Stinker’s current favorite show is called “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”, which is based on the book by the same name. For people not familiar with the premise, it basically is a story about how doing one simple thing can snowball into a much bigger series of events. One thing is for sure, I’ve been handing out a lot of cookies lately…
For Christmas, I gave Wife a book about air plants. I just thought she’d enjoy reading about them and maybe get one or two. In the book, they feature a way of growing and displaying air plants using a stand called a “Thigmotrope Satellite”.
www.floragrubb.com
Wife fell in love with the idea and identified the perfect wall to create a display. The only thing we needed were the stands themselves (well plants too, but the stands should probably come first). While I’m all for supporting small businesses whenever practical, these stands are only available for purchase at a store in San Francisco. Even though I have a few friends in/near SF who I could have probably asked to buy and ship some to me, I also have a welder and it just seemed easier to make the stands instead. Wife’s birthday was also at the end of February, so it was a perfect excuse to dig into this project.
One thing I’ve learned in my time in manufacturing, whenever you need to make more than a few of something, it makes the process a whole lot easier and more consistent if you take the time to setup some fixtures. One of my favorite tools when it comes to making fixtures are magnets. I’ve got a handful of magnetic indicator bases that were pulled from the dumpster at work because they were broken (stripped threads, broken switches). For what I use them for, they are perfect.
I put one on my portable bandsaw to set the length of each rod without having to measure and mark out each piece.
I also placed one on my workbench to act as a stop when I was bending the rods to ensure a consistent angle on each one.
Welder’s magnets are also cheap and super handy.
The toughest part of this project was getting the parts welded together. I ended up having to use a series of tack welds. Not my best work, but they look okay once I hit them with a wire brush. In hindsight, I should have taken the time to swap to a smaller diameter wire so I could run a cooler, slower weld setting. Regardless, I’m generally happy with how they turned out. I made seven stands in total, thinking that would be plenty. Wife did appreciate the gift, she has already put in an order for another eight! Good thing I took all those photos of my setups. When you give a Wife a book about air plants, she’s going to need you to weld some stands to go with it.
The next cookie was when a co-worker asked if I knew anyone with a surface planer. I told him that I’d just got one for Christmas and have been itching to put something other than a scrap 2x4 through it. He bought an old fishing boat and wanted to replace the ½” plywood seat bases with something a little more substantial. The boards also needed to be 12” wide, so dimensional lumber was off the table. How I got roped into the project when he bought some rough cut ash slabs from someone with a band saw mill. Here are the slabs, along with the old seats he gave me to use as templates.
Initially the project was just to get the slabs into useable boards, but quickly spiraled from there. I found out that my coworker didn’t have much in the way of woodworking tools, so I offered to just make the seats for him. But before I could get started with that, I needed to come up with some sort of dust collection method beyond the old pillowcase I had attached to the chip outlet when I was initially playing around with it.
This model of planer has a built in impeller so you don’t need to hook it up to a vacuum. All you need is a container for the chips to go into. I figured I’d also add some filters for dust control while I was at it. Not wanting to get too carried away with building something, I eventually came up with the idea to buy a good size storage tote and add the fittings and filters to it, instead of building a box or cart out of wood. The tote I picked out had handles that clipped over the lid to hold it in place, and also had slots that could bolt the lid to the tote for added insurance. The filters I used are for a battery powered shop vac and were chosen because they were the right diameter to fit the lid. I ended up getting two because I wanted to make sure to not add to much restriction to the system. As a bonus, they were washable HEPA filters, so I could catch a good amount of the fine particles. All of this would work perfectly in my mind, but in reality, it was a complete failure.
During the second or third pass through the planer, I noticed that the flexible hose between the planer and collection box was expanding by itself. Not only that, the tote was starting to look like a balloon. I quickly realized that the air flow had been restricted and shut everything down. I removed the filters to find that they were completely plugged with chips.
After thinking it over for a minute, I decided to flip the filters around so they would sit in the tote instead of on top of it, eliminating the catch point of the chips in the filters. I fired up the planer again. One more pass, and the self-expanding flex hose/balloon tote were back. The chips were now sticking to the outside of the filter, instead of inside of it. Great.
So with a little more head scratching, I eventually got the idea to add some sort of protective cover over the filters to keep the chips from sticking to it. Looking around the shop, I spotted some Christmas cookie containers I snagged out of the recycling (I figured they’d be handy for something). With a hole drilled in the bottom, they would sandwich between the mounting bolt and filter, leaving a 1” gap between the lid of the tote and the top of the container. Surely this would do a decent job of keeping chips out of the filter while still allowing air to flow. Within two passes, the filters were plugged again. This time it was the fine dust more than the chips themselves. So the baffles kind of worked. Even if the fine dust hadn’t plugged the filters, the chips were starting to accumulate in the cookie containers and would have blocked the filters fairly soon. I was too focused on trying to solve my problem and forgot to take pics along the way, but can add some if anyone is curious as to what the failed cookie container baffle system looks like.
So now I was in a pickle. I needed to get these boards done, but had already spent too much time trying to get the chip collector box to work. Back to the pillowcase and having to wear a dust mask. Other than having to stop a handful of times to dump the pillowcase, getting the boards cleaned up went quickly once I was able to actually focus on the task at hand. I was thoroughly impressed with how well the planer worked, even running 13” wide ash through it.
The rest of the project was pretty straightforward. Once I had the boards cleaned up, I used my track saw to get a straight reference edge on one side. I then ran the boards through the table saw, trimming them to their final widths and squaring up both edges to the planed surface. I used the track saw again to cut the angles on the ends (seemed easier than setting up the miter saw), and used the router with edge guide to get the ends to correct thickness (could only be ½” where they mount to the boat). I also cut out some holes to access the storage area under the seats. If you offer to make boat seats for a coworker, you’re going to need a chip collector to go with your planer.
Circling back to the chip collector tote concept… I think I have two issues to deal with. The first is that the small, HEPA filters are too small and restrictive for this application. The second is that the way the chips blow into the tote, I’m guessing they are immediately pushed up the sides and into the filters themselves.
I’ve got some stainless screen and some perforated steel material in inventory that I might use to create a box or wall to protect the filters from the chips, but hesitate to spend too much more time on it. Trying to make this concept work is starting to feel like I’m getting into ‘adding more band-aides to a bad idea’ territory. The better solution would be to just make the cart with a chip collector box on the bottom like I’ve wanted to do the whole time. I guess we’ll see where the road takes me on this one...
