Conspicuous Consumption & New Toys

Throughout this week I have converted a serious pile of rough sawn white oak lumber into two tables full of stacked parts blanks for James’ three Garden Bench’s. This is a fair bit of work accomplished, but there is so much more yet to do, and our production deadline is now a week closer than we had been counting on. That means not only that we will be working longer days, and Saturdays, but will need to take some short-cuts in order to meet this revised deadline.

On a brighter note, we received a new piece of equipment today; a Performax 16-32 drum sander. This item has been on my wish list for some time, but this job, with the large amount of lamination work to be done was just the right incentive to pay out that investment capital.

The sander was scheduled to arrive yesterday (Wednesday), but the freight company in Knoxville messed up and it didn’t get it on the truck. When they called to tell me this and ask if delivering it on Thursday would be alright, I agreed but informed them that I had kept our pick-up truck that day to use in shuttling the crate from the hard road up to the workshop in case their truck was not able to turn into or get up our steep gravel driveway. I would not have the truck on Thursday. The dispatcher assured me they would get it delivered, even if the driver had to put it on a hand truck and wheel it in.

Apparently they thought better of that. When it arrived today, instead of being on a their 24 foot box truck that makes regular deliveries to this area, it was in a cargo van, all by its self. At 280 pounds we still had to cut the strapping holding the boxes to a pallet and off load them onto my dock individually, but at least he could get into the dock. All went well and the boxes are sitting in the shop awaiting unpacking and assembly.

Marie and I assembled and tuned the sander Thursday evening so that it would be ready to prep parts-pieces for lamination on Friday. It was after 10:30 PM when we were done, so I didn’t get this posted until Friday morning – I was too tired to type!

Friday will be spent surfacing the glue-joints of long rails and gluing the rail halves together. Almost every part for this piece of furniture is made up of two or three pieces of wood laminated together to form the thick timbers used in this heavy duty bench. Laminating all those parts will take a couple of weeks, but I will be cutting and assembling some parts as others are being laminated.

On Saturday I’ll put in an extra day and continue this process. Monday is supposed to be a holiday, but I’ll work that day as well because of the tight deadline we’re under. The Step 4 page of this project article will be re-posted as additions are made.

See you Monday!
Doug