brainwagon

I’ve been on a bit of a woodworking binge lately, no doubt fueled by all the creative and talented woodworkers who have made a place on my YouTube subscription list. I’ve also been slowly acquiring used tools of various sorts, working on a variety of shop projects, and even taking a class. The “class” is […]

As part of my attempt to get into woodworking and develop some actual skills, I have been keeping an eye out for what would best be described as “junky piles of rust” at garage and estate sales. I have been updating my twitter feed with pictures and short comments, but I thought it might be […]

Okay, it’s not really a “shop”. It’s really just my garage. But then again, it’s hardly ever had a car in it in the last two decades, so calling it a garage is perhaps even a bit more of a stretch. But I’m trying to convert it into a place where I don’t mind spending […]

So, last night I didn’t actually get any woodworking done. Carmen actually did more than I did: she took the orbital sander to some (very rough) and cheap fence material that I’m going to use for the slats on the shelving and cleaned them up. They looked much nicer after this process. At just about […]

I got home from work today, and decided that the best way to lower my stress level was to go into the garage and make something. I didn’t really have a project in mind. I’ve been pondering making a drill press table and have been thinking about a couple of design options, some of which […]

Got home from work after seven last night, so didn’t have a ton of time in the workshop. I was also impatient to actually get the parts for my tool caddy actually glued up, so I worked rather more quickly than I should have. I taped the edges, spread some glue, rolled up the sides […]

A few weeks ago I was at a garage sale, and picked up a few old tools for just a few bucks. One of the things I got was a little tool caddy for $1. It basically is a box with a central handle, constructed from 1/4″ plywood and divided into a number of compartments. […]

After yesterday’s success in building a little garden stool, I wanted to get back into the garage to do a little more woodworking. Sadly, today was the last day of my “staycation”, and I still had quite a few chores. I spent part of the afternoon breaking out the pressure washer to clean the mold […]

Okay, after all the drought-ending rain we’ve been having, our yard has turned into a lush jungle of various kinds of weeds. Part of it is just grass which has sprouted above the black landscape cloth in the mulch, but other areas were more or less unimproved since we finished our retaining wall project last […]

I have been trying to do a bit more wood working in my garage, with the net result that a fine layer of sawdust is settling everywhere. I had started to use my aging Ridgid WD12000 4.5HP 12 gallon wet-dry vac attached to my table saw and my newly finished router table. But just using […]

I’ve slowly been trying to do some woodworking projects. I have very little skill and experience. In the past, I had (barely) enough skill to put together some simple Dobsonian telescopes out of plywood, using mostly a handheld router and a jigsaw, but they weren’t actually very accurately made (especially compared to the tolerances the […]

I’ve been slowly working toward getting a reasonably equipped garage for woodworking, and have been watching a metric ton of Youtube content made by woodworkers. Today, I ran across this nice list of things that you can 3D print to help out with various tasks, the most immediately useful being some knobs I can print […]

My experimenting with plane sharpening has (like so many other things) caused me to research stuff on the Internet. I’ve been working on grinding the back on my older plane using sandpaper cemented down to a flat piece of glass. It’s still not quite there after about a solid 30 minutes of work, and it’s […]

So, last night about 9:30PM I decided to spend a little time in my garage workshop. I cleared some items off the top of my rolling workbench and decided to do a short bit of work on two projects. A couple of days ago I had started making a cross cut sled for my tablesaw. […]

Okay, a few weeks ago I bought a little Dewalt DW745 table saw for use in my garage. I’ve never actually owned a table saw, but lately I’ve been wanting to do more construction, and I thought investing a fairly small amount of money in a table saw would be a good way to go. […]