Ever see a magazine cover story with a title like Dealing with a Small Bathroom? Then you open the magazine and flip to the article and see that their idea of a “small bathroom” is a bathroom that only has room for one large easy chair beside the double sink and whirlpool tub, because the standalone sauna takes up too much room. How ever will they survive with only one large easy chair?

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.

Backstory Part 1: Neil Gaiman is a fantastic author. He has written so many great things in so many genres that it makes me wonder what it’s like to live in his head. It must be quite crowded in there. American Gods and Neverwhere are on my list of favourite books, and have been since the end of the second chapter of each.

Backstory Part 2: Esther contacted me and told me (she knew from Britain, I didn’t know and it was 2 miles from my house) that a local bookseller had a Hallowe’en party to celebrate the release of Neil’s The Graveyard Book, a retelling of the Jungle Book story set in a graveyard. Bookstores across the continent had parties and documented them so Mr Gaiman could choose his favourite and visit that bookstore for a reading. We didn’t attend the party, but Winnipeg was chosen as a winner anyway. On the tie between Decatur, Georgia and Winnipeg, Neil had this to say:

I wondered if I could legitimately award points for climate, or for whether I actually wanted to go there or not, (suddenly throwing Octavia Books in New Orleans into the lead), or deduct points for it being probably rather cold in, say, Winnipeg, in the winter.

In the end he declared a tie and went to both.

End of backstory. The point of the post is that on December 15, 2009, Neil Gaiman came to Winnipeg and we went to see him, along with about 800 other people:

He read a good-sized section of Odd and the Frost Giants and answered a number of questions from the crowd. He read and spoke at a podium in the center of the large crowd, and we were fortunate enough to be right in front of him:

He was a witty and intelligent speaker, as one would expect from his writing, and he has a deep voice and a not-too-strong British accent. I think he should be required by law to narrate everything. Yes, everything.

Afterwards he went over to a seating area and signed books. Staff was walking around throughout the evening handing out slips of paper with random 1-to-10 numbers on them, and people were to be called in numerical order. All the 1′s first, then the 2′s, etc. We were in the middle somewhere (6, I think) and we were ready for a long wait, and it was after 9pm by this time. Then, in a wonderful show of empathy and class, Mr Gaiman announced that he has kids and he knows how difficult it is for kids to sit for things like this, so anyone with small children would be taken first, before anyone else. I think this took the handlers by surprise, but it was wonderful news for us. (Thanks, Neil!)

He was surprisingly open, and he chatted with the kids for a minute. A very pleasant guy. We discussed the origins of our name and his (they are very similar) and he drew a picture in The Graveyard Book and signed the others with little comments.

Here’s me looking like I’m going to leap over the table and attack him:

Here’s McNally Robinson’s writeup of the event, with more photos.

A good time was had by all, though it was a little late for some:

And, as a sad footnote, that McNally Robinson Bookselller was closed very shortly after in a cost-saving measure for the company.

For Christmas, we made each other gifts, and my eldest son had the idea to build my youngest son a set of building blocks to make a castle for Playmobil-scale people. The boys love playing with their Playmobil knights and Roman warriors. The also have vikings, pirates and various other warriors that they mix in for some excitement. Imagine what a battle between the Playmobil French Knights and the Playmobil Romans would have been like, with Playmobil Egyptian chariot support and Playmobil pirate artillery… the mind boggles.

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.

New Year’s Maintenance time!

I’m in the middle of backups and all sorts of year-end (a bit late) stuff.

Gina Trapani over at Smarterware has some good advice about Gmail maintenance.

Make sure your account recovery options are set properly. If the email you give is inactive or broken, you’ll never be able to reset a password. If your security question is wrong, or you’ve forgotten the answer, you’re stuck if you ever want help with GMail.

Go check it now!!

A friend of ours gave us a snowflake Christmas ornament many years ago, and I’ve always wanted to make one myself. I decided to try this year, using some leftover oak I had in the shop. I had a very hard time finding good information on the about these, so I also decided to write up a bit of a tutorial.

Here’s the final result:

To make the snowflakes, we’ll use 3/4 inch thick wood, because it’s easy to come by. You can use any thickness you want, you’ll just have to scale your work up or down to match.

Start by setting your table saw blade to 30 degrees and making some diamond shaped rods. It’s important that the face of the diamond is side-grain, NOT end-grain. For example, cut the rods across the grain of a 1×4 rather than ripping long strips off the edges. The diamond face should have grain lines going across it (shown below). If the length of the rods have grain going down them, the face is end-grain and it tears and splinters when you do any of the next steps. Even on a very hard wood like maple I couldn’t get end-grain to work.

If you use 3/4 inch thick material, then each faces of the rod is roughly 7/8 of an inch. Mine were very slightly smaller than that because my stock was slightly thinner. The critical part here is that all four faces are exactly the same length.

The 30 degree setting is touchy. Try cutting 6 sample rods from some cheap wood like a pine 1×4. Assemble them in a snowflake shape (look at pictures further on in the instructions) and see if they fit with no gaps. If there’s a gap, increase or decrease the angle of the saw a tiny bit and try again. I usually had to adjust and re-try this step three or four times to get the angle exactly right. Once you get the angle correct, tighten the blade in place and make lots of rods, because the blade setup is the most time consuming finicky part of the whole operation.

Once you have your rods, it’s time to make them interesting. This plan is for a simple-looking snowflake using only the table saw. If you use a router you could use different bits and make many more interesting shapes.

I created a jig to help this process by cutting the edge off a 1×4 using the 30 degree angle blade, and then attaching a scrap piece of hardboard to one side. Lower the saw blade below the table, clamp the jig to the fence, and raise the blade up through the hardboard about 1/8 of an inch. This makes a nice custom zero-clearance table surface. For the first cut, the distance from the blade to the jig should be about half the width of the rod.

Slide the rods along the jig to cut a notch along each side.

Then move the jig so the same cut is made, quite close to the edge of the rod. Turn the rod over and do this last cut again, so the two cuts end up taking the point off the one edge of the rod.

Then start gluing and clamping pairs of rods together, with the missing corners together. These missing corners will make the hole in the center of the snowflake.

When the pairs are dry, unclamp and then test fit the pairs in groups of three.

Gluing and clamping is difficult, so we’ll do it in two more steps. First glue and clamp two pairs together. I needed two clamps to do this properly.

When they are dry, add the third pair. If there are gaps when they go together, you can adjust the fit by lightly sanding the loose piece. If the gaps are too large, you need to toss these out, adjust the 30 degree saw blade and try again. There’s no good way to repair a bad fit at this stage. Clamping was difficult so I used “plastic twine”, which is like stretchy plastic wrap.

Once they are all dry, I added some more decoration by putting a hole down through the center of each rod. It’s far easier to do this now than when the rods were not glued together.

The next step involves slicing snowflakes off of this bundle of rods, like cutting cookies off a roll of dough. I made a sliding jig for my bandsaw, if you have a nice bandsaw square that would do fine. I don’t.

Cut the slices to whatever thickness you like, mine are about 1/4 inch thick. Expect to lose the first slice, because the ends of the rods won’t be perfectly even, and expect to lose a few slices worth of wood at the end because it’s quite difficult to slice 1/4 inch slices off of a tiny piece of wood. I usually toss out the first 1/4 inch and the last inch of any bundle of rods I make.

Sand the faces of the snowflakes on a disk sander, or lay them on a table and use a palm sander.

And voila, ready for finish and string! (Yeah, this one has a tiny gap.. sigh)

I finished my oak snowflakes in a nice stain to emphasize the grain. You can clearcoat them with varathane, or finish them however else you want.

Here’s a prototype for my next design. I used a router to make the notches along the rods rather than the table saw. It makes aligning the rods a bit more difficult (this one is a bit sloppy) but I like the overall effect. It looks more like a snowflake and less like a star.

Have questions or suggestions? Let me know.

Make some? Post pictures!