Category: Around Home

A bought a bench vise before coming up. I wanted a small one but they only had large. Now that I’d built myself a bench, it was time to mount it.

First step was to build myself a pair of jaws.

There is a house being built a couple of houses down for me, and I asked the builders if they had any useful scrap they were going to take to the dump. Among other things, they gave me some relatively-unwarped 2×6 pieces of lumber. I cut them to the right size on the table saw and marked up where the vise pieces would go through. Getting those holes drilled perfectly was the key to having the vise line up right.

I’ve befriended a couple of neighbours: one who’s an auto-mechanic and one who used to be a cabinet maker (and still has all his tools!!). Great guys to know. I borrowed the right sized bit from the cabinet maker, and took it and my marked up jaw-pieces over the the mechanic’s shop to use his drill press. I ever so carefully drilled my holes perfectly, and then excitedly brought them home to set everything up.

Looking good so far… Flip the table, measure twice, drill pilot holes, attach screws, careful, careful, everything at just the right angle and flip the table back and…

Goddammit! Turns out when I had built my table I’d accidentally angled the support beam at the edge of my table ever so slightly off of perfectly square! So now the outer jaw of the vise accentuates that and sits a couple of millimeters below the inner jaw.

Meh.

It holds work pieces, that’s good enough. Later I’ll plane the inner-jaw down so it’s all nice and flat too, which’ll be even more useful. For now, I’m going to count it as a partial success and a valuable learning project.

 

While Tulita may be starved of lumber, it is rich in pallets. I assume they arrive on the barges and ice-road trucks, carrying various goods, and are not worth sending back. People’s yards are full of them, the “board walk” near the local playground is made of them (I’ll grab a picture some day and add it to this post) and the “wood” section of the dump is full of them.

My neighbors just moved into a new, bigger house (they’re having a baby soon) and suddenly found themselves needing a shoe rack. Seemed like a good time to experiment with pallet based construction.

The construction went fine. I just cut a couple of dadoes (like grooves, but across the grain) into the support beams, making them are just big enough to slip the slats into, assembled and presto! One shoe rack!

The tough part, it turns out, is taking the damned pallets apart. Those things are built to stay together! I snapped a hammer in half trying to pry the nails out (lesson learned about cheap hammers…).

I ended up using a reciprocating saw to cut through the nails. Even that was a challenge, because I still needed to bang the slats off enough (despite no room inside to swing a hammer) to fit the saw in between. Found out a few days later that another neighbour owns a massive oversized crowbar that I can borrow! That’s another thing I should have thought to bring up…

Now, call me a princess, but I like to sit my arse down when I’m putting on my shoes. And not on the ground either, I like to have a nice chair or stool to sit on. Unfortunately there’s not room for a chair in our little vestibule, and in muddy, snowy Tulita you don’t want to take a single step into the house in your outdoor shoes.

Time for another pallet-based construction project. This time the plan was to just cut a couple of support-beam sized dadoes exactly half-way into a couple of pallet support beams, slot them together, cut the ends at 45° and stick a piece of pallet slat on top. If everything is cut exactly right, it should just slot together perfectly, sit perfectly flat and take no time at all.

Of course, that didn’t happen. My middle joints were off, my 45 degrees were actually somewhere between 44.5 and 45.5 and the whole thing wobbled wildly when I stood it up.

A month ago I was navigating the dilemma of what to buy to bring up. I didn’t know what I’d need but I knew I had only had a one-time shipping allowance. Easy to get spooked and over-buy, but also easy under-buy and be missing something essential for three years.

I decide to buy a table saw, but decided to buy the cheapest table saw. The first decision was a good one! The table saw has been super useful. Unfortunately the cheapness means that:

1. there’s no precise depth-gauge, so I need to rely on my imprecise eye-ball and ruler,
2. the hinge that sets the bevel angle is plastic, cheap, weak and easily jostled by the depth adjusting handle, so the blade is often not exactly straight,
3. the bench is short, so it’s hard to align long pieces, and
4. the whole thing is unstable and shifts small amounts easily.

So, cutting *exactly* straight on this table saw isn’t something I’ve mastered yet. But I’ve got time, I’ll figure it out.

Anyway, add a few hours of patient chiseling, measuring, fitting things together, wobbling them, unfitting them, and lots more chiseling to the initial plan and I ended up with a nice, compact, stable, stool for changing your shoes on.