Riverbend Journal

  A week or so ago, a fellow blogger was talking about handmaking cards and I made a comment about how such things are disappearing these days. The last handmade cards I can remember receiving are actually ones that a local nun used to give my girls on holidays before mass. They were made from various construction paper shapes or cut out pieces from purchased cards sent to her and glued to pieces of cardboard from cereal boxes. I don't particularly remember what was written inside them but I remember the effort that went into making them. For some reason, that always struck me more as I know a lot of effort went into creating the cards and that my girls were worth that effort. Buying a card, signing it and giving it just doesn't carry the same weight. That nun died probably 8 or 9 years ago and I'm not sure I've seen a handmade card since.  The blog author to whom I made that comment too, saw that comment and sent me the above handmade card. I blurred out her name and w...

  As I write this nine days ago, France is in an imminent financial crisis. Their debt is now forecasted to be around 116% of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product) which is essentially everything of value that they produce in any given year. In other words, they owe more than what they sell and are running a deficit. They are forecasted to lose nearly 170 billion Euros this year. The will likely see a credit downgrading by the time this post is published on blogger which means that debt payments will increase only making their deficit worse. If it gets bad enough, other countries will stop lending them money and they will default and collapse much like Greece did back in 2009. When Greece collapsed, their unemployment surged to nearly 25% for adults and 55% for youth. 111,000 companies went bankrupt overnight causing their GDP to plunge by 26%. Public debt doubled overnight. Over a third of their population lived in poverty. Many government subsidies were cut or stopped altogether. Ri...

  The problem with designing things largely in my head is that it is unfortunately fallible and prone to making mistakes. Disregarding the back panels of any of this doors on this project, there are five boxes to make. Each box has four sides. I used up for of the sides when making the largest back box so when I went to start the middle two doors, I needed eight sides. Two mistakes immediately became obvious. As you can see, I only had four boards for the middle doors and four boards for the outer doors. Half as many as I need. The second mistake is that I had cut the top and bottom boards at the same length as the top board of the first box I built. This made sense in my mind since both of those added up would equal the width of the first box but it makes it kind of hard to open said doors.  The second mistake was easy to correct. I could merely cut each board directly in half. I would lose the width of the saw blade in material, in this case 1/8" which will result in a gap i...

I'm not sure I have listened to more than five minutes of Charlie since I first learned of his existence a couple years ago. Mainly I saw shorts of him "owning" a debate posted by some of my friends who are more extreme right in their views than I. Since his murder, I have heard a lot more of his debates. I don't agree with Charlie on many of his views, especially when it comes to gun control, vaccines and faith in science. I do however admire his ability to bring clarity to some of the issues being debated and distill it down to a single point of disagreement. His murder has hit me hard. Charlie was a husband and father of two young girls. Full stop.  I find it abhorrent that some think he should "reap what he sowed". I find it distasteful that others are saying that while his death is tragic, it isn't as tragic as someone getting killed for political beliefs they more closely align with. These sorts of comments and beliefs are why we find ourselves whe...

  After I got all the dovetails cut on the main box, I cut a backpanel to size and glued the first box together. Above one of those completed dovetails after the glue had set and I could do a rough sanding. You can see some small gaps here and there but overall, I'm really pleased at how well they look for my first attempt. I learned a lot on how to work the chisels to achieve the results I was looking for. I also learned that hard maple was not probably a good wood to do chisel work on as a novice. It requires extremely sharp chisels to sever instead of crush the wood. I discovered that my chisels were probably not sharp enough and will have to learn how to sharpen them better. Below is the main body of the first box that will be the one I mount to my wall. All the doors still need to be made and I am waiting on the hinges to arrive that will hold those doors and allow them to work how I envisioned in my head. Unfortunately, they will take a couple weeks to arrive. Fortunately, it...

  The nice thing about hand cutting dovetails is that you can design them however you like. It doesn't require very precise measurements but it does require some precise cutting of the pins to get them to fit nicely to my already cut tails that I showed you in a previous post. When I am ready to start laying out the pins on the vertical board in the picture above, I take my board with the previously cut tails and lay it across the top. I position it so the shoulder of the tails just kisses the edge of the board where the pins will be. I then take a sharp knife or a marking knife as seen above, and holding it flat against the tails, I trace their profile into the pin board below. No precise measurements needed at all. I darkened the lines cut into the end of the pin board with a pencil so they are more easily seen and then used a square to transfer the lines down to the other horizontal line which is merely the thickness of the boards I am working with. Again, I don't know or ne...

Three Bulgarians, three Filipinos, a Pakistani and a token American were sitting at a dinner table. Were they having a good time? Absolutely. This isn't the start of some good joke. Last year, our daughter's first year of college, we had hoped to visit her more often than we did. We did a couple times, mostly on our way to and from someplace other than that town but mostly she came home. As a result, some friends of ours who moved to that town six years ago and whom we said we would visit more often now that our daughter was attending college there, didn't get seen at all. So this past holiday weekend, we decided to rectify that before another year goes by. The Bulgarians, husband, wife and son who is now a senior in school, are actually U.S. Citizens now. Since we last saw them, they finished the last step of the process and were sworn in two years ago. Their son was born in Baltimore before either were citizens but by the interpretation of our Constitution, he has always ...

  Last summer, in an effort to build some muscle mass for bone health, I bought a pair of Bowflex adjustable dumbbells. Back when I was much younger, my parents brought home a bench weight set with two dumbbells that we utilized until we graduated from high school. The dumbbell set were concrete filled plastic encased weights that slid onto a heavy steel bar with collets that required an adjustable wrench to tighten/loosen a set screw anytime you wanted to adjust the weight. Although I have no idea what became of the rest of the set, I carried one barbell with me throughout life and only sold it a few years ago at a garage sale. The reason I sold it was that it was too heavy for me to lift now and I had no extra weights to make it lighter.  I just figured my weight lifting days were done but then after loosing a good deal of weight a year ago, I thought I might get back into it again if I could find something that fit better. The Boxflex suited my needs and best of all, requir...

  The next time I got some time to spend in my shop, I spent an hour on the table saw making the sides of the boards nice and straight and the ends squared off. Not shown, but I also final cut them to the exact sizes I would be needing for the various boxes I was going to be building. In my first post on this project last week, I mentioned that I wanted to learn a new skill that might serve me later on future projects. There are dozens of ways I could fasten those boards together to form rectangular boxes but I settled on using dovetails. For those who don't know, dovetails are a traditional joint used back before we had the modern adhesives and glues that I have access to today. The design of the joint itself provided the necessary support to keep things together. I have a jig that makes nice dovetails and I have used it in the past when I was making lots of them such as all the drawers in my office desk. While definitely functional, they look exactly like what they are, a joint m...

  After coming up with a rough design, I had to decide how to build it. The rest of the cabinets in my garage are simple plywood carcasses with a door edged in hardwood. I could go this route though I have doubts as to whether the strength of that construction would be sufficient as I am planning to densely load it up with lots of tools, mostly metal and thus it might need to hold a fair amount of weight. Also, I would like to try a new method I have never tried before and will write about in a future post. So I decided on building the cabinet mostly out of hardwood though I will still used plywood for the back panel of the main carcass and the panels within each of the hinged doors. I could go to my local LoNards Depot which has three or four types of hardwood priced extremely high and individually shrink wrapped in plastic. I could order the hardwood online which gives me a bit more control but is still pretty high priced for "shop furniture". In the end, I decided this pro...