Basic Woodworking Part 4: Dust Collection and Adirondack Chair x2

Though I haven't much time during the academic year to make anything, I wanted to make a companion Adirondack chair for the one I made last summer, using the same plans. First, however, I needed a way to collect all the sawdust coming off my radial arm saw. I had a scrap piece of poplar, so I wanted to make a small shield that would redirect outgoing dust into a collection slot in the back of the saw table.

I predrilled and countersunk screw holes on the short side of the L-shaped piece, and cut the second layer at a 15 degree angle on the radial arm (I originally tried using the jigsaw, but I couldn't get a straight line). To mount the top layer, I used a series of dowel-pin joints and woodglue (along with several strong bar clamps). My first mistake was haphazardly drilling the bottom layer of holes - this made it extremely difficult to line up the top layer holes for a tight connection.

Dust filter before sanding (biscuit joint on right edge still needs to be sanded here)

To get the long edges to line up, I cut a small biscuit joint (not exactly a biscuit joint, but the idea is similar) on the edge with my drill. After tapping a piece of scrap into the glue-lined slot, cutting and sanding the edge smooth, and filling the remaining space with wood filler, the edge looks clean and the whole piece is sturdy.

Here you can see the dust shield positioned behind the blade to direct sawdust into the slot for collection.

Of course, as I continued to cut the wood for the chair, I realized that the shield works well right up until you adjust the radial arm for anything but straight cuts. Ripping wood especially threw sawdust everywhere.

Basic Woodworking Part 3: An Adirondack Chair

The September issue of Popular Mechanics included this article on how to make a simple Adirondack chair using only two ten foot long 2x10 boards. With my new saw, the job was a piece of cake and only took an afternoon. I asked the employees at Home Depot to cut the boards roughly in half (following the measurements listed in the article) so that the boards could fit in my car.

Here are the marked up boards ready to be cut.

I spent most of the afternoon cutting the boards to size, including ripping one of the boards down the middle to form paired sets for the legs and armrests.


It took many tries and a lot of googling to figure out how to properly rip wood on a radial arm saw. It turns out you want to push the wood against the direction of the saw while ripping; in contrast, you want to pull the saw towards you in the direction the blade is spinning while crosscutting.

All of the boards cut up and ready to be screwed together.

At this point, I sanded all the individual pieces, because it's a lot harder to sand the large areas and corners when the whole piece is put together.

Carefully screwing the legs together at the correct angle was the trickiest part. 

Here it is, all screwed together! I used glue for the armrest supports for an extra strong hold. Now I just have to do a final sanding of some of the corners and waterproof it with some Thompson's WaterSeal.

The final product: 

My dad suggested using a solid white stain to match the railing, so I'll let the WaterSeal wear down naturally for a bit, then sand it off and restain it. 

Basic Woodworking: A Radial Arm Saw

Up until last Sunday, I had accumulated many of the tools necessary for home remodeling and wood working, except for a saw. I had been using a small Sawzall for most of my work, which was certainly not ideal, as it is difficult to control for all but the most destructive of jobs. One of my neighbors purchased a bunch of new equipment, and was selling some of his older saws, including this radial arm saw from the mid-1900's.

Considering that this kind of saw goes for several thousands of dollars new, I though the $80 I put down for one money well spent, especially because many machines made in the mid-1900's are more durable than newer ones. Radial saws can quickly crosscut wood, but they can also be turned and angled to rip wood or bevel an edge. 

This saw came mounted on an old cabinet, so I'll likely clean it up with a fresh coat of paint (at least) in the future. I also want to reset the counter top, because the blade isn't quite square with it, causing the blade to occasionally stick in the cutting material while ripping. 

I used the blade to cut scrap wood into short legs for new steel caster wheels I got from Home Depot for $10. 

Hopefully these will allow me to move the heavy saw around my crowded garage when it's not in use. 

Basic Woodworking Part 2: Sanding and Staining

Sanding takes a long time. A really long time. Tiny swells that looked easily smoothable while assembling the piece could take hundreds of passes with an orbital sander to even out. The trick is to start with a rough grit (low number) sandpaper and gradually work your way upwards to finer and finer finishes. When I could run my hand across the wood without it sticking in any one location, I called it a day.

Keep in mind two things:
1). Inside corners might be difficult to properly sand, though this issue can be solved by using a square sanding block (basically a square scrap piece of wood wrapped in sandpaper).
2). Edges can be very delicate; when softening outside corners and edges, avoid over sanding and creating a curved edge, especially if that edge is supposed to sit flush with another surface, such as the floor.

Then comes the stain. The magic rule (at least for me) of staining is: if it can get stained, it will. This includes your clothes, your shoes, the floor, anything supporting the piece, as well as any tools you have lying around. Be sure to remove things you want to keep clean well before you even open up the can of stain. If something does stained, you may attempt at your own risk to clean it using mineral spirits, though these can be highly flammable.


The manufacturer's directions on the can of stain are usually very clear and easy to understand, though the basic principles remain the same:

1. Apply stain
2. Wait for it to sink into the wood and partially dry
3. Wipe off excess stain
4. Repeat

The number of coats reflect the desired darkness of the final stain. I wanted my bookcase to match another fairly dark set of shelves, so I used 2-3 coats. The final product has a bit of a shine to it while drying out:

All sanded and stained; only waiting on the books!

And the final product:

With all those books loaded on, the case is quite sturdy and stable. It leans back slightly to allow the wall to provide additional support, so I placed felt furniture pads along the top edge.  

Basic Woodworking Part 1: A Bookcase

I've wanted to make some simple furniture for a while now, and the size of my book collection has far surpassed my storage capabilities. A simple bookcase seemed like an excellent first choice, so I headed over to Home Depot (did you know they're open until 10PM on Saturdays? Everyone becomes so much more helpful when they're trying to get you out of the store at 9:55PM.) and picked up some supplies. I have space for about a three foot by six foot bookcase in my basement, so I bought enough 1x8" boards to fit those dimensions. (Important Note: I bought 1x8's thinking that they would be wide enough to fit a standard book with plenty of wiggle room, but the finished boards are closer to 3/4x7.5, so they were narrower than I intended.) I also bought two 4x4' luan plywood pieces for backing the bookcase and providing support, as well as wood glue and nails (of the pneumatic nail-gun variety) for connecting all the planks. The total cost came to about $100, though it could be cheaper or more expensive depending on the quality of wood you buy.

My plan called for four shelves (five levels for books) built into a rectangular case that would sit on top of a base. As is often the case, I modified that design several times while actually making it. For example, at the suggestion of a friend, I ripped an extra 1x8 board down to make some simple molding for the edges, about an inch wide.

To begin, I set up shop in my garage with a miter saw, a nail-gun, and a table saw. What followed was four hours of measuring, remeasuring, cutting, triple remeasuring, recutting, gluing, nailing, and more remeasuring. I apologize now for the poor quality of these pictures, as I only thought to take some with my phone halfway through the project.

Here I've put together the frame of the case and started nailing down the luan to keep the frame square when I add shelves later. Note that the top and bottom shelves will go inside the vertical supports, because it'll be easier to hide the nail holes through the side than to sand and hide the exposed edge of the horizontal shelf.

I've now nailed down the second piece of luan and inserted the middle shelf that will cover the seam of the backing. When nailing, it's very important to shoot the gun straight down into the wood, otherwise the nails will come through the front of the thin pieces. Pulling out and hiding the marks from the nails I misfired was not easy and made for a less professional work. You can also see here the base for the bookcase. The front piece serves as a kickplate and is set back an inch and a half, and the two side supports end an inch from the back of the bookcase. This is so that the bookcase is above any baseboard molding and can lean flush against the wall. I have to return to Home Depot later to pick up some L-brackets to mount the base to the bookcase, as it's currently only held in place by a few nails.

Here is the rough finished bookcase placed in its temporary home, until I find more time to sand and stain it. Part of me wants to leave it as is, only putting on a clear coat after I sand it, but I know it'll look better with the other furniture with a dark stain. That's all for now!

Linux Explorations Part 1: Installing Slackware

I've wanted to install a Linux operating system on an old desktop PC for a while. There are many reasons for wanting to do so, but the big one for me is that Linux requires that you learn more about how computers actually work. There are huge communities of users, contributors, and developers for all of the Linux distributions, and they're generally all helpful and willing to offer advice if you ask. Without any experience in Linux operating systems, command line work, or hard drive partitioning (to name just a few of the things I've learned about in the past two days with Linux), I dove in. 

The first decision to make when installing a Linux OS is which distribution (distro) to choose. There are dozens of them, and they range from extremely simple and very Windows-esque (Ubuntu) to highly complex (Gentoo). I wanted something that would force me to step out of my computer comfort zone, without getting too complicated. I went with Slackware, which, in addition to being one of the oldest and best supported distros out there, is considered the most true-to-Linux distro. 

Once I decided to install Slackware, I immediately wasted an afternoon trying to install it from a bootable USB drive. If you ever want to do this, don't. It's possible, but there are so many convoluted side steps and extra programs necessary, it's much better to just use a DVD install disc. If you know what you're doing, it's actually quite simple to do: 

1. Go here and download the relevant install DVD ISO (paying attention to whether you want the 32- or 64-bit version). The file should look like slackware-14.1-install-dvd.iso and will likely take 2+ hours to download, because it's larger than 2gb. 
2. Go here and download ImgBurn (or whatever disc burning software you want to use, but ImgBurn is free and incredibly easy to use)
3. Use ImgBurn to burn the file you just downloaded to a blank DVD (choose the"write image file to disc" option). I wrote it at 4x to avoid write errors, and then verified the disc.
4. Insert the DVD into your computer (I hope you've already backed up all your important data) and power on. 
5. You'll need to edit the BIOS boot order to tell the computer to first look at the CD/DVD drive for bootable media. This usually requires pressing Delete or F2 soon after the computer turns on. 
6. When the computer starts up, you'll get a message like this: 

From here on out, I followed this fantastic guide to set everything up. I have an 80gb hard dive, so I set my three partitions up with 40 for the root, a swap partition equal in size to the amount of RAM (1gb in my case), and all the rest for the home partition. The one place I deviated from the guide was in choosing the type of partitions: I used Linux ext4 for the root and home partitions. 

I set up a local user account and edited the inittab file with Vi (which is complicated, but described very well here) to automatically boot into the graphical environment.

Now that I finally have a working Linux OS, my next step will be to install some packages and get connected to the internet with internet connection sharing from my laptop. 

Solar Power 9: Some Results

After using the USB for a few weeks, I couldn't be happier. I've gone on several long plane trips, college tours, beach trips, and now a hiking and canoeing trip, and the USB has kept my phone fully charged through all of it. I listen to music, take notes, send emails, check Facebook, and do a host of other things on my phone that all drain the battery quickly, and there's rarely a convenient outlet I can wait at for hours. At less than 200g, I throw it in my backpack and don't notice the weight difference. When my battery gets to 20-30%, the charge pack goes into an outside pocket of my backpack, allowing me to continue to walk around while charging up. 

One of the only disappointments I've had with the charger is the solar charging. The solar panel is so small that it takes hours, or even sometimes a full day in the sun, to charge the battery completely. Because of this, I haven't been able to charge it with the panel and have had to resort to using outlet power connected to the auxiliary mini-USB port. The USB still works great as a portable battery pack, it's just not as environmentally friendly as I hoped it'd be.

All in all, this has been a great first project for me. Here's a picture of the USB all wired up and charging my phone.