Potlach Feast

damn… err, i repeat. damn…

I’ve just finished assembling a pair of modified Decware Radial 1 speakers. Cutting to the chase these sound absolutely stunning and come close to trumping my Infinity P-FR’s in almost every way.

As these original Radials came unassembled with upgraded speakers, Jensen capacitors, Audioquest Indigo internal wire, etc, I took the liberty of continuing the upgrade to 1.5’s by adding new bases, cones, passives etc. (thank you Zygi!). After fixing various issues with the veneer, I decided to turn my attention to seal the inside of the speakers with black hole pads that I obtained from speakercity a while back for a different project.

(If anyone is curious, you can do both speakers, top and bottom gaskets, etc. in 6 sheets. - highly recommended).

I sit here slack-jawed as I can’t believe the detail and range I’m hearing from these speakers. When I hear folks talk like this, I usually role my eyes and move on, but the imaging, depth and bass (yes, i said it… bass!) that is coming out of these speakers is absolutely astounding. I need to experiment a bit more with different resistors and weighting the passives, but I’m absolutely floored by what I’m hearing.

I have a crummy room for audio, but these speakers seem incredibly forgiving of this sin. And when I open my eyes I absolutely amazed at how such small speakers can produce such a large, accurate soundstage.

ok… enough of the rants, back to the music…

It seems like only yesterday that Stu Weibel, Thom Hickey and myself split a 500 bd/ft haul of 8/4 hard maple. Upon deeper reflection, however, I guess it was more like eight years ago. go figure… Well, two moves, two jobs, and one (and a half) kids later, I’ve finally used the last of it and completed my workbench.

The legs and benchtop are made from the 8/4 hard maple, the carcus is baltic birch and the front doors, drawers and trim are lyptus.

Scott Landis’s the workbench book (which in my personal library along with Nakashima, etc. is cross cataloged under ’spiritualy moving’ and ‘woodworking porn’) was a big inpiration. The front vise is a Jorgenson and for the end vise I opted for the less traditional Veritas twin screw. In the end I went with the Veritas brass bench dogs as well rather then the traditional square dogs due to ease of use and personal preference.

The most (technically) difficult part in putting this together by far was installing the tail vise. The twin screw design is a very good one, but the instructions are … errr … just lacking enough in detail that your pretty much assured to screw things up at least once. The most (mentally) difficult part was drilling the bench dog holes. It took a while to convince myself that drilling into a table top on purpose was a good thing to do.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the results. I do a considerable amount of hand planing, scraping and carving. To do this now on a good bench, its hard to imagine being without one. I can quickly see this becoming my favorite tool in my shop.

Over the weekend, in an end-of-the-year cleaning frenzy to free up some much needed space, I stumbled upon my old stash of laser supplies. 30-ish years ago my father and I built a helium neon laser for a grade school science project (in the 70’s I was really into lasers and holograms). After about 60 minutes of trying to get everything back in working order I came to the conclusion it just wasn’t going to happen. And while it felt good to sling solder again, I ultimately had to come to grips with letting most of my stash go. What I couldn’t part with however were the Hughes Helium-Neon laser tubes that made this project possible. After thinking a bit about how to store these for another 30 years, I decided to go a different route. As a christmas present to myself, I built a simple stand to proudly display these tubes. And while most people that see them offer an odd glance or two, to me they are a reminder of a simple truth that often times the best way to understand something is simply to build it.

The legs are 2.25″ diameter cherry with 1.5″ maple shelves and maple cross supports. The black cones and spikes are from partsexpress.

The design is more complex than it needed to be, but the adjustablity and leveling I find extreamly effective. The ‘floating’ aspect of the design is asthetic, modular and allows the shelves to expand / contract (as maple will in the climate I’m in).

There are various modifications I expect to do to make this more useful and minimize the problems inherent in this floating design. (FWIW, I don’t think I’d do another one like this.) In the meantime, however, I’m pleased with the result.

Additional (albiet poor) pictures are available for those interested. Caveat emptor… I know far more about wood than photography.

Earlier this summer I picked up a used Swifty 14 wooden sailboat from Shell Boats. Alex has named her “High Treason” (he’s named my canoe “The Black Pearl” … one might accurately conclude at the age of 5, he’s pretty big into pirates).

The design of the Swifty is quite attractive, and the original craftsmanship quite good. The boat was in need of some “creative” repair, but overall in good shape. I fixed some skuffs, modified the transom, painfully applied several coats of paint / vanish and mounted a bit of chris-craft’esq chrome to help tie her to the dock. More (albiet poor) pictures are available rolled out of the garage for a bit of driveway sailing.

She can easily hold 3 people and only weighs about 250 lbs. I have to admit, I expected the stability from this boat based on the design / plans, but not quite the speed. Overall she’s perfect as single or family day-sailer and / or rower and / or (small) motor-boat. The biggest problem is I can’t seem to get in / out of the water without folks comming up to look at it.

I’ve had a blast both restoring, sailing and rowing this boat with my son. I can’t help but wonder what his take will ultimately be on the subject.

The face-lift on my Decware Zen amplifier is finally complete and I’m extremely happy with the results. The Zen is one of the best amplifiers I’ve heard and now it looks (almost) as good as it sounds. The re-termination of some 25+ year old silver braided speaker cables have complemented this amp quite nicely.

Ok, so after 10+ years of woodworking, my Jet Supersaw is the first real piece of equipment that hasn’t been rescued from the garbage, found at a garage sale, or ‘given’ (read, ‘no longer useful’) from a relative. Well, its a big step for me, but I couldn’t be more happy with the purchase.

After entirely too much research, testing, prodding, poking and reading various magazines, I decided to go with Jet’s new supersaw. For the balance of price vs performance, this seemed to me to be the hands-down winner. Woodwerks had a 10% off everything sale every time the Woodworking show comes into town. The saw sold itself even that the current price. The 10% discount was just an added bonus. I’ve been enjoying this so much, I haven’t had enough time even think about the Jet rebate.

The saw came in 3 boxes, the largest of which was approx 2.5′x 3.5′x 5′ and was on a wooden pallet. The total saw weighs in about 400 lbs fully assembled. Even after we took the motor out, and removed all of the various accessories to help the move the largest piece (the main saw) was really more than 2 people could easily manage. This thing is heavy so be warned to all of those people (like myself) trying to get this thing in your basement shop. The weight of this thing is very welcome for when you’ve finally got it in place, but it sure is painful trying to get it there. (Thanks Bernie for your help! )

In addition to the spot on accuracy, cast iron top, trunion size and the simple well-thought out design, I was pleasantly surprised by the additional “little things” . Things like the padded washers holding the saw to the pallet as not to mar the feet, the extra electrical nut in the wiring housing of the motor and the nice catch on the back panel, for example, were appreciated little surprises. Additional unknown-to-me-therefore-considered-extras like the “filter” at the bottom of the vacuum assembly to minimize the possibility of getting small chunks of wood in the dust collection system helped confirm my view that this machine was indeed very well designed.

The powder finish is beautiful. Except for a couple of places where there seemed to be some extra ‘dirt’ that was mixed with the powder, the finish is the best I’ve ever seen. A minor grumble, I generally like a good 20″ to the left of the blade. With the left wing in place I’m down to more like 14″. Ok, so maybe these missing 6″ will be something I’ll get used to, but not yet. I also seemed to be missing pages 20-24 in the user manual. If I ever decided to read this manual, this may become an issue

I didn’t have as much of a problem with the fence as some on this list have stated. In particular, I didn’t find the deflection that has been mentioned in previous posts to be a problem. Rather it just seemed that the pairing of this saw with this fence didn’t seem, well… appropriate. Its less ‘heavy’ and smooth than the rest of the saw. After about a days worth of use, I took it off and put back on an Old Biesemeyer home shop fence that I had from my previous saw. Big improvement. (see image 1, 2, 3). If you have the means for the Biesemeyer, I’d suggest going for it. If not, I don’t think its that big of a deal, but It won’t surprise me if Jet offers a beefier fence as a future option. I don’t mind loosing the sliding on/off switch option switching fences forced me to make. Given the Microglide design
doesn’t lend itself to working well with other table saws so I don’t expect a big after-market with this fence.

I’m usually reluctant to buy v1 of anything. One issue in particular that slightly concerned me was the motor / arbor belt. Finding a replacement may be a problem. But in the end this concern seemed small in light of the rest of the design and gave Jet the benefit of the doubt.

Getting the alignment of the splitter/guard with a thin-kerf blade has been a bit of a problem as well (I’ve never owned anything powerful enough that could use a regular kerf . Also, trying to find a zero-clearance blade insert seems to be somewhat problematic. Getting all of this to work right will are high on the to-do list next I get back in the shop. But I have to say, with the purchase of this saw I seem to be finding excuses to get back there on a much more frequent basis.