Early Retirement Extreme Forums

As suggested by skintstudent on vexed's journal so that we dont derail that.

AFAIK other that the people in that thread, ffj also does woodworking. Anyone else who is also interested and would like to come out of the 'woodwork'?

A couple of old threads that may be of interest to get it started.

http://www.forum.earlyretirementextreme ... king+tools
http://www.forum.earlyretirementextreme ... king+tools

There are several other woodworking related posts, but these were the two most interesting to me. A few good links are contained in them.

Not sure which direction this thread is going in particular, but I was looking into building a bookcase with nothing but hand tools, I'm limited to chisels, a jack plane, assorted saws and a few clamps. I was thinking about how to create a dado joint without a specialised router and came across this technique which I thought was worth sharing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_2a_FwjAgk

interested.

Minimal tool kit for greenwood and framing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANYc3kdGKjU

vexed87 wrote:Not sure which direction this thread is going in particular, but I was looking into building a bookcase with nothing but hand tools, I'm limited to chisels, a jack plane, assorted saws and a few clamps. I was thinking about how to create a dado joint without a specialised router and came across this technique which I thought was worth sharing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_2a_FwjAgk

I didn't watch to the end, but i got the impression he somehow secured the chisel at the appropriate depth in a block of wood. That is okay, but you can do dados much quicker by clamping two strips of wood at depth on either side of a dovetail/miterbox saw. Then use this to make a completely flat cut on both sides of your dado, and use a chisel as normal to hew out the inside. For typical support dados you can be done with several of them in the time it would have taken to try to get the chisel in the wood, and you don't have to fiddle with pulling a chisel in and out of some contraption every time you need to touch up the edge of the blade. As a bonus, you'll be improving free chisel skills in an area that will end up being covered up by the shelf. YMMV, but that is just my personal thoughts and preference on how to do dados easiest. Everybody has their own ways to do things though. Cheers~

edit, I should mention that your opportunity to mess up using what i describe is if you allow your clamped wood on the saw to slip, you could end up with a cut that is too deep. So make sure you clamp good and keep an eye on that! (n

I think the point in the poor man's dado was to get a really smooth finish of the jointing surface, this is harder to achieve free hand (especially for novices) although as you rightly point out you could achieve perfectly adequate join freehand with enough practice. You would still need to use a back saw to cut the dado, the hack is purely to finish the surface for glueing.

I think it would pay off if you were doing more than two dado joints, like on my bookshelf project with 6 separate dados.

http://i.imgur.com/WBC0m3U.jpg

That's my latest project. I still need to clean up the paint bleeding through that worthless painter's tape, and add in the inner square of trim just inside the front.

vexed87 wrote:. You would still need to use a back saw to cut the dado, the hack is purely to finish the surface for glueing.

Oh, I see. Yes I agree that would be worth the time if you are looking to finish with a very smooth and flat groove. I actually have a couple of flat ground chisels that I push across across the groove looking for high spots. I'm definitely not much of a perfectionist with dados though. Maybe I give the gap-filling of my glue too much credit.

Really appreciate this guy's pragmatism and appreciation for using what he has. Very EREsque and inspiring!
Hank Gilpin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTwwavQGHZc

I found a Porta Shop today at the swap meet. It is about the size of a regular toolbox and can transform into a bunch of woodworking tools. One of those ingenious post-war inventions made to last forever. Mine is about 55 years old and runs as if it were new.

https://www.shiawasseehistory.com/portashop.html

The inventor and his tool.



Gotta love their motto

Reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aW6c2w1Fk

I wonder if there's still something like this being made. A portable version of Shopsmith.

Speaking of resurrecting old tech, one of my first 3d side projects was working with Pat Delaney, the inventor of the Multimachine, to create design drawings of "the concrete Lathe", an idea he dug up from WWI lathes. He was really into the idea of designing a lathe that anyone could make mostly from junk lying around.

https://makezine.com/2012/04/12/the-con ... e-project/

Years after my work with Pat, someone actually made one of the things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxqxlexybqE

Here's the instructables - all the sketchup drawings in the PDF are mine, from way back when: https://www.instructables.com/Concrete-Metal-Lathe/

@AH - Neato! I was just talking to DW less than 10 minutes ago about how I need to make a proper lathe. Building a second lathe is very high up on my list (the first one I made based on a power drill kinda sucks). Never occurred to me to use rebared concrete. I've previously tried building a three-legged stool out concrete (twice!) but it never worked.

Hm, one cast? Or separate bits fastened together?

I've made a coffee table and two end tables out of concrete, but just rectangular slabs (1.5 - 2" thick, with wire mesh not rebar) with wood or metal bases. Seeing that, my buddy did all his kitchen countertops in concrete.

Take a 5 gal bucket and make 3 1" wooden chair legs about 16" long (e.g. dowel). Pour 2" of cement into the bottom of the bucket and arrange the legs into the cement. You're making it upside down. Dry. Remove stool from bucket.

The cement cracked both times when I was trying to get the stool out of the bucket. Ostensibly it can be done but not by me. It's non-trivial but probably trivial with more cement experience.