Corner detail — 5 by 7 inch field camera — 1992

Making things is one of the fundamental aspirations. Some people aspire to travel, read or play music — some dedicate their lives to making money — still others find their calling in dedicated service to a particular cause. One of the great joys of my life is living through a time when seemingly more and more people have found that making objects with their hands is a way to fulfill at least some of the need to find meaning in daily life. The range of skills and talents I encounter  is more and more amazing all the time. Being in Portland has only enhanced the experience. And working in a building full of creative makers had proven to be a real treat.

Craftsman 207.25530 Electric Hand Saw

I recently had the opportunity to try out this handy little skill saw on the Bungaloft remodel project. I had a few pieces of plywood to cut so I gave it a spin.

The saw has a great retro look with its all aluminum case. It has a nice feel to the aluminum handle and the switch falls right into place under your index finger. The well thought out front knob fits neatly into the palm of your hand and makes you feel like a carpenter before you have even switched on the saw. It’s plenty beefy too — good for holding down that pesky warped plywood.

The Sears Craftsman Model 207.25530 comes with a really cool, all-metal, lift-top case that includes a storage area underneath the saw for manuals, blades and tools. So, before commencing work, I consulted the blade collection to  the proper one for the task.

Finding the right blade.

Right on the back of a blade sleeve is this handy blade selection chart. Just go down the list until you find the right choice.  Looks like the Chromedge Ply Tooth blade should make the cut. Using the conveniently supplied wrench pair, I installed the blade and set up to make the first slice.  Much to their credit, Sears chose to keep the cost of the blade low by avoiding the unnecessary extravagance of carbide tips or the additional expense of providing adequate set to the steel blade teeth. So it’s useful to keep a wedge handy to prevent blade from binding in the saw kerf just in case the wood has a bit of personality.

Depth of cut adjustment

After setting blade depth with this cool, chrome-plated adjustment knob, I plugged in the saw and let her rip. The saw cut nicely with only a little bit of smoke emerging from the cut. Sure enough, the wedge came in handy to help complete the cut. All-in-all, a satisfactory experience right out of the box.

For everyone from the weekend wood butcher to the McMansionista, this tool delivers without complaint. If you can get your hands on one of these puppies you won’t be disappointed.

Re-sawing fir lumber

We’ve begun remodelling our micro-bungalow. The first order of business is to collect or build components that will be needed once demolition is under way.  Since the interior walls are eventually going away, we removed some of the fir interior trim and milled it into thick veneer for use in building the bathroom vanity.
The image illustrates the re-sawing process using my vintage Duro band saw equipped with a custom fence.  The fence has a drift adjustment that rotates the fence very nearly at the front edge of the blade to accommodate any tendency for the blade to cut right or left. There is a cam actuated lock-down lever that operates with a very light action to clamp the fence in position.
Even the small amount of trim removed thus far yielded an amazing variety of figure ranging from some unusual wavy grain to tight VG along with the usual diagonal fir grain and some not-so-tight VG as seen in the image above.

Kurt

I’ll start with this:

These cameras entailed more trickery than I had originally anticipated. (If you are a maker of things, you probably just thought to yourself “Imagine that!”) Part of that trickery evolved from my fateful decision to use a lot of curves for this design and to make them from cross-laminated, wood veneer parts.

The back of the camera includes a removable curved back and a top and bottom strip of material that becomes part of the camera’s body. The trick was to make these three parts in a way that would allow them to fit together in the same “plane” while also managing the difficulty of holding the pieces during fabrication. The next three photos show the solution I came up with.

This image shows a vacuum fixture for holding the raw part on the left, the gang saw that does the cutting and an example of a raw panel ready to be cut. A rotating fitting for the vacuum line is visible at the top of the vacuum fixture.

This view show the saw gang arbor just past the end of cut. The handle visible just to the right of the saw arbor would have been used to rotate the vacuum fixture with the part in place past the gang saw while the vac fitting on top of the fixture allows the vac tube to remain stationary. You can see the three parts along with the leftover waste strips at the top and bottom.

Once the basic fixture design was checked out, the base of the fixture was reconfigured to allow for the attachment of a dust collection/safety shroud. A standard shop vac hose connects to the port on the right side of the shroud. Just enough of the gang blade set protrudes to cut the stock without undue risk to the operator. As the parts come off of the fixture, they were taped together to keep them in grain matched sets. With this fixture setup, a whole stack of raw panels can be cut into parts (that require only light edge sanding) in a very short time.

There naturally would be many ways of doing this but my particular procedure reflects my own experience and the tools and machines available to me. I am fortunate to have an Aciera milling machine in the shop (that should be a post!) so this procedure was largely driven by the milling machine mode of working.