ECAbrams

Oh I don’t have any plans to make content regularly any time soon. I’m very happy right now to go to work, make cool stuff, and then go home and chill. No side hustles. No social media. Just doing the craft I enjoy for people who appreciate that I do it.

Thanks. So far so good. Turns out I’m good at building precise objects for people’s homes. Now I just have to get faster. But I’m employed at an excellent shop and I learn fast.

It’s also real in a way that a purely digital output is not. It lasts. You can hold it. You can use it. In most cases it will outlast me. Personally I suppose it reminds me where I come from when I breath in sawdust and feel the grain under my hands.

Shocked face indeed.

I couldn’t say. I suppose I haven’t been super vocal about stepping away. I mostly did an Irish good-bye on my career.

End of an office. End of an era. Returning the space to its original use as a guest room. Maybe in keeping with my new career I should do a lot of built-ins in here.

“With the peasants?!? They’re revolting!”

Fractal noise still undefeated top effect after all this time.

#woodworking been buying a few tools second hand to build up the capacities here in my suburban garage. One lovely thing about out modern age is I can go on the manufacturer's website, look at an exploded diagram of the tool, and have a part on it's way to me for 1/3 what it would cost off amazon.

I just locked an open door. Strange yet symbolically compelling.

a cartoon of a man talking to a robot with horns and a tail ALT: a cartoon of a man talking to a robot with horns and a tail

Direct descent ⤵️

I lav these great secrets.

1. Hide glue is made of hides. The protein is rendered from the skins of animals with heat and chemicals.

2. It is used often to adhere wood to other wood. It has many properties that make it more appropriate in certain situations and it is a more traditional form of adhesive for wood work.

But AlWAYS cover a judge by its book.

What if motion smoothing could somehow be less accurate and more unpleasant?

On the one hand grades are just numbers, and it’s what you learn that matters… On the other I just graduated this cabinetmaking course with a 3.97 of 4.0 GPA. Yeah, I’m a nerd for this stuff. 🤓

Mahogany tends to show its large open pore structure so have a look for that. white Oak would have the telltale tyloses or bubbles blocking its pores. And it doesn’t look to have the high contrasting late/early wood of a red oak.

What’s the square footage on that thing? Curious to see the final layout.

Particle board is just glue and sawdust. Add more glue and clamp it hard back into shape. But the better recommendation is to build a new drawer box and put the old front on it. MCP is cheap enough and you can iron on the edge banding. You’ll be done in part of an afternoon I’m sure.

Then we move to the stain product itself. Faster drying stains are harder to make consistent. Improper mixing could be happening. A gel stain is usually easiest for most users. And then finally application technique. Lots of factors going into it.

Inconsistent stain comes from a few things. First is the wood itself. Many species are prone to blotching. We can alleviate that with a pre-treatment that slightly seals the pours. Second is sanding. Inconsistent sanding makes for blotchy stain results because the physical scratches aren’t even.

I imagine practically you might try doing it like the sawing in half trick. But that requires a table. Maybe the practical approach is actually just to do cpr on a mocap rigged dummy?

It is a pretty inspiring book. I recommend it. It literally started me on a journey to change careers.

Net and trident is more formidable than you might think.

Nothing. It’s like meditating. Just observing the scratch pattern and grain and making it all an even roughness before progressing. I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t mind sanding.

PICS!!! We have to see that machine!!!

The life hack big business doesn’t want you to know… just become a small factory! But seriously more of these DIY folks need to big up the local maker spaces and libraries where there is the right balance of people to production sized CNC machines. We don’t all need all the tools all the time folks!

Thanks! It was a lot of new techniques for me. It’s solid as a rock though. Totally squared itself from the internal dados and rebates. And, as a bonus, could technically be cut on a CNC.

The base is a mortise and tenon construction and likely grossly overbuilt for a coffee table. The interior of the drawers are lined with resawn grain matched thin maple. The hatches can throw a remote across the room. It’s very extra. But what a learning experience. Glad I stretched myself.

It has two drawers, two shelves, and two hatches. The base is soft maple. The top is birch veneered particle core edge banded with birch iron on.