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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  7d ago (text post)   640 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 15, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Next step is deciding how I'll create the chamfer/roundover without owning a router or a plane. I've seen people do it with rasps but I don't want to tear and chip the soft pine, but I'd also like something faster and less dusty than sanding.

Honestly I'd say just nut up and get a router. But if that is ruled out for whatever reasons, like you are attached to hand tools, maybe a card scraper? I keep meaning to grab a few myself.

It's 100% on the list. In the meantime this is a small project and I kind of like the challenge/discipline of making do with what I have. Plus despite having added ~25m of shelf space most of that was instantly consumed and I'm still very limited on space and storage, so while a router is justifiable a lot of the larger and more practical tools are off the table. If anything the move right now would be to buy a block plane but again, I like the challenge of having to get creative.

Yeah, I hear that. I remember getting creative, and finding ways to use my tablesaw as a jointer, and putting rabbets on joints for drawers and boxes with it.

Then I discovered the raw joy of having the correct tool for the correct job. The jointer I got last year has been the best edition to my shop by a mile. No more planing sled or makeshift jointing on the tablesaw for me!

IMHO, a router table might be the second most important powertool behind a tablesaw. It can joint, template, profile, mortise, and probably more. If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably have skipped my miter saw and gotten a router table sooner.

Also my next project is ripping out a bunch of poorly optimized shelving that came with the place, and instead putting in a miter saw station, lots of drawers, and a wall rack for rough lumber. So that'll be fun.

I'll definitely make a small/portable router table once I have the router. As useful as it would be a table saw is out of the question though.

Americans are lucky that a lot of you seem to have large garages and basements to use, and YouTube being mostly American often gives the impression that table saws are the next step up from owning a power drill. I did eventually find the British corner of YouTube where people squeeze their hobby woodworking into our more typical potting sheds, but if I worked in my potting shed I'd then have nowhere for my gardening stuff.

Alongside the creativity aspect I just have an aesthetic dislike for solving problems by waving a credit card. On the other hand the last time I made a foot stool shaped object I did it using only a Swiss Army knife with a saw stroke of <2", and there was that time I cut a crude mortise for a door lock using little more than a screwdriver and a vegetable knife, so I won't deny there is a certain minimum threshold of viability.

I'm not sure what I'll make next. I've got a lot of projects I'd like to make, a lot of jigs I'll need to make, and a few more tools to buy. Quite keen to learn some sewing actually, was thinking last night that I could start off by making some sort of upholstery cushion for the top of this stool. Should be fairly straight forward, I don't think fitting gets much easier than a small flat rectangle.

Oh damn, not even a tablesaw huh? I really was completely in the wrong mindset for you. There I go being all American again.

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