Tuesday Oct. 18th

Did I say I'd be back on Monday?  I'm sorry I meant Tuesday.  Although technically I was here Monday but as I have mentioned before, Mondays are Radio Program day.

Today I need to pin the three racks I've been building.  This time I'll pin the shelves with walnut dowels.

Last time I placed masking tape tabs on the shelves and used a pencil and Incra ruler to lay out the pin locations.  Then I used a snapper to punch the pin hole centers.  I've set up the drill press with a twist drill the right size for my dowels and have set the depth so it will drill through the shelf and 1/4" into the rack body.  I'll drill the holes in all the lower shelves, adjust the drill press table to drill the middle shelves and drill all of those, reset it again for the top shelves and finally drill the back band.

I have hope I did my lay-out correctly because the rear pin holes are very close to the edge of the next shelf.  If I was off by just a a little the drill will crew a divot out of the front of the shelf, and that means more time and effort invested into sanding that out and re shaping the shelf edge.  Since we don't have time to spare, I try not to use it up in foolish ways.

Next I apply glue to a pair of holes and drive dowels in until they bottom out.  You can tell when they bottom because the sound they make as you hit them with the mallet changes from a woody 'ping' to a deep, solid thud. 

Once they've bottomed I use a flush cut saw to trill off the dowels, glue another pair of holes and drive them in again.

Between each driving I sand a small champher on the end of the dowels to help them go into the holes smoothly.

After removing the masking tape it's time to sand the pins flush and smooth.  I use sanding blocks for this, one equipped with 100 grit paper. for fairing the stump (it only protrudes by the thickness of the masking tape, but this is enough to get a good smooth surface after sanding) and 150 for the finish sanding.

When this is done I'll blow the dist out and set them aside.  Tomorrow I'll load the HVLP gun with lacquer and spend the day finishing.  I' not looking forward to that.  Lacquer always makes me sick to my stomach (my beard prevents the respirator form sealing up as completely as it should) and I'm still feeling puny from being sick last week.  But, at least i do have a dedicated finishing room.  I can go in there to shoot the lacquer then while it dries I'll retreat to another part of the shop and work on something else between shooting sessions.