Notes from the Workshop: 20120107

In this edition of Notes from the Workshop, I’ll post pictures of the prototype wooden mallet I built, talk about my new toy, explain my fear about inspections, and explain why Google is out to get my Hand Picked News Feed.

Wooden Mallet Protoype

After seeing Steve Schuler post his mallets on G+, it inspired my to try and build one. I used these plans from the Craftsmanspace as a starting point to construct my prototype. Eventually I plan to use some scrap Camaru that I think would make a good mallet head. I haven’t figured out the handle yet.

Things I’ve learned so far:

• I need to practice my rasping skills.
• I hate using chisels with pine, it is too springy (actually I didn’t so much as learn this as I keep forgetting it.
• I can’t rip worth a damn by hand.
• I’m laminating the head rather than chiseling out the hole for the handle.

It’s not pretty, but it works. If you want to see the construction process,  here is the album.

New Toy

I was in Menards trying to lighten my wallet of some gift cards I received for Christmas, when I spotted the Bosch PS20 on sale for $70. It isn’t the newest model, in fact I think it is the original model PS20 that everybody originally raved about.  I know I’ve wanted one ever since then, but never  could dropping over $150 for one when I had a perfectly good drill.

It’ll fill a niche in my tool collection, between a screwdriver and my cordless 1/2″ drill. It’s such a pain to pack up my big cordless in my go bag when I have to go fix something. I also see it being really useful for final assembly, so I don’t have to change from drill bit to screwdriver bit in my drill.

The sad thing is I don’t have any projects ready to put together right now, so I’ve only used it a few times.

 Click to picture to see the album

Bathroom Inspected

I finally scheduled and passed my final inspection on my shower remodel yesterday. I was actually done well before Christmas, but I ripped up a section of the tile floor to fix it and had a gaping hole in the ceiling below the shower I had to fix. If I would have been smart I would have waited to fix the floor until the inspector was through, but I haven’t been accused of that lately.

I’m always weary of inspectors coming into my house afraid they’ll take one look around and spot all the small annoyances that might not meet code and force me to fix them. But the inspector walked in the bathroom, and said it looked good. The only other comment she made was that I should think about caulking around my toilet, but it isn’t a code issue for residential. Evidently it is a common place for bacterial to breed since it is hard to clean. This must be a newer code, because lately when I’ve been in men’s rooms I’ve noticed really crappy caulking jobs around urinals, I guess this explains it.

If you want to see some shots from the process click on the above picture.

Hand Picked News Fixed for Now

Google changed some of it’s CSS markup around the +1s and broke my Hand Picked News feed, a commenter tried to point this out to me several weeks ago but I was too thick-headed to listen to him. I finally noticed a few days ago that the feed wasn’t updating and after about a half hour of fiddling, I managed to string together a regex that worked — until Google decides to make another minor change that nobody notices to the CSS again