Inside the tin box

While we suffer through the heat of summer in our tin sheds (whether insulated or not!), here is a little reminder about how hot another tin box can get on a sunny day.

The family car.  Good for getting around, but really bad as a ‘secure’ place to leave kids or pets locked inside, even for a short time.

This was a full, unopened can of coke.

That would take some doing, and a pretty high internal temp in the car.

Banksia

Haven’t had a chance to post for a long time unfortunately 😦

It isn’t much, but this Banksia caught my eye.  Love the texture of the bark.

Pegasus

Quite the collaborative effort.  Plans from MakeCNC.com. Cut on a Torque 9060 CNC from 3mm MDF. Painted by Jeanene Slabbert.  Photographed by Kara Rasmanis.

I give you, the Pegasus!

Toolversed Rating

Toolversed is one of the newest tool review sites, that came online at the start of 2016 according to this press release

It seems to primarily focus on tools available through Amazon, which is not so useful for those of us down under, as I don’t think we can buy anything other than books & DVDs still (but that may have changed).

They recently did a review of woodworking blogs, and Stu’s Shed was chosen as one of the top 25, although there were some notable exceptions in the list.  

Decided to have a look around the review site, see what was being found.  Being US based, I wasn’t surprised I didn’t recognise many of the brands, but there were categories I thought some of the brands I like would have made the list.  Festool?  Doesn’t make the grade, not for sanders, nor drop saws or anything else for that matter.  Didn’t even make the review list.

Try again: Triton? Well at least the brand made a minor appearance, as one of the belt sanders had been looked at (and not surprisingly, well down the list).  Surprised their router didn’t make an appearace.

Sawstop? Nup.  Apparently the best tablesaw is a Dewalt portable, and the best portable is a Bosch.

Powermatic? MagSwitch? Incra? Woodpeckers? No, x4

Jet?  Finally, found one where Jet managed to make a hit, as the best wood lathe.  Nova / Teknatool, especially the DVR XP? nup.

Bummer.  Hopefully the range of what is reviewed will continue to improve- at this stage it seems to be only Amazon-based.  However, seeing as the US can seemingly buy Festool through Amazon, I’m surprised it didn’t get more of a mention.

Carbatec Sale

A 3 day sale at Carbatec has just gotten underway, and while I tend not to mention sales, I’m making an exception in this case as the catalog is worth a look.

Prices are up to 50% off, and while noone cares when the items at 50% off are obscure bolts etc, some of the sale items in the 50% bracket include the Nova DVR XP lathe.  Seeing as that is normally over $3 grand, if you were interested in an awesome lathe, that becomes a bloody good price.

Let your fingers do the walking, and see if there is anything tempting!

Sass & Spunk Styles

Been doing quite a lot of product development for Sass & Spunk Styles recently, which is interesting.  

You can check them out on Facebook – search for “Sass & Spunk Styles”

They can definitely style their product photos better than I can! There are some lessons I can learn from there.

He is a snap I took yesterday of a part of their stand at a local market.

The great Masters sell off.

With 14 days or so to go until the doors finally close on the failed Masters experiment, prices have been dropped again, now to 60-80% off.

Sounds good, except that is a carcass that has been heavily picked over.  There is so little stock in each store, that if the combined shelf space of all Masters put together would struggle to fill a single outlet (and even then it would be a sad product range.

In the power tool section, pretty much everything has gone, bar one brand.  Wonder what is says about that brand’s reputation that plenty of stock is still left, even with a minimum 60% off, and no other choices (competition) available?!

Clean up in isle 1

While I’ve been doing quite a bit in the shed in recent months, especially around the CNC, my housekeeping (in the shed) has been woefully neglected.

So I put a couple of hours into it yesterday, and managed to get a semblance of order into an area of a whole 8m2.  Granted it was probably the worst corner of the shed, but still, there is a lot more work required out there.

I am happy with the start though, and rather than the two hours trying to generally clean everywhere (which inevitably only touches the high traffic areas), this covered a lot less area, but got right into the corners, backs of shelves etc.

Now if only I can keep it that tidy as I progress the clean across the shop.

I might even get to unpack some more boxes that I haven’t seen the contents of for a few years!

Time for a name change

I’m thinking Phoenix would be a suitable replacement name for Triton.  They keep rising from the ashes, and appear to be immortal.

Time after time parent companies have failed, or have sold the brand, and yet even after the demise of Masters as one of the big outlets for Triton, I get this in my inbox: an invitation to a product launch!

While I have some questionable opinions of some of the product range these days (still heavily influenced by their days under GMC), you can’t fault the brand’s resilience!

Stopped the Saw

Having the opportunity to demonstrate the SawStop means I have set it off many times, by a variety of techniques.

Today was the first time I tried a new technique.  Setting off the brake for real, by accident, as a false release.

Wrecked a brake, damaged a blade (a good one).  So how do I feel about it all now, now that I have incurred the cost of a blade and brake which wasn’t a real save?  Absolutely no different to how I felt about the whole system yesterday.

Sure, I made a mistake, but you don’t piss and moan about the airbags in your car going off unnecessarily in a less serious accident, and I feel exactly the same about the SawStop.  It is still there ready to save if there is ever a need.  I have had the SawStop for a few years now, and this is the first time, so to my mind that equates to about a $100/year insurance policy. Yes, I am comfortable with that.

So what happened?  I forgot that the SawStop mechanism was there I think.  I was cutting some acrylic, which I have done plenty of times before, but this was acrylic with a difference.  It has a silvered surface, ie, a mirror.  And silvered surfaces tend to be……metallic.  I must have not been making good contact, so it didn’t detect me through the material initially, but as the blade got closer to me, it must have passed a threshold reading and off it went.

There are a lot out there that disagree with SawStop, for whatever reason, and this adds fuel to their fire.  So be it, that is your personal choice.  Me, I know how much the cost, and personal physical damage of just a simple knife slip.  I can’t begine to imagine what the results would be for a tablesaw accident.