Back In My Garage

 

Back before we left for Colorado, the weather was just getting nice to where I could work in the garage whenever I had time and there were even a couple days where it got warm enough to glue which required a full 8 hours or so of above 50 F degree weather. So I got to cracking on the bookcase project by cutting out the various parts, all of which you can see on my workbench above. You can even see some of the beginnings of the joinery work started with the slots cut into the boards on the left. 

There are different levels of woodworking like most hobbies I suppose. One can use joinery techniques that will definitely get the job done but may not hold up for hundreds of years or one can go all out and build something that might last hundreds of years but at the expense of more time. I chose the first route on this project with my choice of mostly using dominos to join things together. 

By using dominos, which are wooden domino shaped pieces of wood, inserted into the slots and then pressing things together, they align the surfaces of the boards flush with each other to help reduce the amount of sanding one will need later on. I will also use them to attach all the various parts that will comprise each end of the bookcase together. While not as strong as traditional mortise and tenon joinery which I plan to use on the future dresser project, it should be adequate for a college bookshelf. 

The clamps seen in the above two pictures are really nice clamps to use but cost lots of money for each one and so I only have six of them meaning I had to glue up the shelves in two batches. But I like those sorts of problems because I can just glue up two shelves and leave them to dry why I go do something else for a couple hours before returning to do the rest.

Once all the joinery work that I can do at this stage is done, I began the sanding process for the side panels of the book case. For most of my life, I have simply donned a face mask for this dusty job but in my older age, I have gotten wiser and affluent enough to afford other options. So a few years ago, I bought the full face mask that you see on the right. I seals my face off completely and has a rechargeable battery pack on the backside that pulls in fresh air through the filters on top.  This keeps my viewing area completely unobstructed and works well with my prescription glasses. Traditional masks always fogged up my glasses and allowed sawdust into my eyes which irritated them. I also got a rechargeable set of Bluetooth noise cancelling headphones which block out the noise and relieve the tedium by connecting to my phone and playing podcasts and music while I work. 

But sanding still remained a dusty process and my entire garage and everything in it would be coated with a thick layer of fine wood dust at the end of the process. That isn't good when it comes time to finish or six months later when I stir it up looking for something else while not wearing such a nice filtered face mask. So for the first time ever, I duct taped a shop vacuum cleaner to my sander. I must say, it made a HUGE difference. Not only was the dust contained, but my sand paper doesn't get clogged and lasts four to five times as long. But my vacuum cleaner hose is very tough to wrestle around and having to duct tape it to my sander is inconvenient at best so I think that in the near future, I will find a better solution. I have something in mind but waited to order it until my return from Colorado. I might do a future post on it once it is in place.