Colgate EALL (13)

Well, though this video covers ground already detailed in the last two posts, being at last edited and narrated, it seemed worth sharing:

I did my first trip out to Colgate this past few days to install some woodwork. I got into ‘worker bee’ mode while there and didn’t take a lot of photos, but I hope a few is better than nothing.

Here, in the Japanese room, I’ve mocked up the arrangement of the wainscot panel with some plant-on inside corner posts, and a piece of baseboard:

There’s a 2-piece cap to be fitted to the baseboard yet of course.

I’m using 1/4″ (actually measures 0.2″) plywood with one side faced with VG fir. I hesitated to employ plywood, but it was the best option it seemed to me for an appliqué which needs to be thin, and given the difficulty/expense of obtaining VG fir at this time. As you can see, the bamboo floor laminate has been installed in that room and the upper portion of wall has been painted.

My main task in the Japanese room was fitting the various plant-on posts – here’s a look at another area of the same room:

Excuse the dust spots on the lens. The posts, now that they have been trimmed to length, were taken back to my shop afterward, to have yet more cut out done upon them.

The Chinese space at the other end of the connecting hallway saw the installation of the framed bump-out which in turn will later receive a cusped window:

The framing had been largely done in my shop ahead of time, save for final length. I used 2×6 spruce studs, and sheetrock. Not materials I would normally want to use, but they make sense when you are affixing to that same sort of wall system, though the existing framing uses steel studs not wood. I put some drywall compound on the exposed screw holes, and will leave the rest of that work to Colgate’s plastering/painting workers.

Speaking of attaching the framing, I had brought some Spax screws with me for the task, which are advertised on the box as being for various materials, including steel, however I only had luck getting them into the steel framing studs at the bottom of the wall. Of course, when I was atop a ladder and struggling to get the screws in, they stubbornly refused to do their job. I ended up having to go out to a building supply and obtain some self-drilling drywall screws. That really was the only hiccup during this install.

Leaving the site work for the moment, as regards the cusped window, it is made. I elected to use a chunk of bubinga that I had for that. The sides of the frame were made with a pair of pieces joined at a slight mitre angle, with a glued spline joint inside. Here’s my glue-up fixture for that task:

A pair of wedges at each end pushed the two segments together. It worked well.

Once the gluing was done, the parts were marked out in preparation for band-sawing to shape:

Here’s a look at the cusped window frame about halfway along the course of fabrication:

Not yet fitted in the above photo is the face frame portion, now glued on, which gives it the final appearance at the front. That’s almost done, not photographed though, and into its third coat of finish. Also completed is a framed glass panel that attaches to the back of the window via 4 magnets. a sliding panel goes behind that. I’ll install the window frame and associated parts into the opening on my next trip out to Colgate.

Also installed during the visit was the transom at the entrance to the Chinese room, which went in with a little planing and coaxing:

I did end up scratching the wall on the right and some fresh paint was removed, however there will be a bunch of electrical work done in that space and the adjacent hallway, involving cutting into the sheetrock in several places, so further plastering and painting is needed in the space regardless. I felt like I should have left a little apology note for the painters though!

I now have a slate of tasks for the next two weeks before the second installation visit. Hopefully I can complete everything in that timeframe.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way.

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Bye-bye blogger

After many frustrations in recent months on Blogger, I reached a point where Google’s ‘free’ product simply wasn’t serving me, or my readers, well at all, with particular regard to the commenting function.

In recent months, the notification of new comments on posts ceased, due to an unknown cause, and I had to visit blogger’s admin section and look for posts in a moderation queue. That got old fast.

Then there was an option to ‘upgrade’/switch my blogging identity from ‘blogger’ to ‘Google-plus’. I tried this change and discovered it had some curious outcomes:

– it allowed some folks who had been unable to successfully add comments in recent months to post now able to do so – yay!

– I now found comments on posts from months back, submitted by readers via Google Plus, which I had never seen nor received notification about. My apologies to those readers, like Ward in Seattle. I wasn’t ignoring you – I never received any notification, and the comments you made only seemed to exist in the Google Plus universe.

– when a reader comments via Google Plus the post author (me) is NOT given any notification as to whether a comment was left. And this applies to any post on this blog, going back, in this case, some 1020 posts back to 2009. The only way I would discover that someone had left a comment on an old post was by manually scrolling through the summary page for all 1020+ posts, and I’d have to do that on a regular basis. It would be almost a full-time job, and a very boring one at that.

-worst of all, on Google plus, there is no comment moderation, leaving my blog wide open to abusive comment content, x-rated comment content, or just the run-of the mill spam which comes in daily. No way that would work for me, and readers here I’m sure are not looking for that sort of thing either.

– if comments were made by readers with Google Plus, then reader without Google plus would be unable to see them. If i reverted back to ‘blogger’ identity instead of Google Plus, all comments left by google plus readers would be lost.

So, digging in deeper and finding these issues in blogger seem to be more of a feature than a bug, and Google isn’t in any particular hurry to do anything about it, I decided enough was enough, and though it costs me money to have the blog hosted here, at least I have ownership of the content, which is not the case with the Blogger platform, in which Google owns all your content. Whenever the product is free, then you are the product, as they say.

I’m so annoyed at google that I am thinking of canning all my Google accounts, including Youtube, gmail, and stopping using Google as a search engine. We’ll see how far I feel like taking it – for now, I’m happy to be here, and look forward to posting new content. I’ve placed a redirect on my old blogger site, so hopefully you will automatically land here when you visit the old site. Please update your bookmarks accordingly. And thanks for your steady readership! My apologies to all who were inconvenienced/annoyed/puzzled, or simply struggled trying to leave comments previously on blogger. Those problems are now in the past. Onward and upward.

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PVC Dust Catcher

PVC Dust Catcher

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Garden Structures Update

A few years ago, in May of 2013 to be more precise, I created some planting beds and trellises for our family garden plot in the community garden space.

Here is a listing of those posts, in case you missed them

Tower of Power

Trellis All About It

Trellis All About It (II)

Trellis All About It (III)

Trellis All About It (Conclusion)

Three months after installation of the Jatobá trellis, I did an update:

Three months On Garden Update

And now it seems, 5 years on, another update is in order. As I explained at the time of making the trellis, these garden structures, while ostensibly for containing dirt and supporting climbing plants, are really a laboratory of sorts for me, to get a chance to observe how certain woods and certain kinds of joints do over time in the harsh conditions of the outdoors. Save for exposed end grain, none of the wood is painted or ‘sealed’ or has any finish other than what my plane leaves behind.

I am convinced that the hand planed finish does the best outdoors and all other attempts to apply coatings are simply doing nothing to make the wood last longer and just giving you a new bit of maintenance work to do, so I don’t bother. Planed is best, though I will note that the Black locust boards were not hand planed, but just machine planed, IIRC.

First up is an overview pic, showing all the structures in the garden:

As you may note, if you looked over the previous build threads, the black locust garden beds are now elevated, while they were, prior to this year, sitting right in the dirt. The reason for this is largely to combat Meadow Voles, which are now well established in the community garden and which caused a couple of my beds last year to really underperform. I’m not a care and share sort of fellow when it comes to rodents. So, this spring, I dug all the dirt out of the beds, re-leveled the ground, laid down some galvanized hardware cloth with a ½" mesh, then placed a perimeter of CMU’s, aka cinder blocks, around the edge, and then placed the wooden beds back on.

This should keep the voles out, and as a benefit the beds have twice as much soil and require less stooping to tend. It also allowed me to see the condition of the black locust a little more clearly.

This picture shows what might be a typical condition:

The black locust was purchased green, the only option in N. America it seems, and has undergone a fair amount of distortion, cracking and movement over the years. This was to be expected - the multiple through-tenons though have held on quite well, which is good to see.

Black locust is famed as an extremely durable wood in contact with the soil, with people stating that fenceposts can go 50 years in the ground, and so forth, but I am a bit underwhelmed so far. One bed in particular is undergoing significant degrade and rot:

The diagonally-opposite corner of the same bed also shows that it is rotting away, much faster than anticipated:

That’s a big disappointment. The other two locust beds aren’t nearly as bad, but they are still more deteriorated than I would have expected. Still, the locust, at $4.50/bd.ft., was cheaper than most other options in rot-resistant species, but still, I’m not sure I will be inclined to use it again, unless I could find it properly dried. Hah, good luck with that.

The Jatobá trellis, on the other hand, shows zero signs of rotting, and is holding together well, though the wood movement of this species overall is a bit on the high side it seems to me:

The Jatobá does not accept/retain end grain paint well, and does not degrade with much in the way of end-grain checking, so I guess in future I could skip the paint step with that material.

Next is the Spanish cedar pyramidal trellis with teak cross pieces fastened with stainless screws:

That’s doing really well, with no appreciable degrade save for the usual weathering to silvery grey.

The last one to look at is the newest bed, completed in the past couple of weeks in my spare time:

I’ve noticed that different woods have different abilities to retain end grain paint, with Jatobá being noticeably poor in this respect, and Honduras mahogany the most excellent. The new bed is made from teak, which is oily and difficult to glue, but which should last very well outdoors. I used a special epoxy for oily woods and sealed the end grain with that, then applied a clear coat epoxy with white pigment over that. It will be interesting to see how well it holds up over the years.

The corner joints are a place where various joinery options present themselves. I was briefly tempted to do a double-mitered half lap, but that joint, it seems to me, has certain vulnerabilities, so I went with triple rod tenons and 6 shachi-sen fasteners, making the corner joint using a separate nose piece:

I think this should hold together well, but we’ll see of course.

A view of a different corner:

A little gappy on that upper rod mortise, but I made these joints at a high rate of speed, and not the normal care I would take with furniture or architectural joinery. Nothing to see here folks, just move on….

The other outdoor wood/joinery experiment I have going on is the shrine lantern in my front yard, which is of Honduran mahogany and currently looks a bit forlorn:

There is a landscape maintenance crew which looks after the front yards in our community and last year a less-than-attentive mower operator, no longer with the company, caught the corner of the roof of the lantern head and tore it partially off, creating quite a bit of damage. I took the lantern head off last fall and brought it to my shop but I just haven’t had the time to deal with it yet. I need to make a new roof altogether.

I noticed of late that the support framing for the head was also damaged, so I have to take another layer off yet and fix a couple of sticks:

Hoping to get to that work before the summer is gone. Sigh! Otherwise, the mahogany is clearly the champion in terms of withstanding the elements.

All for this time - thanks for visiting.

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