Here's a completed Pine Post Office Box Bank

And here we have a finished bank made from the old growth pine. I used a shellac wash coat before staining, to seal in any problems in the wood from the old paint, or simply from the pitch in the wood, so it didn't get as dark as I wanted. Which is okay, really, as I like the way the grain shows off through the finish.


I don't usually, but I used a high gloss finish on these, so it made getting a good pic a little harder than usual- lots of glare.

Here's a look at the back- note that the back is stapled, bradded and glued to the body, and the bottom of the back extends into the base. Quick to assemble (the brads and staples speed things up because I don't have to use clamps), and quite strong- I can't bend the 1/4" ply back on one of these when it is fully assembled.

This was a great use for this fine old wood, and I'm glad to be the one to have salvaged it!

Finally using the old growth pine boards...

It's been some time since I've posted here, simply because I haven't had anything much to talk about. I've been sick most of the past month (including having the worst of it during my planned working vacation), and haven't been able to accomplish much.

This past week, though, I was finally feeling well enough to go out to the shop and get to work on a project that I have been planning for some time- making something out of those nice old growth pine boards I found earlier this year.
After putting old blades into my planer, I used it to take off most of the paint on several of the boards, then cut them up to make these-

What are they? They are going to be post office box banks. In the picture, they have just recieved a seal-coat of shellac, and do not have their bases (I haven't made them yet). Ten of them are rounded like the bank on the left below, and
the others are all "faceted" like the one on the right.


These are made from only three different boards, but the grain is still wildly different in almost all of them. Note that the grain continues around all three sides- I was careful to make each of them from one length of wood to get this effect.
The shellac has a slight orange tint to it, and made the grain pop out (visually) in such a striking way, that I'm tempted to not go any further with the finishing!

If you're wondering why they are not sitting flat on the boards, it's because each of them has a stub tenon on the back (below), that is formed from the 1/4" ply back- this not only makes a more secure glue joint with the base, but reinforces the back, allowing me to use thin material, which makes for much more room on the inside. These will hold about 40 cubic inches of coins. when they are done

And here is one of the prototypes, to show what they will look like when finished...

Remember a few posts back how I went to all the trouble of pulling the nails out of the back of an old countertop to make a workbench? Well, that's not the plan anymore (in fact, I've already cut that up for shelves). Why the change of heart? Because I finally scored what I've been looking for- a hospital door (inside). The pic is dark- the only safe place to lean this behemoth was against the tree. It's about 7' x 4', and just out of curiosity I put it on the scale- 190 lbs!
No wonder I almost gave myself a hernia moving the thing!
It was on the bottom of a rollway dumpster- I thought at first that the weight was from things stacked on it, but obviously, that wasn't the problem! I got it out of there (over the side!), and into my work truck, and from there into the back of my suburban, where it's been riding for a month or two now. I was finally able to get it out today, and boy is the wife going to be happy!
If this one is made like the others I've seen, the interior is a form of oriented strand board- only about an inch and a half thick! It's edged all around with solid wood, so I'll have to take off the hardware and cut into it to be sure. Either way, It's gonna make a nice massive workbench to which to mount the two bench vises I have waiting on it (procured at an auction for $25 for the pair!!!).


I'll try to get some pics when I'm building the bench, and will definitely post some of the finished product!.

The Purple Computer Table

For some time, we've been in need of a small table for our second computer. So, when I found this table frame a couple of months ago, I snapped it up (it was sitting beside the dumpster at a moving business). Also, the wife loves anything purple, so I just naturally had to bring it home.


Note the long, green grass in the background- this is almost unheard of for central Texas in June! It's been an unbeliveabley wet year so far- it rained *hard* three times in the last week! Probably not much for the pacific northwest, but it's a big deal here, lemme tellya! It finally dried out enough (barely) for me to start mowing here the last couple of days.

I'm pretty sure that this originally had a glass top, but I wasn't about to mess with that- not with all the materials that I have on hand! To secure the top to the base, I simply drilled two holes in each of the 45 degree crosspieces that used to support the glass top. Flat bottomed pocket hole screws through these will do the trick. Also repainted it with the can of purple spraypaint in the top pic (my only expense for the job).

This old piece of countertop has been keeping the rain out of my carport for years- and now I've finally found a new use for it. Note the odd shape- first order of business was to cut a straight line, then work off of that to cut a square table top.

This was a job for the circular saw! Since I didn't want to damage the laminate, it's a two step process. 1st step is to make a scoring cut, with the blade barely protruding- just enough to cut through the laminate, and barely into the wood underneath. 2nd step was the through cut, with the blade lowered all the way. I used the same guide for both cuts. The pic on the right below shows the through cut being made- note the shallow cut ahead of the saw. This works pretty well.

Once cut sqare, I nipped the corners at 45 degrees- much easier and faster than trying to make rounded corners with the router. As it turned out, it looks pretty good that way, too. Once it was cut to shape, I used Durham's rock hard water putty to fill any cracks and voids in the sides (this is a powder that you mix with water- it's widely available, and really is rock hard when it cures). Then sanding, priming (kilz), and turned upside down to paint the edge of the plywood purple to match the base.

Turned it all upside down, screwed the base to the top, and the result is below.

Note that the purple edge really blends the top and base- I didn't anticipate this, but it was definitely a happy accident. The wife is happy, too, but that was no accident :) I had planned to install a keyboard drawer that I picked up somewhere, but it turned out to be *just* too wide to fit between the legs, and there was no way to shorten it, so we'll just have to make do with this :)

completed bathroom floor

So here we have the floor with the self-adhesive tile installed (made the wife do that part, and she did a good job :). I've since reinstalled the toilet and sink, and the new floor is a huge improvement- much stronger than the old particle board floor.

I've been needing to replace the floor in my daughter's bathroom for some time now, and I finally got around to it. We bought our mobile home as a repo, and agreed to do any needed repairs ourselves, in order to save several thousand dollars. Pretty much the only problem we had was that the bathroom floors had been soaked pretty bad, and, being made of particleboard, were naturally in bad shape.
The seal had gone out under the toilet, as the floor was sinking- you can see where I repaired that. The problem that followed was that the repair was thinner than the particle board, after it had absorbed water. The solution was to pull out all of the old particle board, and replace it with plywood.
Removing the old PB was a big job- it was glued, nailed, and stapled to the joists, and they used plenty of all three! Plus, the walls were built on top of the floor, so I had to cut the floor at the edges, then build up a frame for the new floor to rest on. It was sawzall and chisel work (I used a cheap harbor freight chisel- and I have to say that it held up quite well to being pounded on with a claw hammer).

Above, you can see where I've put in the cross braces- they are mostly cut from an old waterbed side, and screwed into the joists using pocket holes. I've also run some up under the wall, and screwed them into the next joist over ( no *that* was tough to do! laying on my face and doing it blind!). I've also put just under the wall, screwed into the frame I built, to support the edge of the bathroom floor, as well as the floor in the next room over. As you can see, there was a lot of frame building to be done here- the people who built the house didn't include any cross bracing, but simply relied on the particle board to hold everything together. Of course, they were working with full sheets- and I was working with random pieces that I pulled out of dumpsters :)



I have to admit that it was some work to get all of this fitted together- note that I also replaced my earlier repair. Total cost for the job? Maybe five bucks, including screws, and the tube of caulk I used to fill in the cracks. When the caulk dries, we'll cover the floor with some self-adhesive tiles that a friend gave my wife last week, and it should all look pretty decent, for now. When I've got time, I'll probably come back and pour a thin layer of thinset concrete to level everything out perfectly, then tile it with squares of Corian (that I'll be cutting from my scrap). In the meantime, though, my little girls's going to be happy to have her bathroom back, and that's the best part of the job.

The Shop Itself

I've noticed that I mention my shop a lot in this blog, so I thought I would put up a post about it. The shop itself is recycled- I picked up a badly damaged 12'x24' portable building cheap at an auction a couple of years ago, then had it moved in behind my house. It almost didnt' make it- one of the skids (what it sits on) broke in half under it when the movers picked it up. They ended up charging me a bit extra for all the trouble of gettinng it here and into a tight spot.


Here it is, in all it's glory, before I leveled it. As I found out later, the decorative surround on the roof concealed finger-sized holes in all four corners (left there by the builders!), which let in water, and I had a lot of water damage to repair.

An example of the water damage- lots of rot in the sills (the supports for the walls). The first owner had put a faucet inside it, and a drain- and simply had the drain running out under the building-which was tightly skirted! The floor was in bad shape- the first thing I did was tear out the old floor (with my wife's help).

I build new skids out of scrap material (nailed and glued shorter pieces into 24' long skids), then slid them under and secured them to the joists with screws, using pocket holes for a stronger joint. I tried to get around it, but eventually decided to replace the sill all around with new, pressure treated lumber. Here I've got the wall propped up for this purpose. This was pretty easy- I simply screwed a 2'x board to the wall, jacked the wall up with a couple of small floor jacks, then placed my propping boards (they are bearing on the new skid- if you look closely, you can see that I also put 2'x4' reinforcements above the skid and between the joists- again using pocket holes. This took some time, but is very, very strong).

Instead of nailing into end grain from the outside, which is a weak joint, I drilled four pocket holes in each end of every joist (that's what's going on in the above pic), and attached them to the new sill with four 2 1/2" pocket hole screws. This is orders of magnitude stronger than nailing, plus it leaves no outside holes for water to get in.

To illustrate the holding strength of these screws- one of the end sills was badly bowed along it's length- about three inches out. My wife was helping me- I had attached one end with four screws, and she was holding the bowed board up for me. When I ran the first screw in on the loose end, it pulled the entire 12 foot board straight so fast, that it pulled it right out of her hands!

Here's the new sills- a big improvement! Later, I inserted aluminum flashing (that I got cheap at an auction :) I've still got a lot of the stuff, and it's pretty useful for a variety of things.

So, next I needed to replace the floor with new plywood. This would require 12 sheets of plywood, which could get expensive at retail. As it happened, there was another auction about this time for the items left behind when a church moved into a bigger building. Among these items was a large stage, built of 2x4's and 3/4" plywood. I got it for fifteen dollars, and it took me two trips to get it all home, as I was unable to dissasemble it at the church. Above is my trailer, full of this material.

All of the plywood was covered in carpet, which had been thouroughly glued down. This was a huge pain to get off! The most effective method I found was to stand it on end, attached an old weight bar to the carpet with clamps, then hang the heaviest stuff I could find off it. It took most of a week, but I finally managed to get it all apart. This still left the glue residue, which was easy to deal with- I simply turned the sheets over and used the virgin bottom surface.

The 2x4 material also came in handy- I used quite a bit of it in building the new skids, and more of it in repairing and replacing rotted wall material.

More to come on the shop later!