This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't know when I last said what I was doing, so to recap...
I built a boardgame table last year out of rustic walnut. I calculated it would cost me $300 in lumber, somehow I actually spent $450. Still beats the $2000+ asking price of most places selling them. I spent the summer working on it, burnt the fuck out, and took a break for the fall/winter. But the weather is getting nice again, so my un-climate controlled shop is getting nice again too. I sorted out all the off cuts from my table, and am going to make a set of 4 chairs to go with it. Because right now I have a motley collection of crappy folding chairs and desk chairs pulled from my computers.
I based my design off these plans. Except I made it a little smaller because when I compared it's dimensions to virtually every other chair in my entire house, they were comically huge. I'm also not using home depot lumber, because WTF? Nor am I using pocket screws, and am instead going with 100% mortise and tenon joinery.
I mean christ, I wouldn't trust a pine chair held together with pocket screws... would you?
But first I had to build a new chicken coop, because a fox killed 3/4 of our laying hens, and my wife thought that was a great excuse to buy 20 fucking chicks. Granted, she's apparently promised to give 10 of them away to friends when they mature, but still.
After that I got serious about the chairs again. I took all the random offcuts I had sorted out, and milled them to the proper size. I also had 2 spare planks of walnut I ended up not even needing for the table which became the seats, and a few more random parts. Next up was gluing up the seat panels. I may end up creating a template for these to give them a slightly more interesting flared shape, but we'll see. They may end up just square.
Next up I made the template for the back legs. This was a fairly straight forward process of putting a gentle curve on a blank with a flexible piece of scrap I had lying around. Then making the cuts with a jigsaw and lots of sanding.
I'm loaded for bear on this project because I decided to invite a buddy over this Saturday to work on it with me. Going to head to the lumber yard, pick up the 6/4 stock I need for the legs. I'm hoping 2 planks should do it, but we'll see how many knots I need to work around. Might get a 3rd just to be safe. Then hopefully get a few milled, cut, and maybe even get some chairs dry fit together. Which means I need as much done as possible. I still need to get the tenons cut on all the parts and my router dialed in to cut the mortises in the legs. I may even take a piece of 2x6 or whatever I have lying around and make some test legs just to make sure everything looks good. Then after the day is over, and I can take my sweet ass time sanding, shellacking and waxing all the parts.
It's remarkable how wood working is like, maybe 15% cutting and assembling. The rest is design, milling and finishing. I'm starting to understand how a lot of people just buy S4S boards, and then also have some other professional finish it to boot. If I ran a business and/or had the money I might do that too.
I'm seriously thinking about sticking some heating in my shop, maybe even a mini split. It's a lot easier to work on stuff (and bring yourself to work on stuff) when your hands aren't blue.
My wife keeps bringing that up, but my shop is too large and poorly insulated for that to be practical. There is actually an old wood stove out there I could get going if I ever spent an appreciable amount of time out there during the winter. But I think for my purposes something like this or this might be more useful. Something a bit more on demand and directional, so I'm not pissing the wind trying to heat up an enormous drafty space.
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