A crosscut sled seemed to be the perfect solution.

I’ve been looking for a good crosscut sled to make myself, but everything that I found was quite large and cumbersome. As you’ve seen before, I have a reasonably small shop so moving and storing a large sled just wasn’t going to work for me.

I had never heard of a front-stopped crosscut sled until I saw this plan, and I knew that it was perfect for my needs.

I started out with a piece of 1/2″ MDF that I cut to 20″ x 20″. I figured I’d make it a bit larger than I needed and trim it later, but that size seems perfect as it is. I lined it up where I wanted the sled to sit on the table saw, with about 1/2 inch extending to the right of the blade. I then marked where the miter slot in the table was, and mounted a piece of UHMW (ultra-high molecular weight) plastic as a guide. UHMW plastic is that slightly greasy feeling dense plastic they make hockey rink boards out of. It’s very stable and easy to cut and drill with normal tools. Lee Valley sells lengths of it that are perfectly sized to the standard miter slot, so I don’t have to make my own runners out of hardwood.

I like the runner to stick out about a half inch or so from the front on the sled, so it’s easier to put it on the table properly because you can aim the runner into the miter slot.

Once the runner was mounted, I put the runner in the miter slot, raised the saw blade and trimmed that extra 1/2″ off. Now I have a sled that slides beautifully in the miter slot, and that has one edge that is exactly in line with the edge of the saw blade.

I inserted threaded T-Nuts into the bottom of the sled along the front edge to attach the fence, and found out that they don’t sit flush, so I used a forstner bit to make a small recess. I don’t want the metal t-nuts sliding on the surface of my saw.

From the top:

I used a scrap piece of red oak for the fence. Once I trimmed it straight, I drilled 3 holes along the length to match the T-Nuts in the sled. The holes were slightly larger than the T-Nuts so there is about 1/16″ play in the fence when it’s not tightened down. I can loosen the bolts and easily adjust the fence to be square. I know my own skills well enough that if I tried to make the fence permanent, it would never be quite square and the whole sled would be useless. Planning for these type of adjustments has saved me a lot of grief.

A large fender washer and a 1/4-20 sized jig handle threaded into each T-Nut keep the fence nice and snug. I bought a large assorted box of jig handles and parts, including the T-Nuts, from Lee Valley. (Most of my birthday and Christmas presents are Lee Valley gift cards nowadays… ) I already have plans for most of the rest of that box.

The fence also has a pair of DeStaCo low-profile vertical clamps (guess where I bought them?) that keep whatever I’m cutting from creeping during the cut. I have them adjusted to keep 3/4 stock tight, as that’s 90% of what I cut.

The only thing that remained was to round the bottom corners, cut some holes through the near side to make it easier to hold, and to add some holes on the sides to hang it up out of the way. Voila.

Here are some pictures of it with wood clamped in, before and after cutting.

And it hangs perfectly on the wall when I’m not using it.

I was unsure about how the front-stopped sled would work, but I really love it. It’s different than the usual back-stopped miter gauge, but I already prefer it hands-down. Wider work is far easier to cut. The fact that the edge of the sled is exactly on the saw cutting line makes setup far more accurate and far simpler; Put the desired cut line at the edge of the sled and it’s perfectly lined up. The clamps make it a breeze. No more slightly angled cuts due to slipping.

Because there’s no support for the back of the work, I found I get some minor tearout if I don’t put something behind it. I have some long 1×1 pieces of scrap that I put on the sled behind the work hanging over the cut line, and when they get too short I toss them. Finally, a use for my scraps box.

I also need to make a 1/2 inch thick piece that sits on the right side of the blade to support the cut-off, because it hangs over nothing and can splinter if it’s long enough. I will just use the rest of the MDF that I cut the sled from, and put a ledge on the front like a bench-hook so it won’t slide with the wood.

The only downside that I’ve seen is that because the cutting takes place a half-inch above the table top, the under-table dust collection doesn’t work, and the sawdust all sprays back towards me. Not serious, just messy. Perhaps when I get the cut-off support made I’ll try to fit some dust collection in it, or perhaps if the cut-off support is tight to the blade on the right side the dust collection will work better. I’ll let you know.

I’ve had it for a week, and I’ve used it every single time I’ve been in the shop. This crosscut sled has made my life in the shop a million times easier, for one afternoon’s worth of work. If you’re still using a metal miter gauge, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you try this.

Looking for information on small workshops is the same. “Mine is only 1200 square feet, come see how I deal with the cramped conditions.” Pfft.

My shop is a 12 by 11 room with one large corner cut off, losing me about a quarter of the space. It looks like this:

Note: I didn’t tidy for this. I was taking pictures of another project and decided to take some of the shop for posterity and insurance. Then I decided to share them. Getting it “show ready” would take a few hours that I don’t have or want to spend, you see it way the shop is most of the time.

The diagonal wall has a wood storage rack and shelves full of plastic peanut butter jars that I use for screw and nail and parts storage, and pegboard. I love peanut butter jars and pegboard. The wood rack is for dimensional lumber, though it often has a few larger pieces of sheet goods leaning against it waiting to be used. Here, the upstairs bathroom floor is propped up waiting for the walls to be painted.

The wood rack is just 2x4s mounted to the wall with toggle bolts. The 2x4s have 1″ holes bored through them, and I inserted lengths of 1″ dowel that I rounded off on the router table. They aren’t glued in the holes so I can reorganize the shelving if I need it by moving the shelf supports. That would involve actually cleaning it off, though, so I don’t think I’ll ever bother.

Looking in the door to the back wall, you can see that my bench is actually just kitchen countertop scraps on old kitchen cabinet bases.

On the left of the drawers are two stacks of large Rubbermaid bins labelled “Electrical”, “Plumbing”, “Drywall”, “Painting” and “Infrequently Used Tools”. There are some half-sized Rubbermaid bins labelled “Cabinet Hardware”, “Caulking” and “Electronics”. Also on that side under the bench is my Router Table, which gets pulled out and placed on the table saw to use.

Drawers (behind the table saw in the above pic) are labelled, from top to bottom, “Measuring and Marking”, “Sandpaper”, “Drilling and Grinding” and “Small Power Tools”.

The right hand side under the bench is miscellaneous stuff. Drop cloths, garbage bags, unfinished projects, etc. I haven’t really organized this side yet.

The right end of the bench is work space. Above the bench is pegboard with hand tools. The left end is bench tools: the bandsaw, drill press, band/disk sander, bench grinder and scroll saw. Above and behind the bench tools is the paint collection, all the colours that we have used in various places for various things around the house.

Being a basement shop, dust control was very important. I didn’t want that fine dust to make its way through the whole house. I have a ceiling mounted air cleaner and a large capacity dust collector from General International to help with that.

Looking left from the workbench past the bench tools, you see them along the wall, more pegboard, clamp storage and sheet goods storage (under the drywall T-square). I can’t keep a half sheet of plywood. If I need that much I have to cut it to smaller size as soon as I buy it.

Looking up, you can see the switch I wired in for the dust collection. I’m 5’11″, so this switch is the perfect height and place for me when I am standing at the table saw. You can also see the house central vac unit, which I don’t use in the shop. It’s just most convenient place to hang it.

You can also see some of the unfinished ceiling. I wouldn’t want it finished. I store a load of stuff up in the floor joists.

The floor is linoleum over concrete (easier to sweep and keeps the dust down) and the walls are drywalled and insulated for noise.

The back of the door is covered in small spring clamps to hold work gloves for the 7 of us and aprons and such. Beside the door is a rack similar to the wood rack, but with the dowels angled. Nice and strong for holding extension cords.

The shop is too small to run a dust collection tubing system, so I just have one 8 foot length of 4″ tubing for the table saw, and one 10 foot length of 2 1/2″ tubing for bench tool dust collection (I need another couple of feet, this one is a bit short). I use the Veritas Dust Chute on the 2 1/2″ hose, because the magnet on the end is handy. I can hang it up out of the way just by sticking it to the house ducting in the ceiling. I switch between hoses using a homemade manifold/separator. It catches the big pieces before they go to the dust collector, and lets me easily pick which collection hose to use:

I finally feel like the shop is getting to an organized point where I can use it and find things and not spend half my time shuffling things around. Thanks for looking.

I sat down with Google Sketchup (which is an amazing, free 3d design program that is very easy to learn) and designed some blocks that could be made easily by gluing cubes and rectangles together. Using some figures as a reference, I made the blocks the correct scale to be used by Playmobil people. I used the tablesaw to cut up some old scrap oak (leftover church pew ends…) and then left Josh to sand and glue them together. Here are the results:

The gun ports are the right height for a Playmobil character to aim a gun or crossbow out of.

And the towers and crenellations are sized for standing armed Playmobil soldiers too. The little ledges for the soldiers to stand on were Josh’s brainchild. He really wanted to be able to have forces on the walls shooting overtop.

Including the doorway, there are only 7 kinds of blocks. The actual gates aren’t complete yet, but I’m not sure they’re needed. They boys have fun playing with it as is. You can see in this picture how the blocks are all made up of cubes and rectangles glued together.

Here’s the entire set of blocks:

Here’s the plan in Google Sketchup:

And here’s the Google Sketchup File for my Playmobil scale wooden castle blocks.

They can, of course, be assembled in any way that they want, and they have been used to make houses and two smaller opposing forts as well as the big castle.

For Christmas 2009, we decided to have everyone in our family make a gift for one other member. I drew my eldest son’s name and decided to make him a more realistic musket. Here it is with a 1 foot ruler for scale:

(click any picture to see it larger)

I looked for a musket that I liked in Google Image Search, and printed it out in large scale. I traced it onto a piece of 1×6 pine, cut it out and the rounded the edges and shaped it with a rasp and sandpaper.

I mounted a 3/4 inch dowel onto the body using normal joint dowels. As an experiment, I used three dowels into the bottom of the barrel through the stock, because I couldn’t think of another way to make it strong enough to handle being tossed around by my kids. It seems to be rock solid, I’m definitely going to do this again when I make more. In this picture you can see the three holes that I used.

The trigger guard is a scrap of brass stock I recycled from another project, bent into shape and ground smooth. The lock/firing mechanism is actually a window sash lock that I found while wandering Canadian Tire one day. It cost a couple of dollars and I think it gives a really nice looking mechanism that actually works. It lets the user flip the lock up to “load” and the snap it closed before firing. It’s a solid strong piece that should last longer than the rest of the gun. The small brass plate in front of the lock is probably going to have his name engraved on it eventually, and is mostly just there because I had more scrap brass and I wanted more googaws on the musket.

The other half of the lock looked interesting too, so I mounted it on the other side of the musket. Again, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to actually represent, but it looks cool.

The stock is painted with super gloss brown polyurethane, and the barrel is painted with flat black rust paint, both of which I had in the shop. I bent the u shaped strapping around a leftover piece of barrel dowel and ground it to shape and smoothed the corners. The trigger guard is mounted with small brass screws. I mounted the strapping for the barrel with small box nails, but they are already loose. I will be replacing them with matching brass screws. The nails were far easier, but they haven’t even withstood indoor play.

Left to do are strap mounting swivels and replacing the nails with screws. But I have to pry it out of his hands to do that. It might be a while…

But didjaknow…

You can double click on a word, and it selects the whole word. You can also double click on a word, hold the button down after the second click, then drag your mouse and select more whole words at a time.

You can triple click to select a whole paragraph. Triple click, hold the button on the third click and drag to select whole paragraphs at a time.

So, is this now called a nowyaknow?

Regularly clearing your cookies is always a useful practice.

However, there’s a new kid in town.

FLASH COOKIES are exactly the same, except they are not stored by your browser, they are part of Flash (a program that helps you see movies and other animated content on the web). The DO NOT GET CLEARED when you clear cookies in your browser. They are NEVER cleared. Some companies use Flash cookies to rebuild a normal cookie, even if you clear them. This can be bad.

This website is the control panel for clearing your flash cookies. Look at the huge list of flash cookies that are likely already on your PC, even if you are paranoid about cookies and cache and all of that stuff. Scary, innit? You can clear them using that web page.

Now, let’s be fair. Cookies can be useful. Staying logged in so that whenever you open your browser, GMail is there and you don’t have to enter your name and password? That’s a good use of cookies. Cookies can be used for good things.

I just like having control over what’s stored about me, and I like knowing that it’s there.

A great silicone scraper broke. All the Pages loved this scraper. It worked well and it was easy to clean. What a sad little scraper.

I slipped out of the mourning crowd and entered the workshop. I knew a handle had to be both strong and water resistant. Finally, I had a use for that block of lignum vitae! It’s the hardest wood known to man, and it was used in olden days for propeller bearings on ships, and for block and tackle. Carpenters often have mallets made out of a single piece (handle and all) of lignum vitae. A year or so ago, I got a 16″ x 4″ x 1″ block for $10 at a clearance sale at that greatest of all stores, Lee Valley, and I’ve been looking for something to do with it. I checked on the ‘net and found that it’s nontoxic and is often used for spoons and other cooking utensils, so I was confident I could do something for our poor scraper. I took a small section off of one end or the block and set to work with band saw, newly acquired scroll saw, and copious amounts of sandpaper.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Lignum vitae is incredible to work with. Its sap is actually waxy, so it cuts rather easily and it sands and polishes up like nothing else I’ve ever seen. I stopped at a fairly course 400 grit sandpaper, but I’m sure that if I moved up to 1000 or so this handle would shine like glass with no finish on it at all. The finished product works beautifully and I think it will outlast any of the other wooden spoons (and hopefully most of the plastic ones) that we own.

Now I have all sorts of dreams about other things to make with the rest of my block of lignum vitae, and I’m pretty sure MrsPages does too.

The plan: Use 2×6′s to make a frame. Wait for cold weather. Lay the plastic liner in the frame and fill it up. Skate.

The execution:

In October, I laid out the 2×6′s in the size I wanted and used 1×2 stakes to hold them up. Here’s the helpful assistant screwing the 2×6′s to the stakes:

Then we waited for cold weather. Being in Manitoba meant that this wasn’t a long wait.

I waited too long to make the plastic liner outdoors, so I laid it out in the basement. The plastic I got was only 48 inches wide, so I had to put 5 strips of it together to make the liner wide enough. I overlapped the pieces 12 inches, put a bead of acoustic caulk down and taped both sides.

As it turns out, this is a pretty poor way to do it. Cheap duct tape loses adhesion in cold weather. Also, one of the joints I made a different way (before going with the simple overlap method) held a lot of air and floated, making it very hard to cover with water. Luckily it was right along one edge of the rink, so I just piled snow on it and made the ice surface about 20 inches narrower than planned.

When the weather got cold enough I went out to clear the snow from inside the rink, but found that the kids’ games of Fox and Goose had packed the snow into heavy, hard to shovel piles. Hooray for Mr. Doug from down the street who spent a half hour on a -30C on a Sunday morning to help me out!

Once the snow was mostly gone, the rest was stomped smooth and level.

Next came laying out the liner and stapling it around the outside of the boards.

The outside tap will freeze and crack if we use it in the winter, so I hook the hose up to the kitchen tap and run it out the window. I got the adapter to hook the hose the the faucet for $2.49 at the hardware store.

Here is another able assistant holding the hose to start the initial filling.

At this point it becomes a waiting game. The initial fill took about 10 hours. I found that the boards weren’t as level as I thought. The water is within 2 inches of the top of one side and 6 inches from the top at the other. My yard is not level (for drainage purposes) so it took a lot of water to fill one side of the rink deep enough to get water over to the other side.

Even using cold water, filling the rink at night at -30C makes for some neat steam.

In this picture you can see that the far side is full and smooth while this side doesn’t even have any water in it yet. The snow close to the camera is my early attempt to hold the floating liner down, before I gave up on that entirely.

Once the rink was filled, I let it sit for a few days to make sure it was completely solid.

Lessons I learned:

1. Make the boards more level. This will make filling easier.
2. Don’t wait until it’s very cold to fill the rink. At -30C the water freezes before it has a chance to flow nice and level, so there are some ridges in the ice. The perfectionist in me wants to try to create some sort of mini-zamboni to fix it, but even that wouldn’t work at -30, I suspect.
3. Buy a one-piece rink liner rather than piecing plastic together.

The plastic I sealed together has a leak somewhere, because the water seeped out into the surrounding snow before it froze (though MrsPages is confident that the seams didn’t leak but there’s a hole in the plastic somewhere) :

Finally the day came:

And there was much rejoicing.

Did you know that if you type something into the URL bar of your browser, you can hit CTRL-ENTER and it will add “.com” and go to the site?

It’s true!

Just type “cnn” into the URL bar, and hit CTRL-ENTER and you go straight to “http://cnn.com”.

If you use Firefox you can make it even easier by hitting CTRL-L to go to the URL bar, then type your word and hit CTRL-ENTER. You don’t even have to move your hand to click the mouse! This has saved me at least 50 calories a day worth of energy expenditure, I’m sure.

Places like Lifehacker (that’s CTRL-L, lifehacker, CTRL-ENTER) are always touting the benefits of keyboard shortcuts for commonly used things, but I really haven’t caught on much. For some weird reason, though, this one has made me very happy.

Yes, a keyboard shortcut gives me a little bit of glee every time I use it.

Hi. I’m MrPages. I’m a geek.

Anyone have any other little-known favorite keyboard shortcuts?

I play guitar with a pretty heavy hand, so I’ve replaced an awful lot of strings. Over time, I’ve found a method that consistently works for me. I hate having 20 winds of string around the tuning pegs, but having only a few winds means that they can slip when you are getting the string up to tension. So, without further ado, How To Replace a Guitar String, as demonstrated on my Ovation 6 and 12-Strings.

First, an important basic: The tuners on the top of the headstock turn counterclockwise to tighten the string, and the tuners on the bottom wind it up clockwise. The strings all run together between the two rows of tuners. This is important. If you wind the strings the wrong way, they will have to bend around the other tuners to get where they are going, and you’ll break them easily, and have tuning problems.

(Click any image to go to a larger version)

<a href="http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/2727067_pD5gz/1#292398181_nMpB2"

So, lets string the guitar. First, cut off the old strings. Use wire cutters and cut them just above the bridge. Sliding the whole string out through the hole in the bridge wears things down, takes longer, and sounds terrible. If your guitar uses white plastic pins to keep the strings in the bridge, cutting the strings lets you reach into the sound hole to help remove the pins. Unwind the strings from the tuning pegs, coil them and discard them. Do that now, because if you forget you’ll poke yourself with them later.

I always start with the bass strings. Insert the string through the bridge. Pull it through gently until the ball end sits neatly. I always line up the ball ends so it looks pretty, but I’m retentive that way.

Turn the hole in the tuning peg until you can place the string straight through it. Insert the end of the string through the tuning peg and tug it straight, but not tight. Check that the ball end is still sitting properly in the bridge and that the string is sitting in the correct slot in the nut.

Trick number one: Tug the string straight, place your finger on the string at the nut, then slide your finger back to the first fret. This should pull the string back enough to give you some slack over the body.

This is just the right amount of slack to wind around the tuning peg a couple of times. Experiment, the bass strings need one fret, the higher strings sometimes need one and a half, it’s entirely up to your preferences once you see how this works. It’s important that you hold the string at the first fret during the next couple of steps to keep the string going where it’s supposed to.

Next, turn the tuning knob so that the tuning peg makes about a quarter turn, like this:

This quarter turn helps make sure you see which way to do the next step. It doesn’t work right if you wind the string the wrong way around the post.

Trick number two: The lock. It might make more sense for you to just do it and see what’s happening than it will when you read it. Bear with me, it’s quite a simple concept when you see it.

Loop the string backwards around the tuning peg and under the string. This is the OPPOSITE direction that the string winds up to be tightened. (That’s why the quarter turn helps, you can easily see which way the string winds).

Tug the string end fairly tight and bend it upwards under the string going down the fretboard. This bent-upwards piece will be held tightly in place by the string once it gets wound a little tighter, which prevents the string from slipping. Even if you only have a half turn of string around the tuning peg, it grabs itself and won’t pull out.

Still holding the string slightly taut against the fretboard, turn the tuning knob to tighten the string.

Keep tightening until it is near the correct pitch. It should look something like this:

Using your handy wire cutters, trim off the extra string as close as you can to the tuning peg. It’s okay if your wire cutters don’t have grinder marks on them like mine do.

And voila! You can see in this picture how the string grabs and holds itself.

That’s all there is to it. Lather rinse and repeat 5 more times (or 11 more times if you have a 12 string, or 3 more times if you have a bass) and you’re done!

Let me know in the comments if you’d like anything clarified.