Monday, August 17, 2015

A Hot Day

Summer finally arrived in Southern California.  I think we were having a little bit of everyone's summer.  We had cool weather and then monsoon weather and now we have the heat and the fires.  Not the best weather to prep, cut and then glue wood in the changing weather.  I am working on several projects.  I have a grader and dump truck which I will put up for sale.  These are to confirm the drawing changes I made from the prototype.  I also have a belly trailer for the semi truck I just made and a front end loader.  These are the new designs that I am working on.  I think I got a little too confident in my abilities and made some decent design errors in the front end loader. 
The first main mistake was making the shovel walls too thin.  The concept was good but the execution was very flawed.  When sanding it smooth I sanded through some of my alignment holes.  The alignment holes were also close enough to the edge that it weakened the part when I drilled them.
This leads me to the second error.  All the parts were made out of 1 1/2" thick lumber. I thought the 1/8" drill bit would not walk on me when going through.  This was an incorrect assumption.  This caused a lot of grief.  It was also a pain to cut out on the scroll saw.  I admit, I was probably using the wrong blade. but a #7 should not have had a problem cutting the part out.  Well the blade did not cut straight.  No problem, that is why I have a sander.
Third problem was not checking the parts before gluing them together.  Yes I did a dry fit.  I have two parts that are close in size and important difference is the hole is a different size by a 1/32" for an fixed and movable joint.  I mixed them up.  It will not affect the end result, just a little inconvenience.  So I have made changes to the drawings and will see how the changes work.

Saturday was also the day that I really felt the heat in the garage.  It was tough doing glue ups.  It felt I like my open time for the glue was less than a minute until it skinned over.  That is not a lot if time to spread it and put the pieces together. 
All in all it was a productive day.  I hope to finish a lot of these projects labor day weekend.

On a sad note, my 4" belt sander died.  I think it will cost more in parts and shipping than to buy a new one.  It served me well.  I was hoping for a little bit longer until I upgraded to a 6" belt sander.  The motor was out of balance, some of the welds have broken, and in a final act of defiance it shredded it's drive belt.  So I ma in the market for a new belt sander.