Month: December 2008

So I volunteered to make 40-odd door chocks for the Marching Band’s motel stay in Syracuse: by edict, all room doors must remain open until lights out. You’re probably not astonished to hear that the kids can think up all manner of reasons why their room doors just sort of drifted shut…

I contributed two battered maple library bookshelves (which my father salvaged from a flooded library three decades ago)  to the cause, whacked ’em into 5-inch chunks, then ripped each chunk into two wedges. Being the sort of bear I am, I had those suckers immobilized every which way from zero, with a push stick to make sure nothing exciting happened near my knuckles.

Worked like a champ; nothing exciting happened at all. It just looks like the blade should suck the wedges into itself and fling ’em across the shop; they’re actually held in position from the outside and wind up quietly zinging against the blade without being caught.

I applied my cute little corner-rounding plane to one of the wedges, did some mental math, then came to my senses: Mr Chock, meet Mr Belt Sander. Ten minutes later, they’re all done!

A pleasant hour of shop time that made the whole basement smell of cut wood… which means that I’m breathing all those fine particles, even with the shopvac catching nearly everything else. Ran the lah-dee-dah radon reducer for a few hours, which helped a bit, and played with my upstairs toys for the rest of the afternoon.