Above 1200 Sq/FT The Blizzard Build 40x60

[TurnipTruck]

While waiting for dust collection parts to be barged up, I took a look at the gifted 1980 PowerMatic 66 tablesaw and what kind of abuse the local high school students had inflicted upon it.

I found the arbor bearings to have a growl, but the 3 phase motor spun quietly despite missing half of its mounting bolts. I tried to test the 3hp motor with the 1hp vfd from the bandsaw, but all it did was jerk spasmodically. The windings ohmed the same so maybe it’s electrically sound. We’ll find out when I wire it up!


A bearing splitter and a hydraulic press showed me where the secret snap ring was hidden, and the woodruff key got absolutely mangled before it came out. Someone has been here before me.


I did a token search to see if I had the right bearings before ordering new.


I chucked the arbor shaft in my early Atlas lathe to cut the hammer peening off, and to check for straightness.


While waiting on bearings, I built a four inch riser for the saw cabinet to bring it up to all of the other table heights. I happened to find some unused trim paint that was amazingly similar in color. I glued some rubber sheet to the bottom of the riser to hopefully avoid having to bolt it all to the floor. The saw got lagged to the riser.


Someone in the distant past torched off the bottom to the motor cover for whatever reason, so I chiseled off the ugly slag and screwed a 2x10 to the bottom. Foam tape on the cover should keep most of the sawdust inside.


While waiting for some assistance installing the top, I wheeled it over to the hanging scale: 175 lbs!


Once the top was on square to the blade and tightened down, I hung the virginal Biesemeyer tracks and fence. The extension tables needed tweaking until everything was flat and even.


The wooden clamp knob threads were stripped, so I chased the glue from the clamp threads and rooted around in my knob box until I found the only 3/8 coarse knob in the whole box.

 

[zmotorsports]

That's a hell of an assortment of bearings and knobs.

 

[TurnipTruck]

In order to get the dust collector off the floor, I fabricated a pair of hangers with leftover vibration isolators to take the place of the cart. This also gave me the room to try out a transparent cyclone and a 15 gallon can. The instructions wanted a couple feet of straight pipe before the inlet to the cyclone, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that with the opposite inlets, so I’m experimenting with rotating the cyclone on magnetic flanges depending upon what tool needs the suckage.


The next experiment involves the table saw blade hood accessory that was included with the saw bundle. The manual for the hood mentioned an optional ceiling mount. Hmmm, what have I got laying around that would be stout? Hey! Here is a dumpster find: a frosty 2” rigid conduit offset!


Let’s chuck it in yet another garage-sale-find tool: a pipe bender!


Ooops! I overbent it judging by eye. I no longer have a pickup with a class 5 receiver to hold the conduit, so I had to chuck it in the hoist arm to unbend it a little.


I eventually got the kids to visit and help hold the ungainly pipe long enough to clamp it up. Then I could fit the hood/hose/ tubing and finish the dust collector branch. Once I mount the VFD on the wall, the saw start/stop buttons will fit in the conduit fitting cover above the saw and then I can finally test run the saw.

Then I can come up with something a little less temporary for the red tubing support.


The other branch has already been through a few iterations in the chopsaw/sander vicinity. This latest version is the least ugly:


I had to scoot the chopsaw over away from the belt sander, which necessitated an ad hoc handle notch for full left swing.

 

[CGohring]

Thats some good creative thinking and some really nice work there.

 

[TurnipTruck]

The final push to awaken the 66 after twenty-plus years of slumber.

Hung the VFD and its enclosure.


I decided to run some half-inch EMT conduit over to the now-30A plug for the power to the VFD.
First was a two inch offset with a kick bender:


Then a minimum offset just for fitting clearance to the wall with this cool little one-shot offset bender:


Finished all the conduit with on-hand salvaged fittings and stuff, except for a trip to town for an odd bushing and a ****** (too short to thread with existing tools). Then pulled wires through and started landing. I swapped the existing 40A breaker for a 20A, too.

Including the hotdog-in-a-hallway control wires in the 2” rigid conduit, which still required a fish tape to pull it through.


This ss box is where I spliced the SO cord to the BX.



I drilled the last cover and nibbled an anti-rotation notch for this mushroom E-stop switch, enabled the VFD remote controls, set some parameters, AND IT WOOOOOOORKS!
I used the blade it came with, but it seems like the wood climbs up off the blade more than I’m accustomed. Maybe the wrong hook angle? I may try some other blades I have laying around before buying new.


The final modification to the vfd enclosure was this window I made out of a rectangular headlight surround and a piece of plexiglas to allow clearance for the speed knob and to see the display:


The cyclone seems to be working. It doesn’t seem to be accumulating additional sawdust after the blower.

The warehouse at work was obsoleting a couple dozen 4”dia X 30” air filters. If I can determine their micron rating, I will manifold a bunch of them and get rid of the dust sieve bag.

 

[kitdoctor]

Then we got to pay again to have all that gravel dug out by a different guy and actually compacted.

Then we dug out some of that freshly-compacted gravel and buried a cross-slab drain pipe to an eventual dry well.

@TurnipTruck I really get this.

 

[TurnipTruck]

I have been wanting to haul more old WW2 Quonset corrugated steel wainscoting up from the beach all Winter, but the 15% road has been a veritable Bobsled run due to the heavy icing and lack of snow cover. It has been unsafe even to walk it, let alone risking a tractor or Jeep sliding off a 65’ bluff.
But this week we got Second Winter with 4” of snow on top of mostly sublimated ice, so I took the tractor down to fetch the final parts I needed to finish the wood shop.

Here we are safely at the bottom of the hill with a great view of the awakening volcano Mt Spurr. Condition Orange! Eruption possible! Danger to aircraft!


I hadn’t seen the pallet of steel in a couple years, so it took a little digging and detarping before strapping some sheets to the forks
then slipping the tractor into low gear for the climb back up.

-It is actually much steeper than the camera makes it appear.-

Back on top, I cut each sheet to fit tight to the floor and slip under the Z trim. Each sheet also got some body&fender banging so the old nail holes don’t draw too much blood. The corner also got a spritz of silver in case it shows through.


Viola! A third room in the shop is now wainscotted!


Now to reassemble the dust collector and somehow find room for the planer and mortiser amongst the bandsaw and drill press.

 

[TurnipTruck]

It has been SEVEN years since the slab was poured. The building has been around long enough to finally require some maintenance as opposed to pure construction.

The failed item is this “long-life” LED over one of the overhead doors:

Winter is coming and it’s about to be dark for several months, so we ordered some replacements. The first not-too-rainy day after the new lights arrived meant that it was Attic Time.

Up the spiral stair and up the ladder part of the handrail:


Then into the Attic for the first time this decade:

Lights still work! I nailed in a 2x6 walkway but I didn’t want to have to refluff the 2’-deep blown fiberglass so I tried my best to stay above until I got up to the front.

I had to swim up to my shoulders while painfully kneeling only on the trusses while searching for a place to add a junction box for the new fixture.
I didn’t get a pic of the first side, but I did take a pic of the other side for tomorrow’s adventure:


All of the door lights are on a photo eye, so I won’t know how well the new light will work until this evening.


The lights are Hampton Bay special orders from the Depot.

Take a lesson from me: always use replaceable bulb fixtures for difficult access places.

 

[TurnipTruck]

Every Fall has perpetually been a mad dash to have everything under cover (or at least out of the path of the snowblowers) before it all gets a thick layer of existence-erasing snow.
Early in my hoarding days I would actually climb on the roof and take pre-snow photos in each of the cardinal directions so I would at least have an inkling of which snowberm was hiding whatever my latest project was needing.
Nowadays, nearly everything has a home, or a cover, or a landfill to stay in.

Except all the **** stashed here behind the shop:

None of this stuff has a home. Where do you stash 24’ 1x4s or overstocked 16’ 2x12s? Or Jeep take-offs? Or ducted Corvair hoods? Not in the too-stuffed shop, that’s for dang sure.


So I rooted around in my racking pile and found three uprights of the same depth and enough beams and wire shelves to build a 4x4x16’ **** rack.

Look at all of that room for activities! And how closely it resembles Organization and I’mNotAHoarder.
In addition, I now have someplace to stand to lag some deck cantilevers for the office slider deck twelve feet in the air.

Last night we got snow locally at 1000’ elevation, so we will have snow by Halloween. I might actually be ready for it for a change.

 

[HogDude]

Every Fall has perpetually been a mad dash to have everything under cover (or at least out of the path of the snowblowers) before it all gets a thick layer of existence-erasing snow.
Early in my hoarding days I would actually climb on the roof and take pre-snow photos in each of the cardinal directions so I would at least have an inkling of which snowberm was hiding whatever my latest project was needing.
Nowadays, nearly everything has a home, or a cover, or a landfill to stay in.

Except all the **** stashed here behind the shop:

None of this stuff has a home. Where do you stash 24’ 1x4s or overstocked 16’ 2x12s? Or Jeep take-offs? Or ducted Corvair hoods? Not in the too-stuffed shop, that’s for dang sure.


So I rooted around in my racking pile and found three uprights of the same depth and enough beams and wire shelves to build a 4x4x16’ **** rack.

Look at all of that room for activities! And how closely it resembles Organization and I’mNotAHoarder.
In addition, I now have someplace to stand to lag some deck cantilevers for the office slider deck twelve feet in the air.

Last night we got snow locally at 1000’ elevation, so we will have snow by Halloween. I might actually be ready for it for a change.

A "Step Brothers" reference? I like the way you roll.

 

[TurnipTruck]

Several years ago, I bought the unfinished restoration of a Wells 1000 bandsaw from a local GJ member. I was in the neighborhood getting a half dozen engines out of storage and had some room left on the trailer for the saw. Here we are at a local business borrowing the truck scale as I was curious how close to legal I was. Turned out it was 2k lbs under.



During the intervening winters since bringing the saw home, I fabricated a VFD stand and mounted and temporarily wired the original 3phase motor, but this Winter’s Project was to invent the auto shutoff system since the saw had none and I had no idea what it originally looked like.

This is all the extra parts that came with the saw:



The actuating rod that contacts the descending saw was a scrap of 5/16 rod that I heated cherry red and bent a couple 90s in. I found some hardened bushings to press in to the drilled-out old egged holes:



Rooting around in my Box O Switches, I found this industrial explosion proof limit switch that had some potential. Scraps of conduit got screwed on and then I had to figure out where it would hide.



I enlarged an existing hole with a new-to-me mag base drill.


The final piece of the puzzle was a double set screw collar I had to bore out to fit the 5/16 rod then weld an arm to it. The arm required a little finesse and a spring get the motor to shut off at the correct height.


It took some research in online pdf’s to get the proper terminals to land the new limit switch wires as my first guess didn’t work.

 

[zanyad]

Wow. Impressive. Just read through your thread the past few days. Looking forward to continued updates!

 

[TurnipTruck]

After a couple hundred days of Winter (followed by a near-record cold/near-record wet Spring), the lake has thawed and the trees have budded two weeks later than normal. I survived my final Turnaround and have reretired, and the deferment of myriad and sundry projects has ended.

The new neighbors across the cove have inflated their swim platform and are excavating for the foundation of their new house, so I figured the time has come to prettify our side of the cove. Let’s start with moving the shed away from the beach.

First: empty the shed.


Then fork&scoot the shed off of the Marston Mats to reuse them in the new location. Unsurprisingly, the tractor was unable to lift the shed high enough to place it directly on the new site, so Plan B was to slide it into place on some wood beams.
In order to carry the 16’ beams down the narrow beach road, I had to strap some 4x4s off the side of the tractor.


Then it was a couple pushes and nudges until the shed is back on it’s foundation and out of the mud.


Here the shed is nestled up near the bluff next to a firewood bunk, nicely clear of trucks backing boat trailers into the water. Lord willing and the lake don’t rise, we now also have room for the gazebo foundation!

 

[TurnipTruck]

The next project to take off the too-long-deferred to-do list is our front driveway. When the new neighbors put their driveway in last year they must have blocked our mud road from draining because the ruts have never been this bad (like Jeep-bottoming bad). I have been wanting to upgrade the driveway for a whole decade, but it finally got so bad that I haven’t even been able to get the GTO out yet.

The first step to digging is to call 811, especially after the utility lets you know that the second incident cost triple$.
In my case, the orange represents a phone line nominally 18” down except that it’s 8” deep when it passes over the red 7.2kv at 36” deep. Here the mud has largely dried out but it’s still jiggly clay duff and foot-deep potholes atop a still-frozen frost lens.



So the crew dug some explore holes and visually confirmed cable depths before scraping 7.95” of goo out of the forest.


Then a triple layer of folded typar and a couple shovels of gravel to keep it in place before progressively dumping and spreading 40 yards.

(These two just willingly quit their boring corporate jobs to build stuff full time.)

And a final drag with a rock rake to even it all out:

The finished product raised the road at least six inches out of the forest floor, so it is almost two foot thick.

 

[TurnipTruck]

This week‘s project was spurred by one of my daughters when she bought an old church van to make into a camper.

I began with a scrap 10’ stick of 2” galvanized conduit, split in half and each bent 90 degrees and screwed onto a hand-threaded ******.


Once it was all screwed together, I had to chuck the whole thing back in the bender to fine tune/equalize the two bends.


This stick of inch conduit got some bends, too.
Doofus got out of his bed to check dimensions.


A quick fit check on the quickhitch:


The next day got some 3x3 angles fit and capped and welded solid before drilling a bunch of holes. The mag base drill and annular bits make it so easy and fun and rigid that I punched some fancy keyholes and even some random bungee holes.


Then I took the whole thing for a test drive!

Favorite wife wants some footboards before I haul guests down to the lake, and the dogs aren’t at all interested in staying onboard once the engine starts. And I need to find some armrests. But the seatbelts work!
I had initially thought to weld a basket behind the seat for a cooler, but we’re getting pretty lengthy as it is.

 

[captain14]

Don’t forget the roll cage.