Miter Saw Station Upgrades

My NY shop wasn't perfect but over the 9 years I was there, I had enough time to get it outfitted to the point where it was very efficient.  My Boise shop is still a work in progress to that point.  One area that needed particular attention was the miter saw station.  I built a nice station in NY with a stationary saw position, 5' outfeed table, and a movable stop for repeatable cuts.  Unfortunately, I left that bench with the house when we moved.  The miter saw area in the new shop has been essentially temporary for the last 2 years (saw not secured to the table, no outfeed table, you get the picture...  Well, that all changed over this Christmas break.

I decided to follow a design I saw in Fine Woodworking magazine, where the saw sits in the middle and has infeed and outfeed tables on both sides.  Also on the agenda was a dust collection shroud in the back for a dedicated 4" run to my new Delta 50-760 dust collector.

The bench the saw currently sits on is only 5' wide, so that made designing of the infeed/outfeed tables a challenge.  I knew a portion of each would be cantilevered, and kept that in mind when choosing a size.  Each extension is 3' in length and hangs off the table ~18" as shown in the photo below.  I built them as hollow boxes out of plywood using rabbit joints.  Each box is designed to be removable with the top surface screwed down with no glue.  Removing the top allows access to 4 screws that attach each extension table to the underlying bench.  Having worked in enough shops and knowing that a woodworker will often change his mind about things, I thought it best to have a backup plan!

I added a custom stop to the fence by attaching 2 pieces of 36" t-track from Woodcraft to the top and fabricating a custom glide that straddles the top of the fence.  A plastic knob with an attached bolt connects to a sliding t-bolt that rides in the track.  I can now move the stop to any position on the fence in a matter of seconds for repeatable cuts. 

Below are photos of the completed station with the dust shroud installed.  It does a great job of collecting just about every dust particle that shoots out the back of the saw.  The shroud also allows a 4" hose connection which maximizes the suction velocity from the dust collector.  The installed fitting on the back of my Dewalt DW705 is 1-1/2", which is essentially worthless.  My miter station will now be one of the cleanest areas of the shop, instead of one of the dustiest.

I also took this opportunity to fix a nagging problem with the workbench drawers.  I accidentally built them too long for the frame, so they extended beyond the back by about an inch.  Normally, this isn't a big deal.  However, when there's dust flying out the back of a miter saw above, the drawers will tend to be filled with sawdust!  Yeah, it really sucks when you open the drawer to get a tool and have to go digging around to find it.  The fix was relatively simple and involved cutting the back off the drawer to the correct dimension and reattaching it.  I unfortunately had to cut off some half-blind dovetails but oh well.  It is only a shop cabinet after all.   Below are before and after photos of the drawers.

 Before

and after...

Now that this project is done, I can focus once again on making jewelry boxes for my last 2 nieces.  I'm WAY overdue on getting these done.  Happy New Year everyone.

Bar Project

It's been a very busy month and I've been wanting to post on several topics for over a month.  Now that I have some time off, I'm going to catch up with several all at once.

My buddy Derek bought a new house recently which has a nice built-in wet bar in the living room. Since it shared a wall with the garage Derek had an idea to run draft lines through the wall and install his draft towers directly on the bar top.  Sounded like a damn good idea to me so I took it as a project to help him out. 

Below is a photo of what we started with.  It's not the best photo but it's the only one I had.  The bar top and backsplash were covered in lovely white 1970's formica and the sink (covered by cardboard boxes in the photo) wasn't attached to the countertop.

The renovation plan included replacing the bar top and backsplash with maple and finishing it with a thick coat of epoxy so it looks like a commercial bar.  We decided to remove the formica backsplash but not the bar top since Derek wanted the job to get finished in less than a month...

I went with laminated maple strip flooring for the top and 3/4" soft maple to trim out the front edge and make a new backsplash.  The flooring was glued directly to the formica then wrapped with the maple boards to finish the carpentry. Holes were cut in the top to reinstall the sink and place the draft towers.  The beer lines were run under the counter and directly though the wall into the garage through a collar we added to Derek's kegerator. 

The epoxy proved to be a bit of a challenge since it doesn't flow like typical oil based finishes but after 2 coats (and quite a bit of sanding) it came out quite nice.  Below are two photos of the finished bar.  The epoxy ended up placing as 3/16" layer of high gloss clear protection over the maple.

Brewing News - Good and Bad...

First the bad.  I poured 10 gallons of beer down the sink this weekend.  Found out the oatmeal stout I brewed a month or so ago went horribly wrong.  It either got infected or was made with a bad pitch of yeast.  I re-pitched the 1056 cake from my last IPA (which turned out great) so I'm not quite sure where the snafu occurred.  The beer had a telltale medicinal taste to it, which points to a bacterial infection.  Regardless, that batch has been scratched from my memory forever and this is the last I will speak or think of it.  Besides one last point... I have made a decision to no longer harvest yeast for future use.  Despite my successes in the past with this practice, I'm come to the realization that I'm too busy (and too lazy) 

Now the good. The sour cherry batch came out fantastic!  The amount of tart cherry juice I added (24 oz per 5 gallons) tastes just right.  The beer is beginning to show more Brett flavor now as compared to the lacto tartness that came out first.  It will likely continue to change as it matures and as the bugs have more time to eat the cherry sugars.  However, I doubt the keg will be around long enough to document much more change.  Think I will start another batch soon since this one took 5 months to make!