Project Update

Attached Timer to the Track

  • Posted on: 27 February 2014
  • By: Jay Oyster

I had to get the Arduino timer mounted on the track so Liam can run some tests for his science expo before this weekend.  Wednesday, I drilled holes in the sides of the track at 25cm from the top and 30cm from the bottom to mount the 'light beam' LEDs on the right side and the photoresistor sensors on the left side (as you look from the top of the track to the bottom.) Used hot glue to position the LEDs in the holes. Then I powered the LEDs so I could see exactly where the beam of light hit the opposite rail. That's when I drilled the holes for the sensors. Then I hot glued the sensors in place.

Since I need to get Liam to do his measurements soon, I just wired the LEDs into the breadboard to feed the Arduino inputs using jury rigged wires for now. It's not pretty, but it works. I ran his pinewood derby car down the track and took the first measurement at about midnight last night! Yay!  :-) 

I'm getting approximately 1.036 seconds for it to run with no extra weight, plus or minus about 0.006 seconds. I repeated the run about 15 times and got readings from around 1.029 to 1.042 seconds. Not too shabby.

Pinewood Derby Car #1

Timer Prototype Finished

  • Posted on: 19 February 2014
  • By: Jay Oyster

February 19, 2014 - OK, I first posted on this project a couple of days ago. I've got a short window to get this working. Liam's science expo is on March 7th, and I need to complete the track (with attached timer) in time so Liam and I can run a set of experiments. So late last night, I managed to finish the prototype of the Arduino timer I plan to mount to the side of the test track. It's all breadboarded now, and I'll probably just use the prototype to run the timing for Liam. After we get some results on paper, I'll worry about turning this into a sturdy version permanently attached to the side of the track.

Layout of the prototypeThe hardware work was basically done last week. I just needed to figure out the update to the sketch to figure out how to trigger the timing code using the inputs from the two photo-resistor sensors.  The picture here shows the prototype board, as it's currently working. Click the image to enlarge it.

Timer with LCD and two LED/photoresistor pairs to detect start and stop times, with Sketch#30 running

Drawer Construction: Drawer #4 & #5

  • Posted on: 16 February 2014
  • By: Jay Oyster

February 14-16, 2014 -It just takes a long time to complete a project when you're a perfectionist and you're not that good. :-)

Drawer #5 dry fit in the middle of sizing it to fit the caseThis past weekend, I completed the dovetails on drawers #4 and #5 of the jewelry armoire project. I dry fit them, installed the drawer bottoms, and fit them to the case. That's the state in which I'm leaving each of the drawers for the moment. Working from the top of the case to the bottom, each set of dovetails gets to be a bigger job. Drawer #5 is the first with three tails on each corner.

Quality-wise, Drawer #4 was a disaster. One of the half blind corners was a fairly good job, initially, but then to get the final fit without blowing out the front, I ended up butchering one of the two tails. Driving the tails in when they're just a bit too tight ends up cracking the front of the drawer face, since I've only left about an eighth of an inch in front of these half-blinds; it can be a risky operation. Sanding down the ends of the tails slightly just prior to driving them into the drawer fronts has turned out to be a prudent step.

Drawer #5, on the other hand, turned out pretty good. Four solid corners without any major gaps in the joints. Practice does help.   --- Latest photos





Cabinet with four drawers fitted

More dovetail work - Drawers 1 and 2

  • Posted on: 22 January 2014
  • By: Jay Oyster

Although I've been fairly quiet on my website, I've actually been kind of busy around the shop. I'll talk about the other projects I've taken on elsewhere, but I wanted to post an update about my work on Adriana's jewelry cabinet.

Tools laid out on the outfeed table to work on dovetailsWhen last we met, I had dimensioned the pieces for the ten case drawers, and roughed out the tails of the drawer dovetails. That was in late November. Now I'm not moving any faster, but I am making slow and steady progress. I have to. We've been told by our landlords that we have to move out of our rental house at the end of June. And as I told my wife.  . . there is no way I'm going to move her cabinet as an unfinished thing. I *have* to be done with it by then.

After cleaning up most of the tails so they were ready to lay out the pins ( I thought I had done them all, but I found out last night that I missed some), I started right after Christmas putting together drawers. Again, it's a down side of combining parenting with a full time job and an intensive hobby like hand-tool woodworking. I put together my first dovetailed drawer in almost a year. I started with drawer 1. I'm going from the top to the bottom of the case, from the smallest drawer to the largest.

Chopping out a half blind dovetail in the drawerfront

Cutting the tails for jewelry cabinet drawers

  • Posted on: 23 November 2013
  • By: Jay Oyster

I decided to do dovetailed drawers rather than the simple rabbeted sides I had originally planned, mostly because of how well the sides and feet of this project turned out. Basically, if I had completed things in my normal crappy manner, I would have said 'screw it' by this point and opted for the simple solution.

My setup to cut dovetails on the outfeed tableThat said, I have not truly cut dovetails for almost a year. That's the key down side of being an amateur woodworker. The real skills for handwork take practice, and a hobbyist often doesn't get much. However, even given that fact, I've done enough of them over the past 3 years that I'm hoping these won't turn out horribly. (I set a high bar for myself, no?)

So I've gotten the extra poplar to make the drawer sides and backs, and the 1/4" plywood to make the bottoms, and I've thicknessed all of the drawer parts. And I opted to cut the slots for the drawer bottoms now, rather than after the side joinery is cut. I'm building these sort of the same way I've done simple boxes, and I dont' see a reason not to do that now.

Now it's time to cut the dovetails. I use what I think of as the Gochnour method, only because watching his videos on the FineWoodworking website is how I learned it.  I could just as well call it the Klaus method or the Becksvoort method. I start by laying the tails out on the drawer sides using a combination square and a bevel. I tried out a dedicated dovetail angle marker from Veritas a couple years ago and liked them so much that I ended up getting all three, the saddle square, the 1:6 ratio, and the 1:8 ratio ones. For these, I'm using the less agressive 1:6 angles.

Clearing between dovetails with a coping saw

Cut parts for drawers

  • Posted on: 14 November 2013
  • By: Jay Oyster

Trusty Table saw and my maple push blockNow that the case is together, I"ve taken about the last week to get the parts for the drawers thicknessed and cut. The secondary wood for the case was always a 'find it when I need it' part of this project rather than something I got up-front. So I bought 4 6" poplar boards from Home Depot. Then I thinned them to 1/2" thick. This was all chop saw and table saw work. Originally, when planning the project, i was just going to put the sides into rabbets in the front and back boards, but since I've spent so much time and quality materials on the rest of the project, I decided that I have to do dovetails on the drawers. So I sized the side pieces to support that.  

Here, all of the 10 drawer parts are lined up. I won't cut the plywood drawer bottoms until I get the dovetails cut and the drawers dry fit. 

Drawer fronts, backs, and sides cut for the 10 cabinet drawers

Jewelry Armoire Case glue-up

  • Posted on: 23 October 2013
  • By: Jay Oyster

About a week ago (it takes me a while to get these updates posted sometimes), I finally took a deep breath, and took the plunge. I started gluing together the case of the jewelry cabinet. I've posted photos here of the dry fitted case, but I took it apart last month and started sanding everything. I got all of the parts into a state that satisfied me, or at least I realized I was never going to get this done if I kept dawdling.  

Case after the glue up was complete. This is the back of the cabinetThe glue-up went mostly as planned, with one hiccup. I had thought of pinning the top of each leg to the case wall using through cherry pins, but I realized that I needed more strength than that in the joint. So switched to drilling screw holes and screwing the tops of each leg to the case. In the front, the front legs only overlap the case by about 3/4", so the alignment needs to be pretty good. I missed.  One of the screws I thought i was screwing into the case, actually stuck out a bit on the front of the case. And unfortunately, I didn't see this until after the glue was dry.  So that one corner has no screw. The glue will need to hold instead.  The hole from the screw is very small and shouldn't be hard to repair. And it will also eventually be covered by the front doors of the cabinet.

Case front after the glue up

Workbench update: Finally got last leg glued up

  • Posted on: 15 October 2013
  • By: Jay Oyster

After flattening the top in August of 2012, I thought I was home free. I glued up three of the four leg laminations in another couple weeks . . .and then I tried the fourth leg.  That damned thing blocked me from progress for over a year. (Well . . . I also put this project on the back, back burner as I tried to finish up about 10 other projects I had started and half finished at that point.)  I've since cleared my backlog and am down to only three projects to work on . . .each large. So I'm working the jewelry armoire, the workbench, and the tool brackets for my wallmounted tool cabinet. I finished the first of the four large outstanding projects last month when I put the finishing touches on my chopsaw station. 

So I'm making progress on both the jewelry cabinet and finally, this past weekend, the workbench. It took me spending about an hour tweaking the hardware setup on my Jet 6" jointer, which hadn't been working right for over two years. But finally, after really reading the manual and taking the time to make sure everything was set up correctly, it suddenly started doing what it was supposed to . . . .flatten the faces of 5 1/2" wide bench leg boards.  Within a couple more hours, I had the final leg glued and in clamps.

Four legs for the workbench glued up, along with the purchased hardware

Jewelry Armoire - Finally took the plunge, glue-up

  • Posted on: 15 October 2013
  • By: Jay Oyster

Jewelry case assembly glued and in clamps (the final clamp arrangement changed slightly from this photo)On the jewelry cabinet project, I've been staring out a pile of parts for about a month now, trying to get the sanding done before I take the big step of gluing the case assembly. I finally finished sanding the case parts to my satisfaction this past Sunday, and glued the case up Sunday night. I opted to sand rather than trying to finish plane my case for two reasons.

  1. I'm still not very confident in my final planing proficiency to trust a good piece to it
  2. The quarter sawn sycamore is VERY prone to tear out, as I've discovered. So sanding seems like the safer choice.

That said, I've sanded all the case parts to 220, and then glued the case together. This presented a certain stress halfway through, when I realized that I do not, in fact, own enough long clamps to clamp all four corners of a case assembly. I ended up clamping the two sides in the middle using my two long pipe clamps, and used shorter clamps across the assembly to reinforce the side-to-side structure, although little force was needed here, since the top and bottom case pieces are attached with through tenons which do tend to prevent outward motion of the sides. :-) I did manage to verify the squareness of the assembly before the glue set, although only barely before it set.

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