Makin' Baloney...

Trust me, I reacted the same way to these words as you probably just did. I was invited up to Sullivan County (only a few miles from the location of the original Woodstock - actually Bethel, NY) to spend the weekend 'making baloney' with my friend Matt & his family. Seems that these friends refer to all smoked sausage as baloney, regardless of the type, in much the same way people refer to all cotton swabs as Q-tips, I guess. Once I got past the odd name for what was actually going on, the whole thing seemed a bit more normal.

This weekend festival has been a family tradition for these folks for many years now, and I now have first-hand experience to the festivities. Nearly all of these guys are hunters, and they use a lot of the venison from the previous year's take in the sausage. It also has some pork in the recipe, but that's about all I can say. I've been sworn to secrecy... We made 3 different varieties on Saturday; a normal smoked sausage, a summer sausage, and their version of a slim-jim. All of it was made from scratch and smoked in their little shack behind the garage.

This is what the first recipe looked like when it was placed in the smoker. They call this variety 'Ring Baloney'. Bet you can't guess why...

While the first batch was in the smoker, we worked on the other two batches. The photo below is just a sample of how much was made. In all, we ground and stuffed about 400 lbs of sausages. Seeing the assembly line in action was quite amazing. Let me tell ya, all of it tastes awesome. These guys have the whole process down to a science.

After a full day's worth of sausage-making, we sat around the garage and basically got drunk. That too is part of the tradition, or so I was told. Once everyone woke up the next day, we took a quick trip up the mountain to the place where Matt's Uncle owned a large farm. It's now where they all hunt, as it's ~300 acres of rolling hills and beautiful scenery. I set the camera on black & white as it seemed to fit the surroundings. Here's a few of the best shots I got.

We headed back to Montgomery about noon, totally exhausted and smelling like a couple of guys from a meat-packing plant. I was never more happy to take a shower and get a nap.

Sump Pump is Done!

I took Friday off as a vacation day, so I had a nice 3-day weekend to work in the basement getting the sump pump plumbed in and wired. The system went together pretty well, although a few of the items were challenging since I was doing everything solo. The first thing I saw when getting back into the project was the 14" of water in the basin, resulting from the 1.5" of rain we had on Tues/Wed of last week. This means that the water table was only 12-16" below the basement floor. Seeing this only reinforced the need we have for this system. If we get drenching rains this Spring like we had in the past, this system will pay for itself the first day it kicks on.

The plumbing is all PVC, with the piping running through the ledger board and meeting up with the downspout drain we had installed when the footing drains were also done. Here's what the system looks like (inside & outside):

I was initially planning to run the piping straight out the wall, but that would have include digging a new ditch through the trees to the right, which didn't thrill me. Jason (the friend who helped dig the hole) suggested tying into the downspout drain since the PVC piping is already in place and runs to daylight out by the street. This solution took a bit more plumbing work, but it was well worth it. All it took was re-directing the downspout a bit around the other side of the wall (shown in third photo). I was also planning ahead a bit with this since the downspout would likely be in the way on the sunroom addition Beth has her eye on...(more on that later. Hopefully, much later).

Working Toward a Dry Basement (Forever)

Hey All. My plans for Sunday changed on Saturday night, when after a company dinner with a bunch of people from Beth's office, two of our friends turned to me and said "Guess we'll see you at 9 AM tomorrow." Given my short attention span, I had no idea what they were talking about. Turns out that a few weeks back, I mentioned in jest that they should come over and help me dig a sump pump pit in my basement. Well, they didn't forget. And being the opportunist that I am, changed whatever plans I may have had on Sunday to make sure I took advantage of their generosity.

For those of you who haven't been reading Beth's blog for the last few years, our basement has been the bane of our NY existence. We've had serious flooding down there at least 3 times since we moved in. Some serious enough to toast our old furnace and water heater. The new foundation and footing drains took care of most of the problem, but there's still a need for the sump, if nothing more than insurance policy.

As planned they showed up at 9 with shovels in hand. It took us about 3 hours to dig the 30" deep by 20" wide hole. This was due to the fact that the clay in the basement was as hard as rock. Once we got past 12" or so, we had to use a steel rod to cut the clay in pieces small enough to scoop out. This process got us down about an inch at a time, and led to frequent exhaustion that comes from ramming a steel rod into the ground repeatedly.

That's Matt, Jason, and me (left to right) with said steel bar leaning against the basement wall.

Here's the semi-finished product. I'm extremely glad the digging is done and the sump pit is in the hole. It will eventually have a lid with PVC piping coming out the top, all of which I hope to finish next weekend. I have grand plans to pour some concrete down there as well, but we'll see where that falls in the overall priority list.

Bathroom Chronicles, Vol. 6

Hello All. Long time since I posted about the new bathroom. It's mostly because I'm lazy, but also because the bathroom itself is done (well, 98% so anyway :-)).

One peripheral task that's been sitting out there is the wall on the other side of the new shower stall. I tore the wall out to allow the plumber's to run the new pex supply tubing and PVC drains and vent. Ever since, we've been looking at an open wall with framing and pipes. Well, no more! I decided to close it all in by extending the hallway to the attic doors and building a soffit to enclose the new heat register that was recently installed. Here's some photos of the work in progress:

Shower wall with new framing and first piece of drywall

Bare Soffit around register

funky view of the rear of the soffit

New wall with drywall installed

Finished rough-in of the soffit with drywall and tape

Rear-view after taping

What I have left to do is about a week's worth of mudding and sanding, followed by new paint. By the time Snarktoberfest, the Sequel comes about, it should look all spiffy. Here's hoping that comes true!

Beer Fridge !!

Wanna know how cool my wife is? She too thought that getting a beer fridge for the shop would be a good birthday present!! I must admit that there is a bit of back-story here, but the overall premise is still true.

The prospect of getting said fridge was borne out of our friends Russ & Roe, who have a similar fridge in their garage. The difference being that Russ has filled that fridge with beer and had 5 more cases sitting on the garage floor! You see, Russ is more of a beer collector than a beer drinker, so the rate with which he buys dwarfs the rate at which he consumes. It's rather said, actually, but he shares much of his bounty and I'm grateful for it.

When Roe threatened to take their fridge back, Russ was faced with a quandry... where to put all of the displaced beer? Well, like a good soldier who's willing to take one for the team, I stood up and said, "I'll Take It." :-) and Just like that, I had a full-size fridge delivered to the house to help my dear friend out. The photo below happens to show my two favorite additions to the shop: the fridge and my 16" Laguna bandsaw.

And this is what 5 cases of great micro- and foreign brews look like in the new fridge. It's OK, feel free to take a moment if you need to...

What I truly love about this one is there's no freezer and it's equipped with an internal heater so you can keep it outside in the winter without the contents freezing. This was key since I only heat my shop when I'm out there. The longer-term plan is to put a kegerator kit in the door so I can keg my homebrew. The bottom shelf should be just high enough to fit 5-gal corny kegs. Yeah, Baby!!

A Necessary Evil

I guess evil is a strong word, but it gets my point across. What I'm referring to is tool sharpening. In reading as much woodworker stuff as I can get my hands on, one central tenet of all the masters is the same: you must work with sharp tools. Basically, if you try to do handwork with dull tools, you're going to get frustrated and tired. Frustrated when the pieces look awful or don't fit and tired by having to wail on a chisel to get it to cut.

I got a reminder of both this weekend when working on J's jewelry box. I'm hand-cutting through dovetails for the box joinery, which requires a fair amount of chisel work to get the pins & tails square and fitting nicely. Let's just say I didn't get off a great start. I stopped after being horrified by the amount of tear-out I was getting from my dull chisels. I must at least give myself a little credit for stopping before I would be forced to use the 4 pieces of mahogany as firewood.

Yesterday's activity was getting the chisels back to form. I've been using the Scary-Sharp method, which uses ordinary sandpaper to hone chisel & plane irons. I buy 400 - 2000 grit automotive paper and work my way up the grits until the metal looks almost like a mirror. The hardest part is flattening the backs of the chisels first so you can actually generate a nice edge. Unfortunately, chisel backs are anything but flat when you first buy them. Here's a nice step-by-step description of the process I generally use (sans waterstones for now). Once the backs are flat, honing the bevel is easy. After about 5 minutes or so, they're sharp enough to shave the hairs off my arm. Not their primary purpose, mind you, but it is a good test of sharpness. :-)

The sad part about yesterday is that I had to quit working in the shop before I had a chance to put them to work. Hopefully, I'll get out there tonight after work since it's a balmy 53 F today. Happy Monday, everyone.

I Finally Got My Shop Back

Hey all. Has it been over 2 months since I last blogged? Of course it has because this is me and I'm quite possibly the worst blogger ever (well, not in content, but definitely in frequency).


I got a bug to write again because I got a nice e-mail from a few windsor chairmakers out in Missouri who found this blog through my instructors' website. Turns out they studied together at the same place and are also professional chairmakers. It was nice to hear from them.


The good news is that the workshop has been busy again lately. I've made it a point to reclaim the shop from the storage area it had become during the bathroom remodel, so over the last 3 weeks I've been doing just that. I basically cleaned it all out (found out that several local mice had been feeding on a bag of birdseed - yuck), moved some stuff around, made a few upgrades, and got it back in working order. The upgrades are a few small cabinets for extra storage that I'v ebeen thinking about forever. They're nothing fancy, but they do manage to keep some tools and supplies from getting dusty, which is key in a shop with little or no winter ventilation. Here's what the weekend oasis looks like now. It looks more crowded than it actually is. There's alot of multi-tasking going on with the benches and equipment.





In fact, I have several projects in progress as we speak. I'm building a jewelry box for a soon to be 13-year old niece (shhh, don't tell her), and have been experimenting more with my lathe. I really want to do more turning, starting with spindles and working my way up to bowls. The first project will be legs and stretchers for a few windsor stools. These have been in the offing ever since I finished my sackback chair over a year ago. I'll let you know how they turn out.


I'm off to Pittsburgh tomorrow for a business trip, so wish me luck that I don't get stuck somewhere due to snow, wind, or both... Have a good week.