Progress on a few fronts

Last nite, I went back to the Wood shop, to work some more on my son's project.
applied wood filler and gave it a thorough sanding.
After, I moved it to the paint room.

Since I was in the prep phase, I thought may as well bring my infamous boring till, which has been sitting idle downstairs for quite a while, awaiting its joinery to be cleaned up. Cleaned up my dovetails then gave it a good sanding all over.

This morning went back to glue and nail (air nailer) the back to the boring till and gave the first coat of primer to Matt's shelf.

Matt shelf has its first coat of primer

Boring till got its back installed and a good sanding all over.

Back piece is sitting inside a 1/4 in rabbet all around

Once that was done, wiped up the boring till with a damp rag then proceed to give it its first coat of primer also.

Dovetails dissapearing.

Now you see them...

Now you don't... :-)

Need at least 4 hours drying time before next coat, will go back tonite to give both pieces a light sanding and another coat. Should be both ready for painting tomorrow morning.

My shop has also seen some modest progress, I can now walk around the floor. There was a floor under all that stuff, who knew?? :-)

Still need a lot more work, but heh, progress is progress!

Meanwhile, also experienced some setback in older projects.

Remember my temporary sharpening bench? A nite dresser re-purposed as a work station. When I first worked on it, the drawer was stuck pretty tight, so I had to planed it for a better fit.  We had a pretty humid summer and my dehumidifier does not appear to be doing much, its been running for a while and no water in the bucket, sigh...

Well, that wooden drawer is now stuck pretty damn tight!.
Whenever I managed to free it, it would required more planing for sure :-)
So much for a piston fit drawer, hum, more like I need some hydraulics to move it, now :-)

It is binding pretty tight on both sides in height.

But my most spectacular failure is with my recently re-glued rocking chair sitting outside. It is not far from our bedroom window, and its been hot and muggy for a while, so we have been sleeping with our bedroom windows open for the draft.

A few nites ago, there was a loud crack outside, did not think much of it, but when I went to put the chair away for the winter, this is what I found...
The chair had literally exploded...

What is wrong with that picture, 

solar lamp is knock over and lower. Lower??

It failed at the old glue line, not the one I reglued

On the other side, the glue line survived but 

it developed a new crack nonetheless.

Must had been the loud cracking noise I heard

It even pulled out a few spindles on the way down...

Huh, back to square one, may need to re-inforce the seat from under, there is a tremendous amount of pressure at play here. When it want to go, it goes...with a bang! It did not even lasted 2 months out there, oh well back to the drawing board. In its defense it was left unsupervised for a while :-)

This time I may take it apart some more to fix it, will see. I the mean time it is back in the garage, ready for me to trip in it, just like in recent memories :-)

The irrigation systems have all been removed, the garden hoses drained and stored, the yard is ready for winter. We will keep some of the garden going with frost covers and see how far we can extend our growing season. Tomatoes, cucumbers and Zucchinis are still coming up. Most of our spices and herbs are still going strong also. We are in the process of setting up an indoor garden for them, re-purposing one of Heather's three tiers light stands she used for her African Violets.

And talking of failures, the only crop that did not take this summer was my yellow and green beans, neither came up, and sowed them twice, go figure!

The carrots are also a failure, but that was my fault, they quickly got over shadowed by the leaf lettuce and never saw much light all summer, oups.

 Once I harvested all the lettuce, I found the poor forgotten carrots. Tried to re-transplant some, to see what would happens. Everyone told me that you cannot easily transplant such root vegetable. Well you can, but don't expect much :-)

On the left, the original ones that spent the summer ligth deprived.

On the right the ones I transplanted

Not even big enough to qualify as baby carrots :-)

Funny how they tried to put down more roots

 instead of continuing with the main one

So there you have it, some progress, some setback. Win some, loose some, oh well.

But it won't stop me, I now feel re-energized and firing on all cylinders

Bob, the old flat head 8 cylinders (For you youngsters, that was before the V8. Yes, I know, I'm old :-)