Month: October 2018

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?

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.

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.

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.