How To Refinish Hardwood Floors: The Hatch - a floor refinishing/repair project wit...

How To Refinish Hardwood Floors: The Hatch - a floor refinishing/repair project wit...: Sometimes pulling up carpet in hopes of gaining a beautiful hardwood floor can introduce unexpected challenges. This is especially true in a...

Woodworking At Home is Fun

This is what I love about woodworking from home.
Need I say more?

A simple way to keep track of the grit on those synthetic scratch pads.

Have you ever had trouble remembering what the grit level is on that synthetic scratch pad? You can memorize the color coding system, but that doesn't work so well if you have color deficient vision as I do.

Here is a simple solution I found to keep track of that grit.

www.dogwoodtales.com

Sanding by hand

Sanding is a woodworker's favorite activity! Actually, that's kind of a joke. Most of us do not really like to sand that much. By the time you get to the point of sanding, sometimes you just want to jump right to finishing and be done with it.
Truth is, however tedious it seems at times, I actually enjoy sanding by hand. It is a relaxing experience if you really let yourself enjoy it. Plus it gives one a more personal feel with the wood project. I still do a fair share of sanding with electric sanders for the sake of efficiency, but I do not enjoy it nearly as much as sanding by hand.

www.dogwoodtales.com

Time to do woodworking

I have two tables to refinish. One to finish refinishing and a new one to get started on. I also have a night stand to refinish, a desk to make and a couple other irons in the fire or soon to be. It's great to have work lined up to do - but nice weather has finally graced itself upon Cincinnati for this week and so I have some urgent things to tend to outside around the house that must get done before winter sets in. In addition to that I have a tandem skydive that I purchased a while back on Groupon that I have yet to use and the skydiving school, Start Skydiving in Middletown, OH is only about a month away from closing for the winter. In addition to all that I am trying to find time to work on affiliate programs for the web site, new content for the web site, videos of projects I've completed and am in the process of etc.
When am I going to have time to get my woodworking done?
I'll get it in there somewhere.
Oh, I forgot to mention, my shop is a mess - again. I have to clean it up before I can work in there again.

Meeting a TV legend

I volunteered at the Woodworking In America convention in N-Ky and finally got to meet a living TV legend.


I had just got out of handling the camera for the overhead projector for a presentation by Jay van Arsdale (a respected expert in Japanese style joinery) and I I went over to catch the last bit Roy Underhill's presentation. Shortly after I got there he asked for a volunteer to handle his camera for a particular shot. (He had his own camera that he was using instead of the one provided by the convention. I'm not sure why the camera operator of that camera didn't help him out.) Roy positioned his camera by clamping it on a board to his bench and got to work on his treadle lathe. So I got up and went up to help with the camera. He was working on the lathe and didn't even know I was there at first until he glanced back at the camera, saw me and said, "Oh, thank you!" It was short lived as his presentation only lasted a couple more minutes after that anyway.

So later on I got a picture with him and true to his legend, he does not take a serious picture. He always has to do a peculiar pose. The guy who took this picture for me with his cell phone camera just had a picture with him also and for that one Roy was hiding behind him and looking over his shoulder.

New Web Site Coming Soon

Well, the dogwoodtales.com web site design and construction is coming along nicely albeit not in a time frame that I would prefer. However, as the old saying goes you can choose any two of good, fast and cheap. Since I want the web site to be good from the get go and I'm a miser on a fringe budget right now getting the web site up and running the way I want isn't going to be fast. But once it is up and runnning it will be a beauty and, hopefully, a decent form of income in both attracting customers and in generating some money through affiliate programs.

I've been working on video and written content for the web site. It's amazing how much time it can take to get an idea out of my head and onto paper (or electronic document for that matter) or into video. Video editing has been painful with free programs like Windows Live Movie Maker. It works well for simple video and audio editing, but add on some layers of audio and it becomes cumbersome and the quality suffers. I must get my hands on better video editing software soon. Just like with the DIY home projects, it will save time and money in the long run.

http://www.dogwoodtales.com/

Do It Yourself and Save Money!

Woodworking has been a passion of mine for years. I first got started doing simple carvings when I was a young teenager. Over the years I would do a simple carving once in a while, but it wasn't until I bought a house, followed by all the home improvement projects, homemade wooden gifts for the kids and the honey-do projects, that I really got into woodworking. Before then I would watch Norm Abram of the New Yankee Workshop chug out woodworking projects from a well equiped workshop. My kids would watch those shows with me and ask if I was ever going to do something like that. I said no because all of the equipment that Norm used made me feel like serious woodworking was outside of my financial reach.

Several years later I wish I had ignored that erroneous thought process and got into woodworking sooner. I learned the hard way the cost for all of the red oak trim I put in my house, bought S4S at the box store. Had I bought all that red oak at a lumber yard in rough sawn dimensions, the money saved from NOT buying it all at the box store would have paid for a decent portable surface planer. The money I could have saved by making the dental molding instead of buying it from the box store at over $5 per foot would have paid for a router. The money I could have saved by refinishing my floors myself the first time I had them refinished could have paid for a portable table saw. But I didn't know. Honestly I simply didn't think about that. Hard lesson learned. Hopefully for some that may read this it will benefit you and you will be the wiser - unless it's too late for you too. But with that said, there's no need to spend the extra money at the box store for things you can make or do yourself.

http://www.dogwoodtales.com/

Safety at the Table Saw

Ever catch yourself NOT using safety eye glasses while in the middle of using a power tool? I did - once. Thank God I didn't have a mishap.

Normally I put the safety glasses on when I enter my woodworking workshop and LEAVE THEM ON until I'm finished. However, occasionally I may take the safety eye glasses off to see something a little more clearly, but NEVER while actually doing woodwork such as operating a power tool.

I had removed my safety eye glasses to do just that - to eliminate the glare of the eye glasses and look at something (in between power tool operations) with the naked eye.
However, I forgot to put them back on when I went to the table saw and didn't even realize it until I was half way through a rip cut. I felt naked, exposed to a higher sense of risk.
After that one time occurance, I decided to take measures to help ensure that I will never forget to put those safety eye glasses back on in the event that I took them off for some reason.

Check out this picture on my Dogwood Tales facebook page. If for some reason the link doesn't work, the picture is located in an album called Woodworking Workshop Safety. Also, if you're on Facebook, please consider "like-ing" the Dogwood Tales Facebook page. Thanks

http://www.dogwoodtales.com/

Getting started

While I'm not new to woodworking I am new to the world of social media - at least to the expanded range I'm getting into with setting up a web site and other things to compliment my woodworking business.
At times it feels like I know what I'm doing and at other times it feels like I'm watching a tsunami rushing towards the beach I'm standing on.

My website, http://www.dogwoodtales.com/, will be up and running soon. It will be a full featured web site to eventually feature woodworking videos for information and entertainment purposes. Information for past, current and potential customers to learn more about me. Many other features are planned for the site as well.

Stay tuned!

http://www.dogwoodtales.com/