Riverbend Journal

  Four or five years ago now, we had a derecho come through our area and took out three of my trees. As I still had plenty of firewood from trees I cut down a decade before, I cut the two trees closest to my yard into stove lengths to season and piled up the small branches to burn some winter when conditions are right. I am still waiting on those conditions. A third tree, a black cherry, blew down on the steepest part of our sloping knob out back. It was nice and straight and would have made for some excellent lumber to use on projects if only I had a sawmill or even some way to haul it up and out of the huge ditch it is in and haul it to a sawmill. But I don't and due to the location, it has just laid there on the ground all these years. A few years back, a friend of mine asked if I could cut him a little chunk of it for some project the next time I had my chainsaw out. I did that and while at it, cut off the above chunk for myself. I lugged both chunks, heavy in water weight up a...

  Sometime earlier this spring while I was chest deep in the altar build project, my wife came home with a limited edition print that someone had given her and asked me if I could frame it. Around the same time frame, no pun intended, as an officer in a Catholic fraternal organization I was sent the picture on the left of newly elected Pope Leo XIV. For reasons too lengthy to get into, the organization can't utilize the picture and so my wife adopted it and added it to the framing list.  I dislike doing such projects when the weather is great because there tends to be a lot of spare time in-between steps such as waiting for glue to dry or coats of paint to dry. So with most of my furniture list completed, I thought now was the time to squeeze this project in. Using more scraps and some router bits from my newly installed wall mount case, I quickly had the frames made, glued up and drying in clamps.  Waiting ensued. The next day I cut reinforcement slots for splines in the...

  Our priest had a birthday and had several celebrations by various groups of parishioners leading up to it but nothing on his actual birthday including the Filipino community. Being fairly close to the priest as friends along with him being our spiritual leader, we invited to take him and his assistant priest out to eat. He accepted and chose a local Chinese buffet place that we don't frequent. In fact, I had never been there in all thirteen years we have lived in this town but I know it does good business as the parking lot is always packed whenever I drive by. But I digress. He had obligations so couldn't get there until close to seven in the evening. I had obligations and couldn't get there until twenty minutes later so my wife met him there and after I finished up, I drove there. I was surprised to see maybe 20 others that I knew, all belonging to the Filipino community also there celebrating Father's birthday, most of them having just celebrated Father's birth...

  After 20 years of driving a minivan, I finally decided awhile ago that the time had finally come. We have one daughter solidly in college and moving into an apartment next summer. With my part time mother-in-law, that meant that we are down to four folks most of the time, and three or five folks on rare occasions. With the older daughter no doubt, likely to need help moving on a fairly frequent basis in the coming years, it put us in an interesting predicament. The minivan was getting up there in age and though while it was a dependable vehicle (with one exception I'll mention soon), it would soon be nearing that point where things will likely start needing attention and as our main trip vehicle, we decided the time to fix that was sooner rather than later. My only complaint on the minivan were the tires. Due to it being All Wheel Drive (AWD) and the layout of minivans in general, it didn't have a place for a spare and had to have Run Flat tires. These allowed you to drive on...

  When I began tracing my ancestral roots, I was puzzled by my paternal side. My birth surname is the same as some very famous Germans and indeed, nearly all genealogists on that branch theorize that we are somehow related. Yet try as I might, I have never been able to trace a line to Germany. I can do so all day long on my maternal side but no on my paternal side. In fact, most of the lines I have been able to trace come from northern England, Scotland and northeastern Ireland. So I was excited when a few years ago, Ancestry.com upgraded my DNA test results to reflect the technology to divide it between your parents. I could see definitively on my paternal side that I have no German ancestors, at least not in the last 500 years or so which is about all the farther modern DNA tests can reliably predict your origins.  The largest percentage of my paternal side of my family was color coded green on the first ring chart and in the above map of western Europe and now that Ancestry...

  Jeff over at From a Rocky Hillside asked about how often I use my router and knowing that he does some woodworking, I thought I would show him my setup in conjunction with finishing up my router bit cabinet. Above is my table saw which is what is considered a hybrid table saw. It has a lot of the same features at a stationary cabinet table saw but has a wheel system underneath that allows me to raise it up and move it around as needed. The right wing of the table saw came with just open space between the guides that hold the fence because it is expensive to fill it with materials that aren't really necessary in using the table saw. My router table at the time was nearly the same size as that opening and so I took off all the legs and attached it into the opening. This allows me to use my router at a comfortable height, use the fence on the table saw if needed, and provides a convenient way to store my router table out of the way when not in use. I just lower it down until the bi...

  Kelly over at Kelly's Thoughts and Ramblings asked to see the previously mentioned mouse skeleton paperweight that I helped my oldest daughter create. My youngest daughter, the creative one, needed some gift ideas for Christmas and so a couple years ago I bought her an assortment of silicone molds and some deep pour epoxy thinking she might make some creative things out of them and she did for awhile. But she got tired of that form of art and moved onto other things. Sometime after, my eldest (medically inclined) daughter found this mouse skeleton and was fascinated with it. It crossed my mind to preserve it using the deep pour epoxy and so together we created this paperweight. I poured a thin layer of epoxy into the bottom of the mold and let it partially set up. My eldest daughter then cleaned up the skeleton a bit to remove any stray bits of flesh that were still there. I don't recall there being much of that left. She then placed the cleaned skeleton on the partially set...

In short order, I was able to make some holders for all the various bits and in the end, I didn't weed out a single one. I figured since I have the room in an organized manner, I'll keep them for just in case. Ninety percent of all routing I do use the handful of bits in the lower right tray and the other 10% are out of the lower left tray. The yellow ones on both sides are rarely used anymore as I out grew them years ago  but the price was right at the time. With the trays in, I scrounged around through my scrap bin and found several small cut offs of oak that must have been from the altar project and I had forgotten about them. I thought they would make passable doors so I spent a morning doing the joinery and gluing them up into passable doors. I also looked through my cabinets and found some hardware from our old kitchen which I will repurpose the hinges and handles for this case. I think I still have some cutoffs of plexiglass from when I made my own windows for the greenh...

  My last post left you at the above picture of a lot of router bits and a pile of scrap wood. The mornings were a bit brisk this past week forcing me to put on a jacket and wait until late morning to get any gluing done but there is still time to do something productive out in the garage so I started in. Most of the scraps were cut from undesirable sections of the lumber, most containing large defects. Back in the day, these would have been thrown into a burn pile and torched but in modern times, things like epoxy render even these boards salvagable. So I taped up the back sides of the defects, mixed up a batch of deep pour epoxy, tinted it black and poured it into the defects. The epoxy was left over from a project my oldest had done years ago after finding a skeletonized mouse in in the garage. We suspended the skeleton into a silicone cube mold and poured epoxy around it to turn it into an interesting paper weight which she still keeps on her desk. Anyway, I had leftover epoxy ...

  Above is my reconfigured wall with my bandsaw and drill press swapping places with my hand tool cabinet. This allows me to move my drill press out of the way and have easy access to the attic should I need to do so with no contortion necessary. At some point in the future, I would like to replace that folding workbench with perhaps a flip down wooden one and clean up the mess of tools underneath it so I can store my rolling chair there but that won't be this year. With my rolling tools out of the way, you can see my replacement for the peg board which was a simple sheet of plywood. All the tools could be organized in a much denser pattern and all the tool holders which I fastened from scraps of wood are screwed to the plywood so they will no longer fall out. I hung up tools mostly related to home construction or repairs that I rarely use and don't care if they get dirty or exposed to the elements. By moving all my batteries to hanging up near the charger, I freed up a drawer ...

  When I last left off talking about this project, I noticed that it was blocking a good chunk of my attic access above it. Due to the perspective of the camera, it doesn't look like it but the cabinet depth is 28 inches and the attic opening is maybe around 36 inches and it maybe 18 inches above the cabinet. The geometry adds up to a really tight squeeze despite how it looks in this picture. I did test out the strength of the cabinet and it did hold my body weight meaning it could be used as a step in accessing the attic but it just wasn't convenient.  To move it, the ideal solution, would require shuffling all my tools around. Not shown but underneath the cabinet in the above picture is a small table that is a catch all for things. It is quite handy since it is right next to the door entering into our house, but it also means that it is usually cluttered with lots of things since it is so close to the door entering our house. One of those proverbial double edges swords. So t...

I received the funniest phone message I believe I have ever received. The pretext is that the message is from an elderly couple in their late 80's who go to my church and have a mole problem in their yard. I've been using my traps to help rid them of their problem. This is the message left on my phone: (Ed) it's (Bob). The trap that you sat down closer to the fences looks like it's tripped so I thought I'd let you know. Talk to you later. (Some mumbling in the background.) Yeah. (More mumbling) Can I see your boobies? (More mumbling) Do you need help covering them up? (More mumbling) You need help covering your boobies up? (Yeah) I'm leaving the kitchen and in the hallway. I was calling (Ed) to let him know about the sprung trap. (More mumbling by both) (50 seconds of silence before it finally hangs up.) I will probably wait an hour before going over to take care of the mole and reset the trap to make sure all boobies are covered up.

  Above it the wall where my former sheet of peg board has hung for nearly a decade and a half. It served it's purpose well but I never really liked it from the moment I hung it up. The hangers that inserted into the peg holes always had a tendency to fall out whenever I removed a tool requiring me to locate it and find the location where it went all over again. The tools that hung on the peg board were always coated in dust which was fine for some of them and not so much for others. Then there were other tools that I use frequently that ended up in various drawers that required rummaging around to find. So after some inspiration and a desire to try something new, I decided to make a cabinet with hand cut dovetails to house all those hand tools I would like to keep dust free. After removing the peg board, I was left with a clean slate above. I assembled the final doors onto my cabinet and oiled it with a coat of some leftover tung oil which I had leftover from some project a long t...

  After two weeks of charity work, it was time to get back to my hand tool cabinet project and finish up the doors. Since the panel on which the tools will eventually hang is comprised of plywood, I wanted to dress up the front just a little but in the same vein as the rest of my cabinets. I dug around in my scrap bin of wood and found a piece of something or other with a lot of defects that I thought I could cut around. After milling and cutting it up, I think it might be mahogany but I'm not sure. If it is, I don't know where I would have obtained it and I the only thing I can remember building out of mahogany was a box to store our silverware maybe 12 years ago or more. Anyway, it did serve it's purpose and dressed up the front doors. Above is a picture with the doors fastened in place to the rest of the cabinet. Above shows the outer doors opened for access to hand tools. Above shows the inner doors open for access to hand tools and larger items.  Overall, I am happy wi...