• Urban Lumberjacking

    Every homeowner in the middle of a city really needs 3.5 chainsaws.  Well… maybe you only need 1, but having multiple saw options makes things a lot easier when a truck load of logs shows in in the driveway or when a tree in your yard needs to come down. 

    I have a neighbor who heats with wood and buys a couple loads of loads (5-8 cords) of wood a year.  He bucks the logs and does all the splitting in his driveway.  He is a great guy and hooked me up with a cord+ of free maple (and ¾ a cord of cedar for camp fires) last year.  We have heated the house during all the really cold and snowy nights this winter with that free wood.  As a way to be a good neighbor and to say ‘thank you’, I spent a few hours one recent weekend helping him cut a load of fir into rounds and prep for splitting.  I took one saw over to his place with a bit of gas and bar oil and cut for 3+ hours on one chain sharpening.  That would not have been possible with oak, cherry, or walnut, but the dry-ish fir cut like butter.

    A fine start to prepping for splitting
    3 hours worth of sawdust

    Speaking of saws, I currently have a stable that includes a semi-shitty Homelite 16” bar that was a $10 garage sale score that I couldn’t pass up.  I put a good chain on it and use it for limbing trees, blackberry vine annihilation, and general yard/garden jobs.  Years ago, I was given a battery powered Homelite polesaw when a neighbor moved away that I keep sharp and use it 3-4 times a year. The long reach makes pruning and trimming branches along the fence a breeze.

    I scored a free (paid for with sweat equity) 50cc Dolmar last year, which is a fine little German saw, and it is my go-to for lopping up logs/firewood rounds and for lathe bowl prep.  The Dolmar is probably my favorite saw currently and the very first one I will take if I have to lend a hand with a tree or firewood in the neighborhood.  The beast in my quiver is a new Husqvarna 576 that I paid full retail price for and meant only to be used for serious ‘bidnes like dropping trees or for milling slabs.  I have two different length bars and three types of chain for it: Rip, felling, and skip.  When the chain is fresh, you can set this baby on a log and it will eat through it just using its own weight.

    You will find all sorts of uses and projects that require a chainsaw when you own one:  For instance, instead of paying an arborist serious $$ last year, I dropped a 40’ tall holly tree that stood on the fence between me and a neighbor.  I had to put on a harness and rope up to top the thing, which I have done many times and once did it for a living for a short time. 

    This time I was like 4 months post-op from hip reconstruction though and my wife forbade me from “doing anything stupid” before she left the house to run errands. I seized the opportunity and started the cutting.  She came home earlier than I had expected and caught me 20’ up in the tree, sitting in the harness with the saw running.  Apparently, that was “something stupid” and I got in trouble. No, like real trouble and she had a fit in front of all my friends and neighbors.  I had to go inside for the day and wasn’t allowed to come out and play with the other 40-something children. 

    This was after I got caught as was putting up my toys before I had to go inside for a proper ass-chewing.

    Couple of quick points:

    A chain saw will maim or kill you if you do not use it correctly.  If you have never operated one, take a class or find a mentor, not Bob down the street that drinks beer in the front yard all summer and has a dusty saw up on a shelf in the garage. Someone that that handles a saw often and who is super safety conscience.

    Buy and use safety equipment:

    1. Saw chaps/pants
    2. Helmet
    3. Ear protection
    4. Safety glasses AND a face shield.  Wear at the same time.  Really.
    5.   Leather Gloves
    6. Good boots – preferable steel toed ones with
      thick lugged soles.  I am a Danner man, but to each his own.
    7. Know your saw, read the fuel and oil requirements – keep the manual in your shop/garage where you can refer to it.
    8. Buy a gallon of bar oil.
    9. Grab a chain sharpener and a guide and try to sharpen your chain BEFORE it needs it.
    10. Buy a gas can for your fuel/oil mix. Label it and only use it for that. a gallon can is the most practical.
    11. YouTube is your friend on a sharpening how-to.
    12. Buy a spare chain when you buy your saw and write the part number on the manual – the one that you keep as noted above.
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  • Workbench Tour from Underground Lair

    This video is a Show&Tell of my Underground Lair/Mad Scientist Lab workbench area: How it was constructed, what is it made of, and all the little bells and whistles that make it super useful. It is where I void warranties, do some leatherwork, solder, conduct some light gun repair, sketch, edit photos, solder, wood carve, 3D print, design, watch WAY too much YouTube, reload, make and edit videos, record a little music, and plot every night with my friend Brain.

    Below are links to all the parts that either I went over or that I made for the bench. I don’t get anything if you download one of my designs or if you buy something from the amazon link. I just want to share, seriously. If you do download something, take a minute to drop me a line and tell me how worked for you. If I need to tweak any of the designs or links, let me know and I will do so.

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  • Fun with Wine Corks


    Due to weather and illness, I am inside the house for a few days and decided to build a couple/three trivets out of the mass of wine corks that exist in our lives. This video goes through the steps of building one with a standard large hose clamp and how to make a really large one using a whisky barrel hoop.

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  • 3D Parts Build

    Winter is here and I have found myself working more and more on inside projects: Letterpress printing, painting, trim work, some electrical, and a god bit of 3D design and printing. Most of the latter to flesh out the workbench in my Underground Lair/Mad Scientist Lab (In our basement). The below is a some of that and more can he found here on my Thingiverse page.

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  • About Me and What I do

    My Joiner’s Bench and a picture take inside my shop in southern France

    I can do and make bunches of stuff: Everything from joinery to electronics, rough framing to leather work, sewing to crown molding, wood turning to machining, from bookbinding and letterpress to electrical, figure carving to heavy machine operation, throwing pots to painting houses, forging/blacksmithing to welding and metal fabrication. I am a rocket engineer at my day J-O-B so I have 20+ years of 2D&3D CAD design and I am a huge 3D printing, laser, and CNC machining nerd.  I wear overalls a LOT, I am a pretty fine shade tree mechanic, and a decent small boat builder.  I don’t plumb really well though.  I say dirty, vile words every time I try to fix an old galvanized pipe or have to sweat lead into a flange.

    In addition to being the son and grandson of builders and tradesmen, I am also a child of both Norm Abram and Roy Underhill.  I watched them both on PBS every Saturday after cartoons as a small child starting in something like 1981.  Their combined influence has made me value the old way of doing things without being a Luddite and I can appreciate modern cabinet shop/woodworking tools.  Case in point: I have a 3HP Powermatic 3520 lathe and would not even want to think about turning a bowl or platter on a pole lathe with a forged hook knife. On the other hand, while I have not given up a single one of my 5 routers, I found years ago that it is sometimes faster to grab an old wooden molding plane from a shelf and take care of an edge detail on piece of trim.  I can be done and dusted with the plane in the time it would take me to find the right bit an set up the router.

    I can do and make bunches of stuff: Everything from joinery to electronics, rough framing to leather work, sewing to crown molding, wood turning to machining, from bookbinding and letterpress to electrical, figure carving to heavy machine operation, throwing pots to painting houses, forging/blacksmithing to welding and metal fabrication. I am a rocket engineer at my day J-O-B so I have 20+ year of 2D&3D CAD design and I am a huge 3D printing and CNC machining nerd.  I am a pretty fine shade tree mechanic and an decent small boat builder.  I don’t plumb really well though.  I say dirty, vile words every time I try to fix an old galvanized pipe or have to sweat lead into a flange.

    In addition to being the son and grandson of builders and tradesmen, I am also a child of both Norm Abram and Roy Underhill.  I watched them both on PBS every Saturday after cartoons as a small child starting in something like 1981.  Their combined influence has made me value the old way of doing things without being a Luddite and I can appreciate modern cabinet shop/woodworking tools.  Case in point: I have a 3HP Powermatic 3520 lathe and would not even want to think about turning a bowl or platter on a pole lathe with a forged hook knife. On the other hand, while I have not given up a single one of my 5 routers, I found years ago that it is sometimes faster to grab an old wooden molding plane from a shelf and take care of an edge detail or piece of trim.  I can be done and dusted with the plane in the time it would take me to find the right bit an set up the router.

    I have a a full cabinet/boat shop, a small machine shop, an automotive garage with car lift, and a blacksmith forge in my 670 sq. ft. detached garage in a tiny quiet Seattle neighborhood.  My cute, though long suffering, wife recently let me build an underground lair/mad scientist lab in 144 sq. ft. of reclaimed basement space as well.

    Our home is a 1928 Craftsman Bungalow that we have torn to the studs and rebuilt piece by piece over a three year period and our small yard is full of fruit trees, flowers, a very large and productive garden, a couple of bee hives, and two French bulldogs running amok.

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