It's been a busy summer and while that's good it's meant not much time for the house or riding - which is bad. But, because I've been so lax here I felt like I needed to kick my *** into gear and get something done. So here's where I was:
This vent is emblematic of the difficulty of seemingly small projects that turn out to be more complicated than you expect. Make a box for it out of dry wall and move on right? Well, leave it to me to make it more difficult.
Since the ceiling is cedar I decide to make the box from cedar and the multiple angles are complicated to miter and fit. In addition I decide that I don't want to use the white plastic vent cover that came with the exhaust fan. It's fine on a white ceiling but on this it will be out of place.
With most of my angles calculated I lay out a circle for the fan.
I found a good deal on a (like) new Festool Carvex jigsaw and wasn't sure if I was going to keep the old one or the new one so this was the first chance to really use it.
The saw has a strobe timed to the blade and it makes the blade appear frozen in place. Turns out it's not a gimmick and actually made it easier to see the blade cutting. It's also a bit lighter. I guess I'm selling the old one so this one will only cost me the difference which is $50 A small upgrade cost and another benefit of Festool is the great resale.
With the circle cut out I decide that I want to use some stainless perf metal that I have in the shop and decide to make a mold to help shape it - because just screwing it in behind the wood would be easy.
You think of a truck as heavy but it's really not once you divide the weight between the four wheels. This was a failed experiment and a reminder that I need to build my shop press.
Instead I took the circle that I'd cut from the vent board and rounded over the edge on the router and then screwed the mesh onto it in nine spots to keep it from moving.
Then I used some mapp gas and a small hammer to work the edge over...
And that seemed to do a pretty good job.
Then I fit it to the panel and used even more screws and, lacking a proper teardrop mallet I used a ball peen hammer to further round the mesh into the panel using my shot bag as the backer.
And finally I get a test fit and it's looking pretty good. I don't like the hard edge of the wood but I'll round that over.
Then I started on the medicine cabinet for the bath upstairs. I had designed one that would be extremely long and even drew it out on the wall and then decided, after marking a few studs, that I should go back and look through my shots to find one of the wall before it was rocked since I couldn't recall if there was power up high or not.
I learned a few things when I found this shot. Namely that my old camera wasn't even close to as nice as my new Sony and that there was a vent pipe that didn't show up when I was marking studs with the stud finder and that would have been a real bummer to have cut open the whole wall only to discover that. So I went back to the studs and planned to fit the cabinet between the double stud under the beam and the one next to the vent pipe.
If you're looking for a stud finder this one from
Franklin Sensors is amazing. It's dead nuts accurate and shows you the width of the studs. Here it's showing the double stud under the beam.
Then I used the Fein to cut the sheet rock and expose the space for the medicine cabinet leaving 18mm on the left side to fur around the wire in the stud.
And so that's where I'm at - bathroom stuff. It's boring but it's small progress and I have to be happy with that.
Gregor
