A productive Sunday

posted: Sun 5th Aug, 2007, categories: Uncategorized, Tools, Shell, & Supplies

Fetching, non?
Seriously, does it get much more attractive than this?

I thought not. Every guy’s crazy ‘bout an OptiVisored gal. I picked up this OptiVisor, which magnifies things 2x at a 4” focal length, with the idea that seeing better would equal sawing better. (Thanks, Ath!) Not sure how I feel about it yet. I did manage NOT to make myself motion sick with it by remembering 95% of the time to lift the visor up before I moved my head. It definitely magnifies, which is good. And 4” is about where my face is anyway when I saw. However, the Optivisor extends significantly beyond my glasses, the result of which is that I am constantly hitting them with the saw on the up-stroke.  Doh!  And sometimes I forgot and didn’t put the visor back down, and sawed anyway. The fact that I didn’t notice it until later makes me wonder how much good it really does; if it were fabulous, I would’ve noticed the difference immediately and wanted to have the visor down. Although I must say, the whole ensemble has the added bonus of scaring the neighbor kids who pass by the garage.  Beware of women who have tools and know how to use them; they put up with zero shit!

Anyway, Saturday was largely taken up with birthday doings across town for a dear friend, though I headed home earlier than I usually would because the monsoon seemed to be threatening massive nastiness. The sky to the east was already darkening with thunderheads when I left the house at 11:20 a.m. (As is usual, the worse it looks, the less likely it is to rain, and we didn’t get any rain until sometime in the night long after bedtime.) I took advantage of the relatively cool day (only in the 80s) to find my workbench. The garage was, in a word, trashed. I could barely get in and out of my car, for all the boxes and stuff that had been pulled out of cabinets and not put back. I broke down boxes, found homes for the crap that I needed to keep, and even went so far as to shop-vac the entire floor, including the nooks and crannies. I found a very large, very dead tarantula hiding in the corner beneath Scott’s golf cart, a cart which has not been used in the 9 years we’ve lived in Tucson, but made the trip from Minnesota nonetheless. I would’ve shop-vac’ed the tarantula, too, but Scott insisted on sweeping it up on its own. I let ‘im.

Behold, then, the clean garage, and my excavated workbench, which would’ve been unusable in its state prior to cleaning.
Cleaned the garage Saturday afternoon.
A clean shop is a happy shop.
A clean bench is a happy bench.

I needed to drill a couple holes into some replacement pieces I needed to saw, so I did that first, trying out my new drill press set-up.  There were some complaints in the reviews I read prior to purchase about its accuracy, but I had no issue, maybe because of how I used it. I put the piece down, and pulled the lever down to make sure the bit was going where I wanted it. Then I turned the Dremel on and pulled it down again, and it went right to the same spot. No problems. Since this is what I wanted it for, I think it should be fine. No holes in fingers this week!

I spent a good 6 hours, minus breaks, out in the shop today. I sawed, filed, sanded, and then sawed, filed, and sanded some more. By the time I was starting to get tired (and my back starting to complain), I only had a few more pieces to work on, and it seemed like a worthy goal to finish all the sawing and sanding today. And I felt good because I was making real progress.

The time consuming part was fitting the pieces within each other. That took a lot of filing and finessing, but eventually I got there.
Dry fitting<br/><br /> All the shell I’m using this is 1.3-1.5 mm thick, and that has meant a lot less unexpected breakage while sawing. I think I’ve gotten more savvy, too, about how I approach sawing each piece, paying attention to potential weak spots. In previous efforts, I’ve learned exactly where a piece is likely to fail, just because I found it, over and over again. </p> <p> I worked a section at a time until I’d finished them all, and the main piece was completely sawed out. Then I marked orientation marks on the back in Sharpie, and dropped the whole piece in my water bath to get the paper pattern off. <br /> <a href=Everything's cut out, filed, sanded, and as good as it's going to get.

I decided I was overdue for a shower and dinner, so I put off assembly of all the parts for another day, with the exception of the last pair, which I put right into the main piece. The rest (on the right) are superglued to each other and will need to be cleaned up with an Exacto to get the excess glue and wax paper off before I can put them into the main piece. Because I dry fitted all of the pieces as I went, before I moved on to the next, they should drop right in. There’s one that’s questionable; it broke when I put the center piece in, so I fudged it and glued the works together. That could come back to haunt me, in which case, I will likely have to resaw both pieces, now that they’re glued together. We’ll see.
On the left, the main piece with the paper pattern removed.

All in all, it was a very productive day. I got more done than I expected to, and it went relatively smoothly. That’s two work days in succession that I’ve left the shop feeling good instead of beaten. Things are looking up. I see my work, and know where every single error is; and I know I have miles to go before I approach competent. But I am improving, and that’s what matters.