Chris Johnson

If you ask a woodworker if they have enough clamps, the answer is always “no.” You always need at least one more clamp.

I’ve become that woodworker. I don’t have enough clamps. So I make do.

My glue of choice is Titebond III. This has a working set time of 15 minutes, it is an extremely strong adhesive, it is water resistant, and it is “easy” to work with. It comes in sizes ranging from your standard Elmer’s glue bottle to 55-gallon drums.

My local hardware and lumber store only had it in the pint size. I’ll be ordering more online shortly.

What I learned today is that I have not been using enough glue in my past glue ups.

Yesterday I went through almost half that bottle with an 11×48 three-board lamination. And I didn’t use enough.

The first board didn’t get enough glue, but I think it will be fine for what it is. The problem I ran into was spreading the glue. I had quickly made a spreading stick, but it just wasn’t working. I switched to using my finger and got better results, but I almost ran out of time working the first board in the sun.

Even a thin layer of glue is more than you expect.

I also took a page from the machine shop and looked up the specifics on the glue. It requires 100 to 150 PSI to properly work.

For those keeping track, that means we need to be providing over 65,000 lbs of pressure for proper use. A good clamp will provide 2000 lbs of pressure. This means that I should have been using 30 clamps on that one glue up.

I hate mathing.

Have a fantastic day; music tomorrow and SCOTUS on Wednesday.

I became lazy, and it cost me a little. There are two braces that are not yet attached to the bench. I knocked one off today. Which tells me I have to do this correctly.

The bench is currently in front of the garage/shop. At the end of every day working, I pick up all the tools and move them into the shop, someplace. It is very disorganized. I then put a heavy-duty tarp over the bench and call it a night.

A few nights ago, I left a couple of tools under the tarp. The rains came. No issues. The wind got me worried. When I got out to the bench, the tarp had been partially blown off the workbench, and the tools were soaked.

I spent the next 30 minutes drying, cleaning, and oiling the tools. I seem to have saved them.

The next day was hotter; I worked to the point where I could not move. Seriously, trying to stumble into the shade wasn’t working. Luckily my lady came to my rescue with water. She then helped me move my tools the 10 feet from the workbench into the shop.

This created a need for a way to transport and store tools.

The first step is the tool tote. Mine is a simplified version of the one shown.

I could have gone to the local lumber yard and spent $75 to get some pine of some unknown quality. The plans call for true sizes of 3/4 x 5 1/2″ and 3/4 x 6″. The 5 1/2″ isn’t really an issue; that is a 1 by 6. The 6-inch board requires cutting down a 1 by 8.

The Sawmill

I intend to cut my own lumber soon. It is currently on the back burner. I have the tools; I just require the will and the time.

There are about a dozen sawmills within a 75-mile radius. The first half dozen I contacted were all big operations. One “local” mill answered the call in Maine. They have a local number; you just can’t get it easily. Another only dealt with softwood. Two were custom saw work only. They either bring their mill to your woodlot lot, or you take your wood to them and they saw it to your specifications.

I ended up going south into Morador to visit the closest mill. It was worth it.

The mill is a small, family-run operation. They have a kiln for drying wood as well as airdried wood.

I intended to get some hardwood for tools and some softwood for projects. This was some cherry and hard maple at $6 per board foot. I wanted a piece of dark walnut at $12 per board foot. Finally, I wanted some pine for projects.

Not only did he have all the lumber I wanted, he had it in the sizes I wanted and rough sawn. This means straight off the mill, no other processing.

He was generous in his measurements. There were boards that I got at 1/2 price because there was a flaw in the lumber. The flaw would not bother me, but he still gave me a great deal. The 2 bdf of black walnut was just given to me. It is two inches thick and about 10 inches per side.

This wood is absolutely beautiful.

A board foot is a volume of wood. It is 144 cubic inches, or 1/12 of a cubic foot, or 1 ft by 1 ft by 1 inch.

When I got home, I cut a 19″ piece off the narrower board and planed it smooth and flat. It was then edged which gave me a good face and a squared edge.

From there the other edge was squared. Finally the board was ripped to width, and the rough edge was smoothed and squared again.

This allowed me to face the other side and bring the piece to thickness. Starting with a 1 inch-thick piece of rough-sawn lumber, I ended up with a 3/4 S4S piece of wood.

What was under the rough surface is beautiful.

Yesterday, I surfaced the piece of dark walnut. With no oil or finish on it, just planed flat, it is one of the nicest pieces of lumber I’ve ever seen.

Knowledge is not Skill

There is a process in machining that is bringing a piece to size. This is the process of making all the faces flat and square to each other. Each of 6 faces must be properly milled to have a piece ready.

Woodworking requires the same operation, but the tools are much simpler which requires the layouts to be much better.

With this first piece, I did not notice that the edges were not parallel to each other. They were smooth and flat and square to the finished face. They were not parallel.

The process is different from machining. When you are machining, you only need one reference face to start the process.

For woodworking, you first smooth a face. This does not make the board flat; it just means that it is smooth. This is a 5-minute process for me at this point. Smooth means that within a local area, the board is flat. The size of that area depends on the tools used to smooth it.

Next, the board needs to be made flat. This is done with a straight edge. By moving a straight edge down the face, you can check for space under the straight edge, indicating where the board is low. You plane off the high spots until you have a piece of lumber that is smooth and flat.

After flattening the surface, you now need to test for twist and then remove the twist. Twist is called “winding,” and you use a pair of self-balancing straight edges at opposite ends of the board. You can sight over the closer stick and easily see if the board is twisted. If it is, you can plan out the twist.

Next, you smooth and flatten an edge, making it square to the board. The squareness of the edge to the face is measured with a try square or any other precision right-angle square. This is a skill I am still working on. The near edge is always to high.

This is where I made a mistake. I wasn’t paying enough attention and ripped the board over wide and then brought the edge back to square after the rip. I didn’t make a guide mark for parallel.

I also didn’t get the board flat enough.

Yesterday, I finished the backboard and the two sideboards. Today, I’ll be attaching them to make the first part of the assembly.

Sharper, Sharper

Friday I thought I had a sharp plane blade. It was able to remove 1/4 inch from the faces of the end boards.

Yesterday I learned that my plane was not sharp. I spent a good hour sharpening plane blades. I’ll spend still more time today.

The difference is really incredible. What was an upper body workout becomes light work. Plus the sound of the wood being peeled away is beautiful.

What I need to do today is to finish sharpening the jack plane. Currently it is only cutting on the corners. I’ve touched up the blade on the diamond wheel, but I still need to take it through the regular sharpening process to get a blade that works as I want it to.

I will also be focusing on making sure I don’t produce cupped boards.

All in all, I’m very excited to get the next few projects finished.

The tool tote, a couple of boxes. The first being a simple 6-board box for reenacting. Then a jointer box to hold my wood tools well organized and safe. Then a stool and the start of other projects.

There is so much more pride in using hand tools and fitting pieces by hand then the feeling I got when I feed wood through my jointer and planer.

It doesn’t matter if you are provided a path to what you want if you can never reach that path.

We talk about 18 U.S.C. §922(g) often. This is the prohibited person section of the US Code. It is what is used to justify form 4473.

The government is allowed to create regulations that are necessary to perform the task they are required to do by law. This is how come the NFA has a registration and background check plus all the rest of the BS that goes with purchasing an NFA item.

All of those regulations are in place to make sure that you have paid your taxes. The entire NFA is based on collecting taxes. The registration is just a byproduct of collecting taxes. The background check is just a byproduct of collecting taxes.

§922(g) states who is prohibited from possessing a firearm. This is a horrible mutation from the original version of §922(g). The original version was a restriction on FFLs from selling to a prohibited person.

A prohibited person could buy a gun from somebody else or acquire it by gift. They could still lawfully posses it.

In addition, they could manufacture a firearm and possess that. §922(g) was only a restriction on the sale of interstate commerce in firearms.

When Congress passed the original §922(g) in 1968, they also included a method to get your Second Amendment protected rights back. Under 18 U.S.C. §925(c).

This means there is a procedure to get your rights back by asking Mommy Dearest for permission.

In 1992, Congress added a rider to the appropriations bill.

This has been going on for the last 33 years!

What this means is that you can apply for your rights back, but there is no money for the ATF to process those requests. So you have no mouth.

The most recent version of the rider is:

The Department of Justice just announced that they are opening a web portal for people to apply to regain their Second Amendment protected rights. Since “main justice” is doing this, it comes under their budget and not the salaries of ATF personnel.

This is another major Trump Administration end run around a violation of our rights.

Site Display Issues

Somehow how, some way, my theme was lost. I’ve reset to a working theme.

It is loud, it is in your face, and it looks like 100 other sites. I do not have the time or energy to put it all back right now. I’ll be working it over in the coming weeks.

Woodworking

It is difficult to know or anticipate what you don’t know. I like to anticipate; I sometimes fail.

Right now my hands are scratched and bruised. My thumbnail is a beautiful shade of blue and black.

I’m currently working on flattening the benchtop. This consists of using the smoothing plane to take down local high spots. Then use a straight edge to make sure that you have a flat surface from side to side. Then you use winding sticks to make sure your top is not twisted.

My top is not yet smooth, much less flat, much less without twist.

On the other hand, there is no noticeable difference in moving from board to board.

Up coming woodworking projects

I intend to make a wood journeyman’s tool tote as my first action. I intend to pick up my wood at a local sawmill. 4/4 rough-cut pine.

If I can find some 6/4 or 8/4 cherry, I’ll pick up enough to make a rabbet plane and a router plane.

Vehicle Issues

I drove home from the autoshop today with a lighter wallet and a much cooler cabin. The bearings on the A/C condenser went out.

If I were the only person to drive my truck, I would have ignored it for a while. But I am not. So, I got it replaced. The issue is that it is too easy to turn the A/C on. All it takes is pushing the A/C button OR turning the knob counterclockwise.

We Must All Watch the Same Videos, Read the Same Articles

There are days when I finish writing an article and then watch a video that covers the same issue. Sometimes I learn more, and sometimes it feels like they are responding to the article I have not published yet.

In the Sotomayor situation, I was pleased to watch two videos where the presenters quoted nearly the same things I did. All of us pointing out that Sotomayor is an agenda-driven rogue justice.

Question of the Week

When I was a kid, people would buy a car for cash every couple of years. A car loan for 48 months was almost unheard of.

Today, I’m seeing people taking out 6- and 7-year loans on a vehicle.

How long do you expect your cars to last? My truck is 15 years old; it needs bits and pieces to be fixed or replaced. I expect to get another 5 years from it.

My first car, a 1967 VW Microbus, was traded in on a 1987 TransAm in 1987. I expect my cars to last 10 to 20 years.

This is a beautiful piece of furniture. I made a workbench.

The beauty of this bench is such that I would be afraid to use it. It is that darn beautiful.

My bench is 60″ by 27″ by 34.5″ It was made from construction lumber, 2x10s, 2x4s, and 4x4s. Now that it is done, I don’t know that I can move it. It is that heavy. I might have to get retractable wheels for it.

This is the basic starting tool for woodworking. Until you have a chance to work on a real workbench, designed for hand tools, you don’t understand just how much of a tool it is.

For years, my goto woodworking bench was a sheet of 3/4″ plywood over a frame of 2x4s. It was stable enough, but it wasn’t really usable for planing.

There are several things that hand woodworkers do constantly. We saw boards either ripping, resawing, or crosscutting. Cutting tenons is an example of both. We drive chisels into wood and dig out mortises. We make boards flat and straight by planing.

If you swing a mallet and hit something and your mallet bounces, that is wasted energy. A solid workbench doesn’t bounce; it acts perfectly with the mallet, allowing hard strikes or controlled strikes.

If you are planing you need the work to stay in place. If you have your work attached to a flimsy work surface, every time you take a cut, the work and work surface move, stealing work. If you brace your foot against your work surface, you are unlikely to be in the correct position for planing.

If you are sawing, you want the work at the height at the correct angles.

Adding a leg vise to the bench will make it even better. That is happening over the coming days.

I’ll be drilling some holes for bench dogs and other work-holding tools.

So here is the astonishing thing: I had a round item on the workbench, I was planing a test piece. That round item did not move.

The number of times I’ve had things fall off a table because it is wiggling…

I’m excited.

Conclusion

The next steps are to make and attach a leg vise to the table. After that is adding some blocks to the underside of the table where I’ll be drilling 3/4″ holes for the work-holding thing.

There are two projects that come next: a journeyman tote to carry my tools and a 6-board chest for Ally for use at events.

After that is a knockdown cabinet with shelves for Ally to use at events.

Side Note

I was picking up some stair treads at Home Depot on Tuesday. As we were checking out we noticed a sale on the Husky 5-tier tote storage rack. The totes are 27 gallons with the nice flexible plastic. Each rack holds 8 totes by their upper edges and two more can be placed on top for a total of 10 totes.

The totes were on sale for $8 apiece. The rack was $149.

If you are looking for more storage, this might be the right thing for you.

Sotomayor is the target today. She wrote the dissent, which Kagan and Jackson joined.

The issue that Sotomayor is having is called “reading comprehension”

Trump ordered McHahan to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department [of Education]. The Sotomayor decided that “facilitate the closure” and “close” mean the same thing.

They don’t.

The law requires that there be a Department of Education. It describes what the functions of the department will be. Nowhere does it say “there shall be 3,284 employees” nor how the executive chooses to organize what employees the department has.

The law requires a few people to be employed by the DoE. That could be as small as “the director.”

When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law,… does not mean they have broken the law. Nor did the Executive order the closure of the DoJ. Sotomayor is known to talk differently to regular people than she does to the other justices. Trump talking to The People is not the words he used in the his Executive Order. This is normal.

It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.

And here is her big mistake: the Constitution grants the power of the Executive to one person, the president. The president decides how best to execute the laws of the United States. He decides who is necessary to carry them out.

The courts do not get to decide how the Executive administers, staffs, or prioritizes the executive branch. That is the responsibility of the executive, and the executive (president) has the only authority to do so.

Sotomayor is upset because without that gigantic staff, the DoE won’t be able to award over $120 billion of our tax dollars in student aid.

Since she also believes that student loans can be forgiven, this means she believes that the Executive should be forced to hand over billions of dollars to students.

I just found that I live in a food desert.

Luck for me, we have just enough to prime the food pump.

This has nothing to do with Shannon, but anytime I think about needing to lie to make a point, Shannon is first in my list of doers.

So the federales learned that there was an illegal pot farm using criminal illegal aliens for their workforce.

They raided the farm. While there, word went out that ICE was picking up criminal illegal aliens. This caused the usual suspects to quickly converge to attempt to impede the feds.

This led to Trump ordering federal agents to arrest people who attempt murder on federal officers or impede federal officers in their official duties.

They found slaves on that pot farm. These were children. Not children of the workers, nope, just children that were being used for slave labor on the farm. According to official reports, these children were malnourished and maltreated.

The lies immediately started to flow from Democrats and the evil left.

They are claiming that these children were actually legally working on this farm. The law says that the children of farmers can be given chores and other work on the family farm. This is an exception to child labor laws.

This is why you can find young teenagers working in the family store as well. They are the children of the store owners.

These were children as young as 14 who were given no options. They were not allowed to leave. They were forced to work. This is slavery.

It is pure evil to even suggest that these children wanted to be there.

Next, we can look at the “pot is legal in California!” argument. Yes, it is legal in CA. That farm might even have been licensed under California law. What is also true is that pot is still a controlled substance under federal law.

That makes the pot farm illegal under federal law.

The law in California also prohibits anyone under 18 from working in the pot industry.

As more than one person has said, more and more I am coming to believe that these people are not stupid, they are not morons, they are not ignorant, they are evil.

The following is taken from his X feed. I’ve manually unrolled it into a single quote.

I read it; you have too. Sorry for that.

The senator is correct; there is a tradition of collegiality in the courts and in the congress. That is why calling a liar a liar gets you in trouble in the congress. But lying does not.

The answer to his “What if…” is itself a question, “What if you were true to the Constitution?”

Ah yes, the bogeyman argument. “Dark money” is money that Republicans get, the money Democrats ‘s get from foreigners, pensioners donating $20k per year, that’s just “the people supporting Democrats”.

“…favored parties…win victories with astounding regularity?” How about winning because that’s what the Constitution says?

“novel judicial doctrines”? Like, “Obey the Constitution as it was written and amended?” Or maybe you mean all the court cases where the courts rule that firearms aren’t arms under the Second Amendment?

Maybe those amici curiae have always supported the Constitution. The secret funding is generally properly reported and is none of your business.

How do you tell if the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated? The Brady Bunch writes an amici curiae brief. Or is it the Everytown now?

“But if they are true?” What if it is just you slandering people? What if it is you hiding the fact that your team loses on a level playing field? What if it is just you being stupid?

I don’t believe for one moment that Justice Jackson is looking for patterns or noticing the parties that win, I think her agenda is driving her drivil.

She might be looking at “interests, motives, and connections.” What she is not looking at is the law. What she is not following is the Constitution.

Where was your concern for mischief when the liberals found every liberal cause “constitutional”? The mischief you are referring to is veiled “collegiality” regarding Thomas. The Justice that saw the rules change had it brought to his attention and reported it.

Thomas is easily more moral and honest than you have ever been.

Truth and candor are judicial values. Jackson is a DEI hire, and it shows. There is truth and candor for you.

Ah, Sheldon, put on some clothes. You are neither the emperor nor pleasant to look at.

The far left has used lawfare for decades, and now they are losing that weapon.

I do agree with you; the schemers have much more to fear, and you know it. You are a schemer.

SCOTUS

Trump keeps winning at the Supreme Court. There was an 8-1 opinion in his favor this week. With only the DEI Hire dissenting.

Violence In the Streets

There were two events where armed terrorists decided to shoot at federal agents.

Compared to the Dallas, TX, shooter a few years ago, this is barely making a ripple in the news.

Stay strapped. Keep your head on a swivel. Stay out of stupid places at stupid times with stupid people.

Evil

The flash floods in Texas and New Mexico have claimed multiple lives. Parents will never see their children alive again.

There are far too many people in the socials going, “Good, they deserved it.”

These people are evil. They sicken me.

TDS, Lies

People have been blaming Trump for the tragedy in Texas. I’ve heard that it was Trump’s fault because the fully manned weather service was not properly staffed. That he defunded the early warning system. That he hasn’t gone to Texas, like Biden went to NC.

Except that Trump was in NC before Biden. Trump has been in contact with the Texas state government. He has offered all help possible, and the federal government had responded, was rescuing people within hours of Trump learning of the tragedy.

These people are nearly evil. If they had the brains of an amoeba, they would be evil.

Safe Travels

My wife has returned from her vacation. Happy dances throughout the house.

Sharpen That Tool

Wednesday, I was cutting a mortise. Because of the style, I cut two partial cross cuts, then knocked out the waste. This created a mortise that was intentionally to small.

The mortise is then trimmed to size with a chisel. While this started fine, it really wasn’t working as I expected.

Thursday, I needed to finish trimming those mortises. Before I did that, I ran the same chisel through the sharpening pattern.

When I went to cut that end grain, the chisel shaved a piece so thin I could see through it.

I need to spend more time keeping my tools sharp.

Shortly, I will need to plane the top of the frame flat. This will require me to use the jack plane or joiner plane. Before I do so, I’m going to spend still more time making sure those plane irons are razor sharp.

Woodworking Tools

The tools you need to make tools. My workbench frame is nearly completed. I am currently adding bracing. But I can clamp boards to the top of this frame to do work.

Planing a short piece of lumber flat two days ago took about an hour and was a chore the entire tim.

I clamped a board to the top of the frame with a plane stop in it. With this in place, it took just a few minutes to smooth and flatten a brace. This workbench is a good height for me, and it is a joy to work on.

Question of the Week

When you look in your holster drawer, what brand of holster do you see that you should not have purchased?

What holster brand have you found to be good for you, and why?