What did you do today

[Tom&Shelly]

We've been in Upstate New York for about six weeks, and haven't had a vacation yet. Still getting my Mom's house ready for sale. Should go on the market early next week. We have a team of handymen doing the difficult fixes while Shelly cleans and I repaint the garage door and exerior windows. (If anyone is interested in a 5 bedroom, 2 bath colonial near Binghamton NY, PM me!)

Dad bought this drawing board, used, nearly 60 years ago (I barely remember the purchase) and used it as a workbench



It tilts, but he left it flat and eventually added a drawer. Not sure how old it is, but the metal pieces look like they could have been made in a blacksmith shop. I've seen a few similar drawing boards, but none as big. This one is 3 x 5 feet.

Yesterday, I took it apart, and we're hoping to take it back to Albuquerque along with the workbench I mentioned above, and lots of other junk. It'll be a real challenge fitting everything into our Tundra, while also keeping the camping gear handy to use on the way home!

I'm thinking this bench will make a great second layout table and sanding station in our wood working shop.

Tom

[tony.latham]

Me? Took the new truck camping.







Thank goodness we had the Propex.

Tony

[gudmund]

good looking "NEW PU" !!!! enjoy.............

[delta fred]

Worked on my teardrop (based on a Benroy).

The chassis and floor are from an 40 year old trailer tent, the canvas or which has seen better days.
The sides are the old (marine ply) beds which set the length so the floor and the chassis have been shortened by 80mm (3 1/8"). I'm waiting for the paint to dry on the chassis before I can final fit the floor.

No photos yet as who wants to look at a chassis.

[Tom&Shelly]

After 2 months of painting, cleaning, and hiring professionals to paint and clean, we put my folk's house on the market today.



My Dad would have loved the drone the photographer used! He flew RC model airplanes for years, and we sometimes experimented with short take off and landing aircraft that could fly out of there. The power lines always defeated that effort.

Sure hope no one gets ideas about putting an offer in on that teardrop in the back yard!

I painted the garage door. At this distance and resolution, it looks okay, if I do say so myself. We've been told to get an FHA loan, there can be no pealing paint, so we fixed that.

Tom

[MickinOz]

Haven't posted for a while. Life got in the way.
Had a good day yesterday. I know a bloke who owns a gigantic paddock that is home to a WWII bombing practice range.
The target circle is 200 yards in diameter.
So yesterday, a quick text message yielded the written permission one needs to shoot on property owned by someone else, and my mate and I spent the afternoon using up some Winchester 0.223 target ammo I no longer use in competition.
Despite 20 mile per hour winds, and a rifle sighted for a 200 yard zero, and shooting off a rickety camping table, we managed to shoot 1 minute groups of 3 at 100 yards.
So, happy enough with the centrefire.
I want to compete in a 100 yard 0.22 rimfire shoot next Saturday. We managed, after a bit of sights adjustment on my old Chinese Norinco I inherited from Dad, to produce 1 inch 5 round groups at 50m, with the wind roughly at our backs. So I'm thinking, when I go for 100yds/90m at the range, I should be OK unless the wind goes boonta again.

Range.JPG (112.34 KiB) Viewed 2279 times

Stewie with the XPR.JPG (93.48 KiB) Viewed 2279 times

[MickinOz]

Well, the practice day paid off.
The rifle club hosted a "double bunny" shoot yesterday.

Morning event was 200 yards, open for any hunting rifle. Really anything other than a dedicated target rifle.
The target is an outline of a bunny about 8 inches long printed on A4 paper. It has a more normal target overlaid. The ten ring is about 1 minute of angle. So a touch over two inches in diameter.
If you hit the bunny, you score according to the ring you land in. However, you might land in the 9 ring, but be just above the bunny's back or just under his belly and score nothing.
Maximum possible score is 200 points, 20 rabbits.

The afternoon event is similar, but conducted at 100 yards. Instead of scoring rings the bunny silhouette has a circle on the head about 1.5 inches in diameter, and one about 2.5 inches in diameter on its butt.
Hit the bunny, get 10 points, except if you shoot it in the butt they only give you 9 points. As well, they count the number of head shots landing in the circle on its head.
So maximum possible score is 200 points, 20 head shots. This one is for 0.22 rimfire rifles only.

15 shooters attended the morning shoot. Some brought rather odd guns that were never going to produce high scores. e.g. one guy had a 0.458 x 2 inch.
Another guy had a folding Chiappa Little Badger in 0.17 HMR with open sights, no scope.
He got on paper a few times, but not a big score.
Well, I was the only guy to hit the bunny the maximum possible 20 times. So I came first with 189 points and 20 bunnies.

In the afternoon, I again managed to nail the bunny 20 times, but only got 6 head shots. Thus, I relegated myself to 4th place in the afternoon.
I was unable to get the scope on the 0.22 to adjust for windage. Found myself aiming at the left edge of the paper to get bullet in the bunny. This would be a pain in the butt in an actual hunt. I might have to buy a new scope, I think.

For my first ever 20 bunnies in the 200 yard shoot, the club captain awarded me the "Wascally Wabbit" trophy. This is a tiny statue of Elmer Fudd.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=525 ... 2207520000

[Modstock]

Sounds like fun. After Halloween we usually go blast our pumpkins full of holes.

Sent from my SM-A115AP using Tapatalk

[Tom&Shelly]

Today I reassembled the workbench I took apart two months ago and brought back from New York. Only a few misteps along the way. I almost looked at the pictures I took as I disassembled it, but that was too much like reading the instructions.



I also replaced the rusty 1/4-20 bolts with new ones, and the square nuts with hex nuts. (Why did they think square nuts and slotted screws were a good idea 60 years ago?)

This workbench will be the sanding station in our wood shop. It's near the back garage door, so on nice days we can open it and politely ask the saw dust to leave. That Fox Shop drill press has a funny feature: You can put in a rubber belt in the works and as it spins the chuck oscillates slowly up and down, so it can be used as a spindle sander. We already have a Central Machinery floor standing production drill press with Jacob's chuck replacing the original, so we don't need this one as a drill press. (Once you replace the original chuck a production level Harbor Fraught drill press is very suitable for non-production home use.)

One of these days I want to try making a 12 inch disk sander, and that will live on, or near, this bench as well.

We got home on Friday and saw our first snow today, followed by an interesting rainbow. Is the pot of gold on the right or left side? Because that right side lands right at the bottom of the driveway!



Tom

[Tom&Shelly]

Today, Shelly's and my Christmas presents for each other arrived early!



They are a Proxxon mini-chop saw, and mini-table saw, mostly for Shelly's doll house furniture making business/hobby. But they are also useful for any small detailed work. (We already have a full size compound miter saw and table saw for big work.) Actually, I thought I bought these for Shelly's Christmas and birthday presents (her birthday was in late December, 20 some years ago), but no, she assures me we bought these for each other and therefore I still owe her a birthday gift. She's suggesting replacing the filament printer we currently have with a Bambu. News to me that one can print bamboo, but OK. Evidently, she has some issues with maintaining alignment of the old one, so an upgrade is in order.

In recent days we also finally found a space for my uncle's machine lathe



We wanted to make sure we had its home selected before we moved it out of the Tundra bed. Too heavy to move more than once! For that reason, we decided the work bench closest to the garage door is going to be the metal working bench from now on. (There is room on the other side for a small milling machine--hint for any family members reading this.)

Now that I have a free lathe, I'll need a few hundreds of dollars worth of accessories to make it worthwhile.

To make room for all the new (to us) tools, I decided to re-organize the hardware, from laying haphazardly on the work benches to being filed in some logical order in the cabinets we've had for several years for just such a purpose



The parts bins came from various garage and estate sales, but be careful if you go this route yourselves. They often come filled with yet more valuable hardware, causing you to get further behind the organization curve!

The Husky cabinets only come with three shelves each and they only allow for those to be installed at a few different heights. So I made cleats out of milled 8x2 scrap left over from the faux cabin build, and made shelves out of 1/4 inch C-C plywood that I bought intending to use it in the teardrop, back when I thought the lumber yard was being honest in calling it A-C plywood.



At the rate I'm going, hopefully the shop will be all reorganized and everything set up to start projects a little before I'm too old to enjoy it!

Tom

[noseoil]

This guy has been hanging around the house. Lots of ladies are coming around with their friends & the big boy is watching, waiting, shredding trees & bushes & doing a lot of "sniff sniff & a big whiff" stuff now. The rut is nearly here, or it's starting already...

[Tom&Shelly]

Just a quick follow up on the hobby tools (in case anyone is interested in buying one). I have a few minor concerns about the Proxxon table saw:

The aluminum table itself is not quite flat. The problem is that there are four screws holding it down, and there are T slots cut in the table. The screws tend to make the table bend at the slots. Perhaps 1/64 of an inch on the left side, but it's visibly not perfect.

The slide out extension on the left is interesting. It isn't quite level with the table, maybe 1/16 inch too low. Also, there is a flip down leg that doesn't quite reach the workbench.

The blade safety guard is frustrating and in the way, as are many full size table saw safety guards. Well, we all know the solution to that one. (They call the attached riving knife a "splitting wedge", which maybe is what they call it in Europe? I have a completely different tool by that name that I would use when splitting wood if I had any biceps at all, and didn't have a log splitter.) Shelly found an alternative safety guard on Thingaverse, so she'll print it on her new Bambu printer, and we'll give that a try, even though, she tells me, there are words on there that say "DO NOT USE" just to cover their assets. (She also found a zero clearance plate and a cross-cut sled, so we'll try those too.)

Proxxon suggests using the auxiliary stop on the slide out extension as a fence. It worked okay, but I don't think there is a way to align it to be parallel to the blade. I'm worried about kickback here.

The actual fence (Proxxon calls it a longitudinal stop) is a bit frustrating, for the same reasons some full size table saw fences are frustrating; tightening it down (with two knobs) tends to cause it to rotate so it isn't quite parallel with the blade. When checking alignment with my machinist rule, the blade guard gets in the way.

The blade tilts and the system is weighted so it wants to tilt. Again, when checking, the blade guard gets in the way. There is a knob to tighten the blade to 90 degrees, but I'm afraid it will tend to go out of true, particularly after a few years of wear.

Nothing that can't be worked around, as long as care is taken. There's probably some small work where I'll prefer this tool to my full size Saw Stop.

Shelly also bought some accessories from Micro-Mark for their mini-table saw that should work here. We will see...

For the Proxxon cross-cut saw, I noticed one of the safety notices in the manual says: "NEVER STAND ON TOOL". We all know what that means! Somewhere out there, there is an idiot who...

Tom

[Tom&Shelly]

Here is Shelly's new Filament 3D Printer about to print a blade guard, for the Proxxon table saw, that Shelly found on Thingaverse



She already printed a zero insert plate for the saw which works okay. After bringing the blade up through it, it required sanding to get the melted plastic off. Proxxon sent us one of theirs, but I haven't tried it to see if it has the same problem.

The printer is a Bambu Lab X1C. It prints multi-color, and Shelly has tried both ABS and PLA so far. Pretty nice, and much less alignment required than her previous printer--pretty much plug and play. On this one, there is a camera inside and she can check the progress on her telephone.

PLA requires that you keep the door cracked. Note the green door thingy she printed to do that.

Tom

[tony.latham]

Me? I'm building a new grouse gun.





Tony

[Tom&Shelly]

Me? I'm building a new grouse gun.

Tony

Cool! Looks like a flint lock?

Tom