Woodworking Night - Thursday the 9th 6:30pm to 9ish

I declare that Thursday, February 9th shall be a woodworking night at the space*.

I will open the space prior to 6:30 and run it until 9ish (probably longer). I’d like to do a bunch of individual builds of something like a block plane or we could do a group build such as a french cleat system for the newly opened up wall to hang our clamps.

Anyone have interest in that night? If so, what sort of project would you like to see us do?

-Mike

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Okay; I’ve decided I’m going to make this into a group project night for doing a french cleat-style system for hanging our stuff on the new empty wall.

Do you have little to no experience woodworking? Do you have lots of experience woodworking? Do you want to be a part of something that makes the space a better place?

Then this night is for you! I hope to see you there!

Committing to showing up and working on stuff - This might be a good night
to put up plastic all around the woodshop, as we’ve been saying we should
for years now.

Gonna be honest, that’s been my hesitating on getting onboard with a
thickness planer and similar. Does anyone have or can get some appropriate
barrier all around that area?

I actually have some plastic I used for a home-repair project. I’m not sure if it is enough, but I’ll dig it out and bring what I have.

I’d be partial to a system that doesn’t use French Cleats and just directly attach mounts to some plywood. Matthias did a video on it (5:08) awhile back and sold me on the idea.

How important is the modularity of a french cleat system versus fixed mounts? A fixed mount system looks cleaner and stays cleaner as dust and shavings don’t get lodged in the cleats. Not investing in wood for the French Cleats themselves would also save a bit of money.

Regardless of whatever system we go with, I would be all for creating a few brackets. They’re great small projects to get familiar with woodworking.

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Awesome!

I’m not completely sold on french cleats.

The reasoning I had thought french cleats would be a good system:

  1. Things move about more often in VHS than a personal shop. There’s always a better way to organize so people doocracy the better way all the time :). Having the modularity for that is nice; and invites improvement. In fact, that wall might not always be for the shop.

  2. Playing off of 1; I was hoping that we could build this in such a way that we can remove it from the wall when we are done with this location and make it useful in the next. If we make this general enough; maybe it could be holding electronics equipment in its second life.

  3. I’ve never made french cleats before.

  4. Playing off of 3; I kind wanted to use this as a prototype for some french cleats at home for some closets ala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYbexqIH4IY.

None of those are super-compelling :slight_smile: so if we end up in a better place than we started I’ll consider it a success.

-Mike

Reminder. This is tonight.

I’ve picked up a full sheet of 3/4th inch ply and had it cut down into quarters. I’ll be dropping this off at the space for tonight soon.

@Jarrett I picked up my plastic sheeting, but its thinner than I remembered. Its probably about similar to the sheeting over the lathe/mill if that is appropriate. Its just plastic construction dust barrier stuff.

Also, if anyone wants to come to collaboratively work on/fix anything; feel free to come on down, organization system is just my suggestion.

-Mike

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I know the topic has gone the way of french cleates however here is a photo of a set of Krenov style bench planes I made a few years ago for a 2x4 contest. All of the planes were made from a single 2" x 4" x 8’ Padauk board. For scale, the jointer plane (longest one) is 18" long and the block plane (smallest one) is 5" long. All have Hock plane irons. They work great and I love using them because they are so light. Making planes is pretty easy and is a lot of fun.

This one is the prototype smoother plane that I made from Western Maple.

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Oh My!

Those are beautiful! Once we have a jointer I say we do a night of building planes!

Tonight went really well. We didn’t finish our project but we got one receiving cleat fully attached to the wall. Even better, we did this with material that was going to be discarded!

By the end of the night we had all the 45 degrees ripped, and one entire set prototyped and up on the wall. As this is a VHS project, anyone is welcome to contribute, but I’ll post when I plan to go back to the space and continue on the rest of the cleats in case anyone is interested.

In some ways we certainly overbuilt this structure; it was fun coming up with a plan, filling in various knowledge gaps of each person (many gaps in my knowledge were filled, thank you!). Soon we will have a nice storage system on that wall!

Additionally @steven did a great job of cleaning the overhead dust extractor, that certainly seemed to make a nice difference in airborne dust. Thank you for do-ocracying that!

Thanks everyone for the help! I love theme nights!

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So I’m hoping to get in to the space this week to work more on the shelving system, but it’s a VHS project so if you feel empowered to do it feel free. I’ll post here when I know what day/night I’ll be in to make progress.

I thin one standard that needs to be set is the gap between each vertical cleat. The gap on the first board needs to set the gap for the other two, as well as th gap between cleats on other boards. Ideally something of a nice integer inches.

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I’ll attempt to create a new sled tomorrow. If there’s a lot of people at the costume session, I’ll move the table saw and shop vac to the garage if that’s allowed.

Perhaps check on Slack random/woodworking about moving tools like the table saw?

It’s probably easier to ask for forgiveness to disturb the space for 5-7 minutes which is all I’d likely need.

Please talk to the event coordinator to see what their expectation of noise is. While I’ve been guilty of being too loud during an event, I have regretted it after.

Also, be awesome to one another.

I’ll be in tomorrow (Tuesday) morning to work on the french cleat system in case anyone is interested.

-MIke

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Oops, I meant Monday

I won’t be there on Monday-- likely Tuesday. The sled I made is all glued up and sitting on the bench. You can unclamp it if you wish and take a look. Heck use it if you wish. For my first woodworking project ever it could be worse.

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