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Thursday, May 29th, 2003
I'm building a sandbox for Sylvia and I came up with a pretty neat technique for marking the screw holes. The sides of the box are going to be 2X4's screwed together to make a wall 3½" wide and 7½" tall, with a 2X6 on top to provide a wider ledge. Reducing sanding work requires that I get the boards aligned as well as possible when I am screwing them together. There is an offset in the length of the boards so that the walls will interlock at the corners. So: I made a story stick as long as the length of the walls, excluding the corners. I marked the stick with 6 points, 3 pairs of points about an inch apart and roughly equidistant along the length of the stick. I used my marking gauge to scribe a line down the center of each board and marked the end which will be going into a corner with an "X". Then I transferred the marks from the story stick to each board, working from the end with no "X"; one of each pair I marked "x" and the other "o"; the "x"'s are to be screwed into and the "o"'s are to receive the heads of screws. Each top board got only "o"'s, each bottom board only "x"'s. Now I'm all set to go! The only worrisome point now is that the through holes, those that receive the head of a screw, need to be quite square to the surface of the board. I was thinking I would use the drill press here but on second thought that does not seem to make sense. I believe I will just try my best with the hand drill.
posted afternoon of May 29th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, May 26th, 2003
Today I put stones in the back yard to make a path between the lawn and the driveway. They were slate that I took out of the ground at the back of the garage. Very thick, about 2", so I dug holes of the appropriate shape to receive them. It worked out very well -- although a couple of them rock very slightly, I am thinking that will go away after they get walked on some. If not, I will take them up and redo. I am seeing this as practice for the back patio, which is going to be a huge project. Maybe I will do that during my August vacation. For that I need to: measure the area of the patio; buy stones and sand; take up the old stones; level the ground; put the old and new stones down.
posted evening of May 26th, 2003: Respond
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Sunday, May 11th, 2003
Mom and Dad have been visiting this weekend, I have been doing a lot of yard work with help and direction from Dad. We discovered a big climbing rose bush against the back fence, behind all the underbrush there, much of which we cleared away. There are also a whole lot of a plant that the man from Rutgers Co-op Extension says is honeysuckle -- we took some clippings from 4 plants in to the county fair to see what they are, and though the Master Gardener was not there, the person on hand was able to speculate some. Also, some weirdo took a flower pot off of our front porch -- everyone thinks it was taken to be used as a Mother's Day present.
posted evening of May 11th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, May third, 2003
Well I let the moment slip last weekend and did not finish the shoe rack... So I was all set to do it this morning. Brought the rack out to the driveway, with brushes, thinner, alcohol, everything I needed, except varnish -- the varnish I was confident was in a box in the garage, where I had packed it away when we moved. But when I looked there I was sorely disappointed. I started the search; combed the garage, the basement, nothing -- did some other yard work, then went over the search again -- still nothing. I was getting kind of upset; Ellen offered to look and she had a little better luck, discovering a bottle of Behlen's master-gel; this was not what I had planned to use but it should work. So I started trying to open it and discovered it was welded fast by old dried finish. After a lot of fretting, I hit on drilling it open; over to the drill press and I took a nice ½" circle out of the lid. Great! But alas, I went to use it and found the entire contents of the bottle had dried solid. Not actually too surprising as it's been open for a year and a half or more. But I was back to square one. The day went by, and eventually I found an opening to drive over to the hardware store and get new varnish. I went to Main Street Hardware in West Orange, a place I've had my eye on for a couple of weeks, and was glad I did -- it is all I want a hardware store to be. Home Depot will play less of a role in my life now. Got some Minwax Spar Urethane and after dinner I put it on the rack! Tomorrow morning I will do a second coat and that will be the end of that project. And meantime, this morning I started to draw up plans for my next project, a breakfast nook. More on that later...
posted evening of May third, 2003: Respond
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My hobbies of reading and woodworking have intersected in a nascent new collection, of old (Victorian era) books about carpentry and house-building. So far I have George Ellis' Modern Practical Joinery (1902, by coincidence the year our house was built) and Modern Practical Stairbuilding (1913?), plus Steven Sloan's Victorian Buildings (1850's) and one or two others. Today I found out my friend Janice has passed down from her father two books by Fred Hodgson, one of which, Practical Uses of the Steel Square (1903) I have heard recommended several times on woodworking web sites. She loaned it to me so I will be finding out more about squares in the coming days.
posted evening of May third, 2003: 1 response
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Friday, May second, 2003
It's been Spring for a couple of weeks now in South Orange, the flowering trees massively in bloom; but I've been waiting for leaves on the larger trees to come. This morning it looks like they are finally here! Almost all the trees have foliage coming in. In our yard, the little tree that may or may not be dogwood has buds; and the bush in our front yard sprouted hundreds of crimson flowers all at once a few days ago. I de-ivied that little tree a week and a half ago; and last night I cut the last trunk of ivy off our big maple tree -- there are now about 8 feet of visible trunk before the ivy infestation starts. My dad thinks if I give it a couple of months, all that ivy above the cleared section -- which is no longer getting any nourishment from below -- will dry up and be relatively easy to remove. Update: Ellen informs me the crimson bush is an azalea; also there is one in our back yard, which I noticed this (Saturday) morning is coming out in buds the same way. I'm thinking it may have gotten buds a few days later because there is less sun; but that is pure speculation.
posted morning of May second, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, May first, 2003
Well tonight I was working in the yard and I noticed, the hose hook I installed last weekend was pulling the siding away from the wall. Oh no! I thought I had screwed through the siding into the stud -- come to find out, when I pulled that siding away, I had screwed through the siding into air -- there is a gap of about ½" between the siding and the stud. What to do, what to do? I ended up cutting a rabbet in the end of that piece of siding so it would fit over the end of the piece around the corner from it -- that seemed to work ok but now I need to seal it.
posted evening of May first, 2003: Respond
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I've got things pretty well back into shape. The links were all lost so I will have to rebuild them by hand, not too hard to do but a pain anyway.
posted afternoon of May first, 2003: Respond
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Well I came up with a cool idea for how the site data should be physically organized -- a script to put that organization into effect -- ran it and bang, it deleted all my posts! So I'm trying to get them back, meanwhile the links are not going to be there, sorry.
posted afternoon of May first, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2003
With regards to my previous post, I want to flesh out the idea of limiting information content in order to increase bandwidth. Actually -- well I guess its accurate to say "I want to flesh out" this concept -- but not sure it is currently within my ability to do so. This must be an existing meme though -- if you have any recommendations for reading on this subject, please contact me.
posted afternoon of April 29th, 2003: Respond
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