Or Susan, if you prefer.
It will be Round. And in the House. Hopefully not Taped though.
So there I was, on the east coast visiting a friend. He has lots of wood (heh-heh), some extracted from trees I helped fell and cut up. Since I had a vehicle and was driving home, I could return with some raw wood (heh-heh) to fashion into something useful. I selected some hickory; the wood was too dense and hard for him (heh-heh) – so he was willing to part with it. It made a lovely, sturdy book shelf (of which I have no pictures at the moment). As I was packing the wood (heh-heh) he asked if I wanted some red oak that had been lying around for a long time. There was a reason it had been lying around. Twisted, warped, bug hole infested, punky in places. “How about some of that cherry? Or maybe some nice maple or white oak?” … That was unsuccessful. So I end up grabbing his crappy wood (heh-heh) too. Now you might say, “Be happy with the wood you have, you get what you pay for (so says Winston’s mom)”. Well, I must say I paid a hefty price for said wood – given that I stayed up with him and his wife until 1AM drinking whiskey and talking about “LAAANDDD!!!” even though I was hitting the road at 5AM. So driving with a severe headache and the potential for collecting DUIs across at least 4 states before I sobered up somewhere in Tennessee. But let’s hop up onto the wood (heh-heh – that’s the last one, promise).
So what am I going to do with this crappy wood? It’s not really good for anything large, maybe firewood? Anyway, it laid there on the garage floor for a couple of years until someone mentioned that a Lazy Putrid might be useful for the center of the rather large island that now occupies my kitchen. Hmmm – I could take the narrow pieces, maybe cut some narrower and sort of force/plane the warp out of narrower pieces. Let’s give it a shot.
So off to grab the narrowest pieces of crap wood and joint the edges, the process of trying to make one edge ‘flat’. Then referencing off the newly flat edges, joint a face flat and perpendicular to the newly created flat edge. This is possible even with my very small and crappy jointer since all the wood is narrow enough to pass through. With one edge and face flat and perpendicular to each other, can run through the table saw to create a parallel edge and then the planner to create (somewhat) parallel faces. Now I have a couple of relatively flat, straight, and narrow pieces of wood.
Now I want to glue these pieces up so I have a single ‘plank’ of wood large enough to extract a round (and round) disk from. Given what will come, doing biscuit joinery on the edge is not really an option, so I elect to edge glue the pieces together, provided that I’ve jointed/sawed the edges well enough to join mostly seamlessly. Gluing edge grain like this should be quite strong anyway. So apply a bunch of glue and a shit ton of clamps and wait.
So that gives me a jagged, irregular somewhat rectangularish piece of wood. Deformed, much like Hitler’s penis. Or Harvey Weinstein’s. I suppose I could make a square Lazy Putrid – be much easier and would live up to the moniker. But I kind of want a The Circle one. Since the width of my newly manufactured board perpendicular to the grain is shortest, just that the center on that dimension and take distance to the edge as the maximum radius. I just made a marking stick with a hole for a pencil just inside the maximum radius and tacking the other end at the center line. There is some freedom to move the center parallel to the grain as that’s the long direction, but the wood is relatively crappy in all directions. It does become rapidly apparent that I should have either discarded or at least moved the center slat to an edge, as it is the worst piece – I don’t mind knots so much, but flaky/punky wood will never finish up properly. But given what I’ve created so far, I have minimal choice. So I just mark out a circle so that a particularly bad knot doesn’t fall on the edge of the cut out section. I then rough cut with a jig saw, leaving maybe 1/8 of an inch outside the mark. The final circle (in stone) is refined on the table saw with a sanding disk; just have to be careful to ‘creep’ up to the line and keep the piece rotating. It turned out pretty gud.
However, now if I want a lip to prevent things from flying off the Lazy Putrid when I spin it madly, I need to carve/route out the center part of the disk so I have a narrow (~1/8 inch) lip (~1/4 inch) around the edge – i.e. a very shallow flat bottomed bowl. But how could you make such a circle? Insanity I tell ya. I suppose I could build a circle cutting jig, but I’d need it to be adjustable and rigid enough to hold the depth (DON’T LINK IT AGAIN! YOU PROMISED!). Thought about it for about a day than said f-it and bought a $50 circular router jig. This lets me cut a circle from ~1.5 inch to 52 inches in diameter. Neat! So only the initial cut of the outer lip needs to be carefully set up and once you have correct radius and depth set, cut that. Now just make the radius smaller by the width of your router bit and repeat. And re-repeat. and re-re-repeat until you have the minimum circle possible with the jig left. Now chisel, plane, and sand that last bit down to the correct level.
Turned out nicer than I expected. Now I need to figure out the finish and the Lazy Putrid mounting base spinning thingy
But that will be for another entry.
IT’S RAINING FIRSTS
HALLELUJAH
IT’S RAINING FIRSTS
(In ode to RJ and any SF Glibs and their potential meet up)
Also…
…Wood.
Natalie Wood and Bro wouldn’t.
How much wood would you wood, would wood be wood to would? Or wouldn’t?
It’s not really good for anything large, maybe firewood?
I would have used it as firewood.
The work looks good.
Ya. Woodworkers here on this site are amazing
turned out better than I expected actually. I was fully prepared to smash it up and burn it – and sit next the fire inhaling the wood glue fumes – but at each stage it showed promise, so I just kept going. Happy with the final result (submitted as part II).
That should turn out nice, you have come full circle, Ill stick a round for part 2
heh heh, you said Bug Hole.
heh heh.
(nice work.)
You see things I don’t see and then you make them happen. I would never have thought of something like that, let alone figure out how to do it.
I saw firewood from the get go. I guess the scraps aren’t scraps, they’re a project that hasn’t been thought about yet.
I used to be good at firewood though and making use of my talents as we speak. Old people like it warm.
If you need firewood bring a trailer (when the snow is gone). Thanks PM
I guess the scraps aren’t scraps, they’re a project that hasn’t been thought about yet.
They’re crap that accumulates until you need to move house.
Very nice.
My warning for the day, if you have an iOS devise.
DO NOT update to ios26.1. What a mess.
They add steps to change between open webpages and make the keyboard even worse if that’s possible.
There was an idea. To bring together a group of racist people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together to say the slurs that we never could.
They wanted race essentialism.
They are getting race essentialism.
Who’s the guy with the face tat wearing the Burger King crown? I don’t remember that one.
He’s probably the single most powerful member of the team.
Nice work.
“Australia launches youth social media ban it says will be the world’s ‘first domino’”
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/australia-launches-youth-social-media-ban-rcna246730
Jeez, read only if you want to hear about a bunch of teens who are really hot for the government cracking down on what they’re allowed to do. Australia is cooked.
Has been since the 90s.
It’s that $pecial.
Utopia incoming.
“Isn’t”
Prisoners become habituated to following their jailers demands. I guess it can pass down to new generations.
As bad as Oz is, most Americans aren’t much better. I still get nauseous thinking about how so many Americans bowed and scraped during the VID years. And I still get furious realizing that most of my countrymen proved they would have happily helped the Stasi, KGB, or Gestapo by informing an neighbors, friends, and family.
an = on
I firmly believe the US is only about five minutes behind the worst excesses of the rest of the western – and especially Anglo – world. I keep hearing “we have safeguards constitution 2nd amendment blah blah blah” but none of that seems to be stopping the inevitable.
happily helped the Stasi, KGB, or Gestapo by informing an neighbors, friends, and family.
One of the most pervasive domestic spy agencies, the Stasi didn’t even have to have that big of a payroll. The East German citizens were all too happy to volunteer. One of our great conceits is that we are somehow different, there’s something magic in the dirt that will prevent that from happening here. It’s not inevitable, but we may have been complacent for too long and may not have a core of citizenry that understands/defends the systems that protected us for so long.
My Slovak friends like to talk about how after the Iron Curtain fell, all the Communists “turned their costs inside out and became democrats.” I have little doubt that a significant percentage of Americans would do the same in the other direction.
They already have.
That looks really nice. The wood also has a fun #2-lookin’ birthmark. Could be the seat next to the dealer.