looking up videos, etc online was also difficult because we were replacing a “belt”. But there is also a “belt” sander made by Ryobi. So the google search results kept getting confused about what we were looking for.

But we got it together, fired it up and it worked! I had a moment of a panic when it started making a squeaking/chirping noise. But it turns out, the sander just really likes to be perfectly level. We re-installed a base on it and we were back in business.

At that point, we could get back to work on the tower. I started by smoothing out the curves on the curved pieces. No problems there. After that, my father showed a different, half-way approach on the table router. You can put a peg in the table, and anchor off the peg to keep the piece stable as you run it down the router. This was… a bit of a pain actually. It works against the router bit, but it’s pretty rough when you’re moving with the bit. You have to flip the piece around and run it the wrong way to get the entire length while it’s still on the peg. But in the end, it’s good enough for this project. Nothing a little sanding won’t fix.

From this point, we started laying things out for the joinery, marking all the pieces, and then using a jig to drill the holes for the dowels in the permanently attached sides. That’s a lot of holes, but the jig really made it easy.

Unfortunately, the 3/8ths dowels that we had were quite old, and had swelled a bit in the Houston humidity over the last, say, 20 years. We headed over to Rocklers to get some new ones after lunch. It was a long trip, which ate up a lot of the day. The employees were very helpful there, but they apparently handed us the wrong bag of dowels. (It may have been hung on the wrong peg.) So we discovered after the long trip that we had 7/16ths dowels that were definitely too big. Sigh.

That was the end of another day. At least we didn’t break any tools.

I’m headed to a different Rocklers in town to swap out the dowels (and also get some smaller screws for the knock down joins) on Tuesday. Then maybe strike back up, assembling the tower on Wednesday?

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Making It Official

Got the Federal EIN for Archi & Avo, so now I can officially get out and open up a bank account. Sadly much of my time this week was spend demoing a garage for repainting, so I haven’t gotten a chance to get out to the bank. Hopefully, I can get that done early next week. I’ll need to set up the bank account, quickbooks, and quickbooks payroll as I am able. Then I’ll get the 401k setup. Whew.

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Sheetrock

We’re trying to make a push to get our old home sold. I’ve had my wife’s uncle come out and help paint the interior of the house and help me spruce up the garage space. That’s turned out to be quite a pain.

Monday was all demo. Taking out and breaking down the (very rough) built in shelves, while he was inside painting. We disassembled the water heater, too, allowing better access to one corner of the garage.

On Tuesday, Uncle tore out the sheetrock on the back wall, that, after being exposed to water and humidity from the washer/dryer, was in pretty bad shape. Hu hung new sheetrock on that wall, but I was a little sad to not get my hands on that.

My sadness was relieved on Wednesday when we got to hang the sheetrock on the ceiling. My back is still sore and tired from this work.  We hung the sheetrock and taped it off. I scraped and cleaned while Uncle floated. Tough work that’s still going to look rough, but hopefully it’s an improvement.

Thursday will be putting the second coat on the interior while Friday will be painting the garage (I think). I’m ready for that house to go to a new owner.

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Day 2 of Kitchen Tower Construction

Another day, another broken tool.

We started the day off replacing the tire of the bandsaw. There were quite a few videos online about how this would be a difficult task. The tires are very tightly fitted, and there were a lot of tips and tricks out there to get them on. We soaked the tire in some hot water and then used a couple small clamps to slowly jigger the thing on.

After that, we reassembled the bandsaw and got to cutting the other curved pieces. That was pretty short work. After cutting the first (of each type), we headed over to the drum sander to smooth out the curve. That is totally the right tool by the way. You can really see where the curve is a little elevated. Then we used that as a stencil to cut the other pieces the same way.

It was quick work getting all the cuts done before heading back to the drum sander for the finishing passes. Alas, that’s where we were struck again with a broken piece of rubber. One of the belts in the drum sander broke, causing the drum to oscillate wildly. The belt that turned the sander remained whole, so it still spun… but no more smooth up and down oscillation.

Once again, we called our day short.

I did some other work on the pieces though. I used the table router to take the edge off some of the pieces that wouldn’t be impacted by the join. It turn out the long angled edge of the main legs wasn’t quite straight. That was a bit of a curve ball when it came to the router, but I’ll finish that up with the handheld router later.

We were supposed to put the curve on the top of the legs with the drum sander–broken–so instead we put the curve on very delicately with the disc sander. That worked well enough for this piece, though it was difficult to get a steady curve that way.

Last, we took a look at a jig for joining up the pieces. It’s meant to clamp to either side of the end of the piece to exactly center the drilling for the dowel joinery we intend to use. You just select the placement and the size of the hole, and it handles the rest.

Coming up next then is fixing the drum sander, finishing the curved pieces, hitting a couple edges with the handheld router, and then laying out and drilling for the joinery.

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Day 1 of Kitchen Tower Construction

This went much faster than I was expecting!

I started off in the morning heading to Houston Hardwoods. The prices there are much cheaper than at Home Depot for that sorta thing. I guess Home Depot is probably price competitive on pine 2x4s, but then it makes up margin on hardwood products.

I bought 5 milled planks: 3 1x6s and 2 1x4s. I used stock that was already cut to different lengths, most around 8 foot. The 9.5 foot board just fit into my Mazda SUV by going all the way to the bottom of the windshield. All told it was $68 and change.

After heading up to the shop, I laid out the cuts with pencil, just to get a rough idea of the pieces. I then cut everything on the chop saw to a slightly longer length… half an inch or so, just to make sure. This was probably an unnecessary step, but it went fast enough that it wasn’t a problem.

I then ran the planks to width on the table saw. I cut the wider pieces first and found that I could still use the leftover strips for some of the smaller support pieces. After making all the rough cuts, I ended the day with an extra 1×4 plank, which I suppose I could return.

I cut everything to the true length next. I used a stop on the chopsaw which made it quick work. When that was finished, I laid out all the square pieces to see how it would all fit together.

From there, I started making the decorative cuts. I tapered the legs using a taper jig for the table saw. It’s a little hard to estimate the exact angle, but I left a little straight edge at the bottom of the taper to be conservative. I think it looks pretty good like that, so I decided to keep it.

Next up, we used some scraps of veneer to trace an arc on the support pieces. It’s a three handed job that way, so it helps to have a friend. Then I began cutting them out on the bandsaw when the bottom bandsaw tire came loose. It looks like it either wore out in the heat or was a faulty one, because it should have lasted longer than it did. We tried to fix it, but it was just too loose on the wheel, and the slightest knock on the blade would send it spinning.

So that brought the day to a halt. My dad is buying a new tire. Hopefully it’ll get to the Woodlands soon, so I can keep going.

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Another Boozy/Non-boozy Attempt

Maybe it should be called Sorry Not Sorry.

I’d like a complex, neat cocktail with Seedlip as the base “liquor” for the drink. The trouble comes from the fact that there isn’t that bite from the ethanol… which is an important part of that cocktail.

This time, I’ve mixed in some stronger booze… stronger in taste… and strong booze itself, to try to get a bit of that ethanol flavor.

  • 1.5 oz Seedlip Grove 42
  • 0.5 oz Myers Dark Rum
  • 0.25 oz Appleton Estate Rum
  • 0.25 oz Pear Liquor
  • A dash of orange bitters

It still has something missing. Maybe the Grove 42 is simply too light to serve as a base, which is a shame because the flavor profile is spot on otherwise.

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Punch

I had brunch with a few friends, two of which are pregnant. I was responsible for bringing the beverage as is my wont. I aimed for a guava Seedlip punch and it came out rather nicely. I added orange juice to brighten things up a bit. I had planned to add some lime juice, but the orange juice alone was sufficient.

Then I added some Chinese Five Spice bitters to the mix to up the level of interest. The Seedlip Spice 94 and the bitters combined to give a spicy Pacific tasting blend, that was delicious and hard to place. Then topped off with soda. Quite nice.

  • 32 oz Guava Nectar
  • 12 oz Seedlip
  • 12 oz Orange Juice
  • 4 dashes Chinese Five Spice Bitters
  • 48 oz Soda

Mix in a pitcher. Serve over ice. Drink by the pool. Imagine tropical beaches.

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Drywall and Kitchen Tower Selection

First day up and trying to do some woodworking in my dad’s shop. I wanted to have a quick warm up project, and decided to make a kitchen tower stool for my son. It’s at best a temporary piece of furniture–not exactly an heirloom piece–so it’ll be fine if I make some mistakes.

My goals got a little railroaded though because my parents needed some work done on the house. They’re shower plumbing fixtures were apparently lemons, and they had a plumber out to repair it. But that left a quarter sheet sized hole in their den closet that needed fixing. A very easy starter project.

After cleaning up the hole a bit, I added some crosspieces to the existing studs with some scrap plywood from the garage. That gave something to which I could attach the new sheetrock. Then cutting down the sheetrock to the right size–we had some spare old sheetrock already–and attaching it to the crosspieces.

It was a bit of a pain because of the non-uniform hole size. And even the studs weren’t quite square, so there was a lot of rework, going back downstairs, back out to the garage to trim down pieces. Measure twice, go up and down the stairs once. But in the end, there’s a well covered hole with some unpainted old sheetrock.

I would like to learn how to do this right, floating and taping the sheetrock so it’s seamless in the wall. But at this point, the unfinished cover was all they needed and wanted. (They still worry that they’ll want to go back and open it back up.) Maybe in the future I’ll go back and fix this properly as a good learning project.

From there, we picked a kitchen tower that we’d build. The Wood Whisperer has some plans for the kitchen tower and I decided to go off of this. It’s a bit overwrought for what I need. (It’s likely going to end up painted in our kitchen.) But I like the idea of learning some of the joinery. And we’ll take some shortcuts:

  • We’ll use plywood for the standing platform instead of glueing together the milled boards
  • We won’t use the crazy expensive Festool domino joiner, and go with the dowels instead
  • We’ll use something cheaper than cherry. Probably poplar.

Finally, we went by Home Depot to look at the hardwood selection there. Using poplar, it’d end up costing around $120 for lumber costs. That seems a bit high. I’m going to go by a hardwood specialty store to see if it’s cheaper, because they can cut things to precise lengths.