Riverbend Journal

  Soon after we moved to this place some 14 years ago, I decided to hang our bicycles from the ceiling. My wife has always insisted that both our cars spend every night pampered inside the garage and so as we added children and bicycles to the mix, it became harder to do. In order to still leave room for all my woodworking equipment, I looked toward the ceiling and came up with a solution. I bought a half dozen of these rope hoists with hooks on the end and used five of them to hang up various bicycles and one to hang up a ladder. It got everything off the floor which allowed both cars to park at night but it had some issues. The biggest issue is that they were hard to work to lower a bicycle down. The mechanism requires a specific angle of the rope to allow the rope to slide past it and lower the bike down, something my kids and wife never seemed to be able to figure out. This meant that I was always on call to lower a bicycle down or pull it back up. This often resulted for the b...

  Moving day for our annual library fundraising book sale has come and gone. I thought I would share a few pictures of it for your enjoyment. Here is my dolly of books heading down the freight elevator to the main floor where the books will be offered up for sale soon. Although my dolly could hold more, I limited myself to 28 boxes at a time which weighed around 1000 pounds or about half a ton. If I stacked them any higher, it made it harder to see where I was going and increased the likelihood I would run into something or perhaps spill part of my load. In order to take this picture, I was backed into the corner next to the door with my phone held inches from my face and zoomed completely out as far as it would go. It is tight quarters with a half ton of books in a small elevator. Even though the dolly makes moving all that weight down to the sale floor easier, we still life each box onto the dolly and then lift it off the dolly and put it on one of the rows of display tables wher...

  Every fall, I help in a local fundraiser for our public library where we take donated used books in good condition and sell them cheaply back to the public with all the funds being given to the library to purchase more books. Last year, we came close to raising $30,000, our best year ever.  Although the sale lasts only three short days in the fall, work to prepare for it began a month earlier. Shopping carts are set up at the drop off location for people to put their donated books into. Myself and an army of volunteers wheel those carts upstairs to a cavernous storage room where we unpack them onto sorting tables and then one by one, classify them into one of about two dozen genres on more tables. Once they have been sorted, they are boxed up and put in stacks by genre until moving day. On moving day, myself and a couple other able bodied people, use large wheeled dollies to haul all those boxes of books, down to a large gymnasium sized room below where the actual sale is he...

  California Gold Rush family A blog post that I wrote about my 4th great grandfather Joseph Chicken Sr. whose gravesite I visited for the second time a few years back, elicited a response from a previously unknown cousin of mine. We have been corresponding via emails back and forth and sharing information. When I get these emails and requests, I typically start going back through my research to try and get facts straight and such and this time was no different. However, at the same time this was going on, I was also applying finish to six sets of chaos coasters so between coats while waiting for it to cure, I found myself with time on my hands. So I decided to focus on one of my nearby ancestors, in this case a fellow by the name of John Bolton who is the father of Joseph Chicken's first wife Frances Ann Bolton. John is sort of a blank canvas to me because he got caught up in the California Gold Rush of 1849, the only one of my direct ancestors to do so. However, I'm not sure ...

When I started out woodworking, like most people, I bought a lot of cheap tools that have since been replaced. A lot of it was because I simply couldn't afford better tools and often I learned by using the tools, what I liked and what I didn't like about them. The one exception is my planer (seen above) which I bought twelve or so years ago and have been tremendously happy with it ever since. It is probably no coincidence that you can find one of these in perhaps any long time woodworking hobbyist's woodshop. I know more people with one of these than I do those that have other makes and models.  I won't bore you with details but a planer has spinning knives in it that make rough boards smooth and the surface flat and parallel to the opposite side. It is an essential piece of equipment if you ever make something from rough sawn lumber which I do quite a bit since it is considerably cheaper to buy. The three large knives spin very fast and essentially scrape the wood smoo...