tuesday pizza night......

Tonight will be the last meal that we will share together with Seth and Amanda in 2015. Amanda wanted pizza because she said they don't have good pizza in North Carolina. She must be used to the Rhode Island way of doing it. I know that New York City pizza is different then Crusty's (Amanda's favorite pizzeria) and she grew up eating this almost every friday.

Tomorrow they will fly back to North Carolina and the New Year pops in a couple of days after that.  And so ends the old year and the new one begins. One thing I would like to get done before that happens is to figure out what to spend my gift certificates on. I've been pouring over catalogs and searching on line and I'm coming up dry. The big problem is in order for me to get what I want, I have to add about 35 bazillion dollars to the GC (gift certificate) amounts.

first batter tonight

I did a rub down of the whole bookcase with 4-0 steel wool. I like using this over sandpaper. I have tried 320, 400, and 600 grit and I didn't like the results. I feel that 4-0 steel wool does a better job with smoothing the surfaces out. The sandpaper tends to clog and feel rough in spots.

The card scraper is my secret weapon. I use that to scrape all the drips and big 'puddles' because steel wool doesn't remove them. The scraper removes 99% and the steel wool then smooths it out what's left. This will be ready to put shellac on tomorrow night.

bookshelf top

I already know which one I'll be using and it's the left one. I put both of them side by side so I could see both at once. I think the left is a better fit for the OA (over all) look of the end and a continuation of the front slope. For some reason the right looks like it is going to tip over to my eye.

sawed and planed the angle on the top

laid them out

is was a lot of work

This took a while and a lot of effort to saw. I don't know if it was sawing it on the bench hook or if the length of it was too long and that was causing the problems. This saw is sharpened as a sash saw so I should be able to make cross cuts with it. I'll be revisiting this again.

panel saw

This time it was much faster to make these two cross cuts. My first one was off plumb and off the knife line into the good wood and I got a lot of chip outs. The second one was closer to plumb and off the knife line but I still got a few chip outs. I like using the sash saw for this because I don't get the chip outs in pine with it.

square

I tried to first square the two ends together but when I checked them individually they were OTL (out to lunch). This corner with the two edges that the square is on will be my reference edges. I didn't bother squaring or straightening the other two. Those two edges get the angle cuts on them.

this sucks

I think this had something to do with the boards being individually out of square. There wasn't any appreciable cup in the board before I sawed the two ends out. These are going to be an adventure trying to make mortises in.

fingers crossed

I don't know if this is going to work or not. I have the time and I'll let this sit in the clamps for a few days and see what it looks like then. I tried this once before and although I couldn't get all of the bow out, I did manage to remove a lot of it. On this, I think I can make this work if more of the bow is gone.

the drawer

The grain at the top far right washes out like a wave. Each swirl of grain is raised and I can feel the ridges. I tried to plane and scrape it flat and couldn't. It feels smooth after sanding but still bumpy and  I'm leaving it as is.

accidental woodworker

trivia corner
What is a "lemniscate"?
answer - the infinity symbol  ∞

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