Monday, October 26, 2009

Great Room Project Update, Monday 10/26

Rippin' it up!
Ran errands in the morning -

- Lowe's to get a new blade to replace the dull 20-year old one on my table saw.
- Pick up rugs from the Atlas oriental rug cleaning guys.
- Lumber Liquidators to exchange the two boxes of hardwood. I wanted 16 boxes, but they had 19 in stock, and cut me a deal to take all of it. Sure, I'll take more product for less money! It turns out that I only needed a tad over 15 boxes, so I have 4 boxes left over in case I want to do another room someday. It turned out that two of the boxes contained the wrong size and color boards. So I went up to do an exchange.
- Trader Joe's for food. This is just a cool place...

I wanted to reuse the baseboards and trim, but they are now too tall by the thickness of the hardwood. I had to rip 3/4" off them. Hence the need for a functional table saw blade! The problem was in how to rip a pair of fourteen foot long pieces of wood on a table saw with just one person. First of all, you need a room with 14' on each side of the saw. Since I don't have many 30' long rooms, I had to drag my tools out into the driveway. That meant clearing a path in the current project-induced mess of a garage wide enough to get the table saw out through. My hand truck came in handy. (Remember - chicks dig guys with good hand trucks!) I used the miter saw stand to catch the cut lumber coming off the saw, and an old chair to support it on the feed-in side. Looked like this:
.

The in side **


The out side

It was going to be a challenge keeping the stock feeding in tight to the rip fence and tight against the table. A 14' long piece of 1"x6" is pretty floppy! So I made some featherboards and clamped them down to use as guides. I like to be mega-careful around power saws, especially when there are no other people around. I even wore my safety glasses, but since they are an old prescription, I'm not really sure if they increased or decreased my safety. But they make me look like Elvis Costello, so I wear them.
..............Me.................................................................Elvis Costello.......








The table saw set-up:


This all worked like a charm. I was, as my friend George would say, rippin' 'em up!

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** Two things to notice in that top photo:

1) Those seven foot tall wooden box-like things in the upper two photos are halves of an antique wardrobe. There is a long, involved, hilarious Bond family story about acquiring and getting this home to Livonia from some auction out in the sticks of lower Michigan. I think I remember driving from Detroit to Worcester, MA with one of those halves strapped to the roof of a compact car. Must have killed the gas mileage on that trip! I also remember getting some custom trim milled for it at a shop in MA. This restoration project started a good 20 years ago and was, umm, set aside. Maybe I'll re-start that it when the Great Room is done. Could be more blog fodder...

2) The small grey stonelike thing at the bottom of the photo is a mostly life sized cast concrete replica of a human brain. This is our most prized lawn ornament.

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