Shop Week
A new tradition?
I don’t like to stop doing my “main task” in favor of sidequests unless I have to. Usually if making a tool would make something easier, I’ll make that tool afterwards, for next time, rather than stop the current work and make said tool.
Well this week was the time to do all of that (or nearly.) I completed two projects, a third is useful but incomplete, and the fourth is barely begun.
Shooting Board 2
Let me explain why I need a new shooting board. It only helps me make 90 degree cuts, and sometimes I want to shoot other angles. But also it’s just really terrible:
The new one is built with much nicer plywood, an adjustable fence, and is generally just better all around:
This can shoot any angle between about 95 degrees and 45 degrees. I could easily make it go more acute than 45 but I probably can’t go much more obtuse than 95. This is my own design. I took a friends design (who has a curve in his fence like mine) and some popular adjustable fence designs I’ve seen online (that have multiple holes, like mine) and put them together to allow a reasonably sized fence and a broad set of options for shooting.
Saw Horse 6
This is the sixth sawhorse I’ve made (first two, second two, and the fifth). The one it replaces is not totally gone, but it’s close. That fifth saw horse got stretchers for strength, this one gets a medial stretcher for even more strength.
These videos show the strength of the fourth, fifth, and sixth sawhorses. (In the fourth you can see the final leg is pretty loose; the ticking clock for making this new sawhorse.)
This last sawhorse, when being wobbled, actually shakes the whole benchtop. Nice.
The short stretchers are oak, the medial stretcher is ash. The legs are douglas fir and the straight leg is oak. The body is douglas fir. I would have used softer wood for stretchers (like I did for the fourth) but the medial stretcher means too many duty cycles on those little tenons:
On top of the medial stretcher, I took pains to ensure that the two newer sawhorses are the same height (the others had been mismatched all along, which is incredibly annoying.)
