Exercise your Mind

I thought I finally hit it on craigslist for some wood. Actually, I thought that twice.

The first time was a posting that I responded to less than 5 minutes after it was posted. People moved into a repo and there was a bunch of oak, maple, poplar, and others they just wanted to get rid of. No phone number, so i sent an email right away.

Someone had already responded to the post and was going to take it.

The other wood was excess 2x stuff and plywood that I was going to use to build a couple three workbenches out in the garage. Sent an email, got a response, set up a time. It’s about 25 miles from home and I got there 5 minutes after the agreed time.

She thought I was there for the bed – someone had just gotten the wood.

*sigh*

If I had known it was going to be a wasted trip I would have taken the car as it gets better mileage.

Score: craigslist: infinity me: 0

I’ve been watching the free listings on craigslist to see what I can pick up. I’ve found that I must have slow reflexes or something.

Last week I saw, within 30 minutes of the posting, a 14″ Ridgid band saw. I didn’t get a response from the owner, so I guess someone else saw it first.

I’ve also missed out on some wood. For some reason a lot of people are tearing up their old decks. I have some plans (that I’ll be modifying to suit) for a workbench. I plan on making at least two of them, making sure that the tops are the same level as my table saw (that will also go on a platform so it’s easier to reposition) so those workbenches can be used as infeed or outfeed tables as well. One of the two will be meant to put the drum sander on and the other for the planer.

So far, by the time I contact the folks with the decks, the wood is already gone.

Nothing to do but keep looking and keep trying, something will work out eventually.

Given that I anticipate having more time to spend on our puzzles now, yesterday I decided that I needed to get my work area in the garage in shape so I can go out and work without having to do a massive shuffle every time I want to get busy.

When you know that it’s going to add an hour on to your shop time just to shuffle things around between getting to your machines and then putting all that stuff back, it makes it hard to convince yourself that you can go out and work.

Now, however, while the state of affairs in the garage is not, by anyone’s definition, close to that state of entropy one could call organized (not even mine – and according to my wife I have a fairly relaxed definition of the word), it is possible to go out and work with only having to move a couple of things. And if it stays nice today those things will be going out in to the shed.

There’s a non-working lawnmower sitting out in the front yard with a “FREE, non-working” sign to go on it (and I’ll list it in the local Freecycle group as well), 2 very full trash cans and several bags of trash waiting pickup at the end of the drive, several things moved up into storage in the attic, and a grandson’s dresser in the house ready to be moved into the shed.

There’s an old pink and white dresser (most drawers missing, a chance to practice building some), a printer table, and an end table just to the left when you walk in the garage door that are being used for storage (they used to be in the middle of the floor.) The jointer is sitting in front of the workbench (which is next to the aforementioned storage), the table saw is in the middle of the floor and there’s a luggable (wheels are planned at some point) work surface with a couple of tools on it.

No, it’s not the ideal work area yet. It doesn’t come close to the organized shops that the professional woodworkers I’m acquainted with have set up – but it is much more conducive to getting out and working now.

At some point I plan on replacing the current storage with a couple of wheeled surfaces with storage underneath so I can have a better place to mount the drum sander and planer, but that will have to wait for employment to come my way again.

So, what have you done to improve your conditions?

Well, yesterday I had a bad day: I paid my taxes and I got fired.

After 20+ years (semi-amusingly it was 6 months to the day) they decided they didn’t need me any more. Now it’s off to find a new job. I might have a little breathing room here, so I’ll be getting some stuff done around the house and get my workspace out in the garage straightened out so I can start working on more puzzles (and other projects.)

So, wish me luck if you’ve a mind to and I’ll keep you all informed on how things are going.

Earlier today I posted on Twitter (over several tweets) a question about how to demonstrate a couple of things: what kind of wood and finishes we have along with what kind of puzzles we make.

Actually, to start with, I was just thinking about how to show the wood and the finishes. Then Adam (@AdamKingStudio, worth a follow) suggested that I combine them. That sounds good to me, but I do have a concern.

I wonder how confusing it might be to potential customers? Right now I have 6 different puzzles with 3 more being prototyped. So far we’ve used about 8 different woods with 3 different finishes.

So, you can have puzzle C with wood F and finish A.

I don’t know. I’ve still not made up my mind on how to do it. Especially since most all of the puzzles can also be made with 2 or 3 different kinds of wood. I think it would be beneficial for a customer to get a hands on and be able to see the woods next to each other.

I’ll definitely need so have samples of all the puzzles, that’s a given. I’m just tempted to have the samples all be in one wood and then have the wood samples in 3/4″ square sticks a few inches long.

Please share your thoughts and suggestions – I certainly appreciate all your help.

since I’ve posted anything. Part of that is not having much to say. Life has been “interesting” to say the least. The weather was not good for a while, family issues used a lot of time, work was insane – it just all conspired to make it easier to not work on the puzzles than to work on them.

Just a motivation issue on my part.

Then I made an offhand comment on Twitter about posting and found that at least one person reads what I write. That gave me at least a little motivation to come back here and write something. Not that there’s a lot of content here, but I’ll try to get better at keeping you all updated.

An odd thing for a woodworker, no?

Well, in this case it makes sense. When we’re done putting puzzles together and in their box (which is open topped, at least for the moment) we have to have something to keep them contained. Originally we had planned on shrink wrapping them, but our first opportunity to sell our puzzles at a physical location was at a place that has a decided slant towards the natural and green side of things.

So, Cher and I figured that shrink wrapping might not be in our best interest. We decided to go with muslin bags. The first set of bags we sewed up I cut by hand. I had a cardboard template, drew the outline, cut them out with scissors and then Cher sewed them up. I threaded the drawstrings and put the beads on the ends.

This worked out well and was well accepted at the store.

Now it’s time to make more bags, but I know there has to be a better way to do this. I talked to a friend in the fabric business and she told me about the cutter and cutting mats. That’s in line for tomorrow – cutting up 4 yards of tea stained muslin so we can sew up some more bags.

Well, at least partly – it’s been through the skim cutting, but not yet sanded or cut into cubes.

Most of the koa was just undersized, so I’ll be saving that for later use in my 1/2″ cube based puzzles. This is not a reflection on the seller – these were extras thrown in to fill my box of wood and if I were actually turning pens they’d most likely be fine. Almost all of the mango was usable (and all the ones from the auction were), the red river gum was just a touch undersized (for me) and the tamarind and signature turned out just beautiful I’m going to have to find out how to get more of that.

So, here are the followup photos: taken after the skim cut on the saw. These are not wetted down at all.

koa: (hmmm, guess I didn’t get this one uploaded – I’ll fix this later

mango: some of the mango shows a bit of curl

tamarind: This showed some surprising color

red river gum:

signature: this was the most surprising. I’ll be very interested to see this with some finish on it to give it depth. Since I have some pieces that can’t be used due to the knot in them you’ll most likely see some waterloxed pictures tomorrow

So here’s what happened – since I cut wood into 3/4″ cubes, I don’t really need a lot to get started and I wanted to try out some new types. I figured that a relatively inexpensive way to try something out would be pen blanks. I’ve looked at pen blanks in the stores (Rockler, Woodcraft) but they tend to be just a bit undersized for my purposes so I went looking on EBay.

I found a bunch of auctions from a guy in Hawaii and tried a few. I found out that some of those blanks go for a lot of money. Well, he sells in packs of 10 and if you’re making custom pens it’s probably really not all that much money, but it’s more than I wanted to go on this first time around.

One nice thing about him is that he’ll throw in some extras of what he has around – I’m guessing it gets rid of some of his scrap and since it’s a flat rate box it doesn’t matter. It’s also nice because his are rough cut to about 7/8″ which gives me plenty of space to process them down to size. I took advantage of his offer to supersize the shipping and he’d throw in a bunch more different things.

So, here’s what I got when I won my 10 mango root pen blanks.

Mango Root Pen Blank

Koa pen blank

Red River Gum pen blank

Tamarind cutoff

I had to ask him what this next wood was as I was having great difficulties finding anything about it. He wrote what kind of wood each of the pieces was (a very big help, by the way) and this was labelled “signature”. You try looking for wood and signature and see if you find a tree of that name

Signature/Autograph flat grain

Signature/Autograph end grain

So, now I’m off to put these pieces through the saw, cut them down to my cube blanks. Once I get a smoother surface on them, I’ll wet them and show them once again.

Oh, in case you’re interested, you can find him on EBay as the seller named eganlaw and search for his pen and turning blanks using “joel* Hawaiian”.

I sort of feel bad about this – but on the other hand, it’s just sort of how things worked out.

In an effort to find ways to acquire some of the more exotic woods in a budget conscious manner, I’ve taken to looking at auctions of pen blanks on eBay. They’re about the right size and since it’s an auction you can set the limit on what you’re willing to pay and then just stick with it.

Sometimes you get a deal, sometimes you have to wait until the next time.

This time I got a deal. 3 Jatoba and 3 mahogany pen blanks, 6″ long. That’s about 7 or 8 cubes for me for each stick. The auction started at $0.01 and only had a few hours to go. I put in my max bid and the initial bid was put in for $0.01. No one else bid. I won for a total of $2.96 with shipping.

Why do I feel bad? It’s to go toward her first lathe.

Should I feel bad? That’s a different question entirely. It’s not like I cheated her in some way. After all, she set the opening bid. I do find it interesting that another auction, the same offering, starts at a higher minimum bid. Maybe she’s running a test, I don’t know.

At any rate, I guess what I’d take from here is that it’s OK to depend on the marketplace, but make sure you can get a reasonable return on what you’re offering to start with.