The Bespoke Woodworker

I’ve had a kind of crappy blue plastic borg sanding block for some time, and I’ve been lazy and switched out the paper.  I don’t use it too often, but its finally given up the ghost and won’t really stay closed any more.  I decided to make myself some proper ones with a nice cork backing.

Here’s the original borg crappy one..

The one thing I do like about it is that it is sized such that you can quarter a regular sized sheet, and they fit the sanding block right.

I had a bunch of sheets for cork, because I made myself a small corkboard/takboard for veneer inlay layout purposes.  I had some spare blocks of ash, left over from the bench, but I actually ended up making a sizing mistake and switched to maple.

I drilled a 1/4″ hole, counterbored a larger hole, lined it with 5 minute epoxy. and a 1/4-20 nut into it.

2 small walls on either end, to help retain the sandpaper, were glued on.  My leg vice made an excellent clamp.  Note that the counterbored nut faces down!

Then I cut some rough pieces of 1/4″ cork backing.  (I found it at Staples.)

Plenty of glue, there’s a lot of surface area to grab on cork, and some bench holdfasts make good clamps.

Some over-sized ash blocks, fitted snugly in between the ends, will give me room to sculp something comfortable to hold.

Some bandsaw work, followed up with the oss/belt sander, and voila!

One thing I noticed while building my Roubo was that there appeared to be some uncorrected blade drift and inaccuracy in my bandsaw.   I have to admit, taking the time to tune it up properly has been on my todo list for a long time, but I’d never gotten around to it.  Since this is Tool Tuneup week, I decided  it was finally time.

The top and bottom doors lift off their pins quite easily, which makes it easier to remove the blade.

Then I loosed the four bolts and removed the table.

The first thing I noticed was that the bottom wheel was missing the retaining bolt and washer!   This could certainly explain the trouble I had dialing in the cut on this before!

I sent some mail over to Rikon Tools, and Al Goldstein responded promptly that he’d put the missing parts in the mail.  I had them within a day.   Props to Rikon for their excellent support!

I took some time to vacuum and blow out the spare dust with compressed air, and checked over the bandsaw tires to make sure they were still in good shape, then moved on to the actual tuneup phase.

First I joined up some spare stock and checked the wheels to ensure they were coplanar.

Once I had the wheels coplanar, I checked the table, and noticed it was significantly canted forward.  I ended up shimming the table lightly just to get it somewhat closer to level.  I’d fine tune that later with paper shims.

Then I began the blade mounting and tuneup.  Step 1 was to retract the guide bearings and mount the blade, making sure the blade spins freely without any bearing contact.

Lower bearings too!

Then I checked the blade tension, and (just spinning the wheels by hand) made sure the blade was tracking correctly.

With that set appropriately, you can bring the bearings carefully back in almost-contact with the blade.  I use about a business card’s distance from the blade.

The final test was to make sure the table is perpendicular to the blade.

Front-to-back required some shimming, and this was as close as I could get it.  There’s just a hair gap up top of my 12″ square.  Close enough for me!

I also checked and fine tuned my 90 degree table stop.

I then did a final check, made sure I cleaned up the tools and re-installed the fence, and hooked up the DC for a test run.

Everything checked out, so I grabbed some four quarter 7 inch ash stock and did a quick resaw test.

I got myself a nice consistent slice a hair over 1/4″.

That’ll do it!

There’s a pile of crap in the tool drawer of my router table, and I can never seem to grab what I’m looking for, so I decided to use some scrap and make a quick organizer.

A little bit of scrap ash…

and Voila!

I’m in between projects at the moment.  This is a rare time for me.  Usually I have more than one going.  I decided to take the time now that I’ve finished the drill press table to go ahead and do both some shop cleanup, and some tool tuneups.   First up is flipping the knives in my Dewalt 735.  This planer has indexable insert knives, and I’ve never flipped them before.  I’ve probably run a few thousand board feet through the original set.  While it still cuts fairly well, there’s definitely once place where there’s a small seam in my boards due to hitting what I think may have been a hard knot or a small staple or nail.  Not such an issue on the workbench, but now that I’m moving on, I decided wear and tear I’ve gotten my $20 worth out of this side of the blades.

I vacuumed and blew the planer out with compressed air.  Looks quite clean!

Using the provided tool, I unscrewed the 4 allen screws and the lid lifts off to show you the dust shroud.

The 3 red T bolts are easily unscrewed by hand, showing you the planer head.

You unscrew the 8 or 9 allen bolts from the blade hold down. ( I figured out before this that I would have a hard time knowing which side of the blades were dull or sharp, so I actually rotated the head around, and put some marks from a black sharpie on the ‘dull’ side of each reversible blade.)

Then you lift off the black metal blade hold down, and you can see the blade itself.

Then you can use the backside of the Allen wrench tool, which contains magnets, to lift out the blade.  I took the time to wipe down (carefully! The blade is sharp! the accumulated sawdust and gunk that had worked itself into the blade and hold down cover over the last year or two.  Here you can see the sharpie marks reminding which side of the blade is dull.

I then went back and cleaned the blade-less planar head of accumulated dust and gunk.  I gave the whole thing a good vacuuming out, just for the sake of being complete.

Assembly is just the same as the teardown, but in reverse.  I fired it back up and put a light pass on some Sipo.  Good as new!

I decided I wanted a permanent solid fence for the table, with adjustable stop blocks.  I decided to to put on a laminate surface there too, since I still had plenty.

I doubled up some more 3/4″ MDF, for the fence, and the base, as well as some support blocks to keep that fence a perfect 90 degrees to the table, and to resist any flexing.

First I glued on some more laminate, and doubled up the MDF.

I then prepared the back section and the support blocks.   I’ve actually pre-drilled the holes for the T-track hold downs.

I got in the groove, and as usual, forgot to take enough photos.    Once I had the pieces all dried out, I routed out another T-track channel in the face of the fence to control the stop blocks.    Just a 5/16th straight bit followed by a T-Track bit.     Then I glued and clamped up the 2 pieces together.  Once I had good adhesion, I took the fence to the drill press table, and fitted it, then I traced out just enough room so that the drill press lever can swing down and tap the fence, which I outlined on the fence.

Some quick work with the bandsaw and the oscillating spindle sander, and I gave my drill press lever free reign!

At this point, the table is already quite usable, but I’m going to create a few stop blocks so that I can make nice repeatable cuts.

Ran out of star knobs for the T bolts, so its off to Rockler for me.

Fin!

First, I grabbed my block plane and smoothing plane, and cleaned up my recent banding addition.  It came out quite good looking.

With a recent post to Woodnet pointing out you can get fairly cheap T-Track from McMaster-Carr, and myself in possession of a new Freud LU90M blade, I decided to completely overdo the top with T-track for fence and hold down positions.   Whee!

First up, dado up some grooves.

I also decided I wanted my intersections to be nice and neat.  No fiddling and moving holdowns.  I wanted to go right around corners, so I spent some time mitering nice neat junctions.

And finally, trimmed the ends and filed it smooth to the edges.

And finally, bolted back in place, with a holdown for show.

That’ll do it for today.  The fence can wait for tomorrow.

I must warn you, this post gives you a good view into my skewed mind sometimes when it comes to the off the cuff way I approach the design aspects of projects.   I bolted down the new table, and then offset it slightly from where I wanted the final position to be.   I’m using a round ZCI, so that I can just turn it slightly, without replacing the whole insert.  The idea was completely stolen from a nice fellow on Woodnet whose name I cannot currently remember.  I loaded up a circle cutter, picked a fairly random size (bad move #1) and drilled it out a full 3/4″ so that I won’t hurt the table too much if I overdrill or forget to set the depth stop in the future.

This gave me a nice clean hole.

Of course, now I realized I’ve got to figure out a way to make a nice perfect circular insert.  In retrospect, If I had made a round template to start, I could have cut both the ZCIs and the hole in the table quite simply.   So I had to work backwards and make a template based on an existing hole…

So, I started with a quick hardboard template, so I don’t have to muscle the table around the shop.  One hand router and a flush cut template bit later…

Then, to actually USE the template, I needed to add double collar size of the template system to the size of the template, which the rabbeting bit provided quite handily.  (Original template double stick taped to template #2)

With this, I was able to cut out a couple of sample ZCIs quite easily.  I wanted them to rotate with only finger pressure, so I did sand the edges down a bit on the first one.

The plain MDF edge of the table wasn’t very pretty though.  I decided to use some scrap sapele to band the table.  A few mitre cuts later, I clamped it in place.  I think this may be the first time I’ve ever actually hit a nice tight mitre fit on the first try.   I glued it in place and called it a night.

One weakness I discovered during my Roubo build was the ability to set up nice clean repeat drilling on my drill press, and the difficulty with workholding.  I nearly stopped halfway through to build a drill press table, but decided I just didn’t have the room to stop, so I made do with a lot of bits of scrap wood clamped all over the table and to each other.

Now that I’ve put the bench into the field, I decided to scratch this particular itch next.   I grabbed a piece of spare 3/4″ MDF, some laminate, and went to work, with no particular plan in mind.  I started by guestimating I wanted a table roughly 24×18″ or so, given the space in my shop where the drill press is, thats about as big as I can get without interfering with neighboring tools.  Any larger probably can’t be properly stabilized by the drill press’s stock cast iron table anyway.   I wanted to give the table sufficient strength, so I decided to laminate up two pieces.

First though, I wanted to ensure I had a good way to both hold it down, and adjust it later if necessary.  The stock CI drill press table has some X shaped channels, so I made 2 parallel channels that overlapped them roughly in the middle, giving me 4 solid contact points.

I routed out 2 parallel grooves 5/16″,  and followed with my T-Track hold down bit.  4 T bolts, and washers and nuts, and this clamps down solidly.  The drill press moves before the table does.

I used some spare white laminate from previous projects. (boy, one of those 4×8 sheets lasts you for years!)  Out comes the vacuum press and I called it a night.