Don’t let the (old) man (winter) get you down!

Yesterday was a balmy 34 degrees here in the Twin Cities, so with no heavy snowfall in the forecast I parked the truck outside for the first time in a long time.  I fired up the shop heater as soon as I walked in the door and gave it some time to warm up.  Later in the evening I was able to start prepping the shop for some, long overdue, work this weekend.  It’s been a couple weeks since we’ve had some workable temperatures!

I’ve got a stack of resawn stock ready to be planed to thickness from the last session in the shop.  With the open garage stall, I’ve got room to set up the planer with a vacuum while keeping Minnesota at bay.

In the spirit of a second wind, I’m going to harvest the planer shavings for another project…more on that at a later date.  To collect the shavings I lined the inside of the shop vacuum with a new trash bag.

This will be the first time I’ve run the planer with the dust chute and a vacuum.  In the past it’s always been warm enough to roll the planer outdoors and shoot the shavings onto the driveway to be swept up after.

Some of the faces need to be touched up on the jointer before bringing them down to the final thickness of 3/8 of an inch.

I also culled through the wood pile to set aside some thicker boards for box lids.  I’ll be using the standard 3/4 inch thickness for some of the lids, however with some thicker stock on hand, I thought I’d play with some 7/8 inch thick pieces and try a few extra creative things.  I have a pretty wide assortment laid out for the lids…Zebrawood, Walnut, Bubinga, Wenge, Curly (Tiger) Maple, and some Quinella.

With all the parts labeled and laid out I’m ready to get to work again today…after the heater runs a bit…and another cup of coffee.

I’m also going to start working with some of these smaller, book matched, pieces (aprox 2 X 6 inches) that I’ve had hanging around for a while now.  I’ve got about three dozen pairs of the lighter colored Marblewood (on the right) and a handful of the Bubinga.

The challenge will be milling these small pieces with the planer.  I’ll need to gang them together as I run them through so that nothing gets stuck or torn up.  A drum sander would be ideal for pieces like this, but alas, the drum sander fairy is nowhere to be found…probably stuck in the snow over in Michigan or Illinois!

Pete