Woodshop Setup - Planer and Jointer

As I mentioned in the previous post the desire to build a simple coffee table quickly turned into a headlong dive into woodworking that by necessity started with the aquisition of tools. I quickly learned that in order to build anything decent at a reasonable cost I would need to be able to start with rough sawn lumber and joint and plane it myself (for details on this process see the links at the end of this post). I immediately began scouring craigslist for good deals on a used planer and jointer and within a few days found a pretty good deal on a 15" planer.

It is a import clone of a delta DC-380 probably made on the same factory line as the Grizzly G0550. It came without a stand so I built up a quick mobile base out of 2x lumber I had laying around and some cheap harbor freight casters. Since the planer has a 2HP 220V motor I needed to wire up a 220V outlet in the garage. I managed to get that done without electrocuting myself and was finally able to test out the planer. The first few boards I ran through it came out rougher than they went in so I figured it was time to change the knives and give it a tune-up. It came with 2 extra sets of knives so I got to work installing the new knives and adjusting everything as described here.

Above you can see the quick and dirty jig I made to hold the dial indicator over the cutter head. This allowed me to ensure that all 3 knives were set to within about 0.001" of and inch of the same height. The original knives were off by as much as 0.070" from each other which goes a long way to explaining the initial poor performance. I then created a jig to hold the dial indicator above the planer bed to measure the heights of the feed rollers, chipbreaker, etc... and then used that to adjust everything to the recommended settings outlined in the link above. Again everything was way off so it was no surprise it was cutting poorly. With fresh knives and everything aligned properly I ran a few scraps with much better results.

I now had a decent planer but still hadn't found any deals on a jointer. A few came and went on craigslist but all the good deals were gone before I could get to them. By chance I found out a guy at work had a Craftsman 6" jointer sitting in his garage that he wasn't using as much as he planned so I began trying to talk him into letting me take it off his hands :) Eventually he caved in and sold it to me. It was previously owned by another coworker of ours so it was in really nice shape. It was dead flat and well setup so I just added some casters to the base and called it good.

At 6" the jointer is a bit on the small side but I should be able to true-up boards 6" wide by about 5 or 6 feet long and I think that should cover most everything I can think of building at this point. I should now be able to turn rough lumber in perfectly flat and square stock by following the procedure illustrated in this video: Part 1 and Part 2

1810 Bathroom Complete...Now What?

So I just realized that I never posted an update after finishing the bathroom remodel. I ended up getting it done the first week of February just in time for the refinance appraisal. The appraisal went well and all the work I've done to the place bumped up the value quite a bit. The refi is now done and I am happy to now have a mortgage at 5% rather than the 6.675% I had before :)

Here is the final result.

So now that the bathroom is done what's next? I decided to take a break from remodeling and work on a few other things I've been wanting to do. The first that came to mind is building a new coffee table. The coffee table I have now is a piece of fine furniture that I inherited from Lon after he moved out. It was hand crafted by his dad out of scrap lumber and drywall screws and was also one of echo's favorite chew toys when he was teething so its anything but pretty.

I really do love this table...but its gotta go :)

After deciding that this would be my next project I realized that I had never actually done any real woodworking so I started reading up on building furniture. Well it turns out that in order to build something I would be happy with it was going to take a significant investment in tools and things sort of snowballed into me setting up a full wood shop in the garage. Ever since building speaker boxes in highschool I've always wanted to do more real woodworking so I'm considering this an investment that I will use and keep for the rest of my life...at least thats how I'm justifying it now. Stay tuned for more details on the tools I've aquired and their setup and eventually the construction of the coffee table.

1810 Bathroom Part 6 - Grout, Toilet, and Vanity

I was hoping to make a lot of progress this weekend and I actually got more done than I planned. The tile is grouted, the toilet and vanity are installed, and the new door is stained and sealed with 2 coats of polyurethane. Here are the pictures to prove it:

Friday night I started by removing the plastic spacers and scraping the excess thinset from the grout joints with a box cutter. I then went over everything with the shop-vac to clean out all the dust and debris.



Once the floor was clean I mixed up half a bag of "Sahara Beige Keracolor S" grout, slopped it down, packed it in the joints, and then scraped off as much as possible. This is the easy part...



After letting the grout setup for about a half hour I started cleaning the excess off the tile. This sounds easy but is actually the hard part. The trick is to get as much grout off the tiles as possible without getting too much water on the grout joints. Getting the grout joints too wet will cause the grout to cure funny colors and leaving too much grout on the tile now makes it difficult to get the tile clean later. The process I used was to wet a sponge, wring it out as dry as I could, then wipe once on each side, rinse and repeat. This takes forever but works pretty well.



Even after all that sponging there is still quite a bit of grout haze on the tiles the next day.



Saturday afternoon I cleaned up the grout haze and after letting that dry got a feel for the grout color. The grout initially came out very light colored which is likely because I mixed it too thin. Too much water in the grout or getting it too wet while cleaning causes minerals in the grout to rise to the surface of the grout joints and turn them white and blotchy. I tried cleaning up this "efflorescence" with a 50/50 vinegar water solution and it did help but I will likely need to use full strength vinegar or maybe a stronger acid to get the grout color darker. I'm going to let the grout cure a full 7-10 days before I try a stronger acid solution. The picture above shows the difference in color when the grout is wet vs. when its dry.



With the floor done I could finally start putting the toilet in. The tile is higher than the old floor so the toilet sits a bit higher than the flange so I doubled up the wax ring to make sure things are sealed nice and tight.



After the toilet I moved on to installing the vanity. I bought this vanity off Craigslist for $75 over a year ago so its nice to finally get it out of the basement.

And here is the vanity top and faucet installed.



In between tiling and grouting I've also been working on finishing the new door. Here it is ready to be stained.



I tried out a few stains to find something that matches the existing trim and ended up with Cabot dark walnut. Here's the door after a coat of stain.

Next on the "To-Do" list is to install the new door and put the trim back up, hang a mirror on the wall, and set the tile base.