Workshop Makeover, part 22 - Dust Collector Closet - Painting, Venting, Collecting

A few weeks ago my friends (Robin and Will) stopped over to help with tearing up the carpeting in my dining room. That's barely a job for two people much less four so I figured Will and I could work on my dust collector closet.

Again I may have been a little too ambitious; however, I'd been hoping the two of us could get it mudded and the PVC to collect the dust from my table saw run. Instead it took the two of us most of the afternoon just to do the first coat of mudding. We unfortunately didn't get to the dust collection.

Let me start by saying I understand most of the principles behind a good mudding job, I just have acquired little of the physical skills to execute them. I probably did Will a miss-service in improperly mentoring him in his first drywall experience. Hopefully he's not scarred for life.

In any case over the next week or so I sanded, mudded, sanded, mudded until I figured it was good enough for a basement dust collector closet. This week I primered and painted the closet.


I painted the closet using the leftover paint from my dining room project so it's a blue/grey color. I'm a little better at painting than I am at mudding but not nearly as good as my wife. Regardless, it's a basement workshop closet.

In the back of the closet you can see the vent/filter for releasing the air pressure when the collector is running after I've got doors on the front.

This is a furnace HEPA filter wrapped in a poplar frame. To keep the filter from just blowing out of the frame I put a hinged back on it and used a bolt with the head cut off and a thumb screw to keep the frame shut.

I didn't do any fancy joinery on the front half the frame. Butt joints, glue and a couple of brad nails. Since the back frame isn't going to have the framing to help hold it together I half lapped the corner joints. Since I only had four corners and it was going into my basement shop I just used some scrap to set the height of my regular table saw blade and just made a bunch of passes until it was done. Not furniture quality work but perfectly acceptable for my purposes.

The other thing I did this last week was dry fit the collector piping for my table saw. It kind of winds around through a wall and under my table saw so I wasn't able to get a good picture of it' however, I did get a few adequate pictures.

I had a couple of concerns with getting the placement of the initial hole correct. The outlet is attached to a stud and I wanted to avoid it and the 220V line running down to it. The next stud over was less than 16" since we laid out the studs from the back of the closet when we built the wall. Also the floor wasn't level so I know the bottom plate is not at floor level but is an inch or so high.

I picked what I thought was a relatively safe spot and drilled a pilot hole through the T1-11, then using a stiff piece of wire I poked around to make sure I'd have enough clearance. I used my compass to draw a circle the outside diameter of the PVC and cut out the hole using my jigsaw. I used a half round rough rasp to clean up the hole so the pipe fit tightly.

To get the correct location to make a hole on the inside of the closet I pushed a short piece of PVC through the outside hole, traced the interior diameter on the back of the drywall using a pencil. I then transferred that line to the outside by pushing some wire nails through to the inside of the closet where I could use my short PVC off cut to trace the outer diameter. Then it was  just a matter of cutting it out with  drywall keyhole saw.

At the end of the pipe next to the table saw you can see that I have a threaded connector for dust collection hose. I'd originally planned to make the connection a solid connection; however, it would have ended up costing me another $20 or so in parts and would have meant a lot of fiddle fitting. A foot of flexible hose at the saw won't be too bad and will have the added benefit of giving me a little flexibility, having an easier cleanout and not having to worry about transferring any vibration into my collection pipe.

All in all, I am happy with how it's all coming out. I have the end in sight. By the end of the weekend I should have the collector back in the closet and the table saw hooked up. I just need to build my doors and run a couple more collection pipes.

Dining Room, part 1 - Demo and Flooring Prep

It's Thanksgiving week here in the United States. Traditionally people get together, eat lots of food, play touch football, and sometimes even think about all the good things we have to be thankful for.

My wife and I add home improvement projects to our Thanksgiving traditions. We take the long weekend to kick off medium to large projects. Close to ten years ago we started this tradition when we replaced all the nasty old carpeting in our upstairs bedrooms with hardwood. We completely underestimated how much effort stripping 1000 sq feet of carpeting and laying hardwoods would end up being.

It didn't help that after we started ripping up the carpet we decided we may as well replace the base molding. What was in place was basic bull nose molding and we wanted to upgrade to a nicer colonial molding. Then we thought that if we were replacing molding we may as well replace all the case molding around the doors. Then since we had light weight hollow core doors we were planning on replacing eventually anyway we may as well replace them with solid core 6 panel doors.

And you know what? If you've got all your floors torn up and no molding...  You may as well paint too, right?

That long weekend project took three months to finish but it all looks great now. I may even finish the last of the base molding sometime this decade.

It was a good experience because it taught us to not be surprised when you look under the covers. One of our bedrooms had the carpet padding glued to the floor with a rubber cement. You know, just in case the tacks and gravity both failed. Be kind to the next person doing renovations... Don't glue down your carpet padding. We also found water damage that had been partially covered up and a poorly done patch in the sub floor that needed to be fixed. We also found around a half gallon of playground sand under the padding in one of the rooms. If these kinds of things would bug you, pay someone else to do your renovations, or do them yourself so you can know they're done right.

Since then we've done our living room with Kempas and I did our first floor powder room with some of the leftover red oak.

This year we're redoing our dining room. We've lived here for about sixteen years and the dining room has been the same awful pepto-bismol pink as it was when we bought it. The carpet wasn't too bad when we moved in but sixteen years of cats and people made it pretty gross.

We started demo a few weeks ago with the help of some friends of mine. We'll call them Will and Robin to help protect their identities. Will has started a vocational program for carpentry and I thought he might like some real life hands on experience. Robin is his older brother and is college. He's tagging along for fun.

Heimdall, Idris and Luther in their new playground

This weekend we're going to be laying the new flooring (Tigerwood) and with any luck we'll be putting molding in too. We started breaking out the boxes and sorting the boards by length. You can see the new colors in the next photo too.

Workshop Makeover, part 21 - Dust Collector Closet - Table Saw Wiring

I don't remember what I was thinking when I had my table saw outlet first installed. The box is floating loose which isn't safe.

The power cord also stretches across the only way to get from the front of my shop to the back of my shop. Not only is this a tripping hazard but whenever I roll tools into the shop I have to unplug the saw to get them through. Now that I have the closet completed the best place for the power cord is on the other side of the saw on the exterior wall of the closet. That will keep the power cord under the table saw top extension and out from under foot.

When I designed my initial shop walls I thought I might be making more wiring changes to support new tools down the road. I wanted it to be as easy as possible to add new wiring. Since these walls aren't really load bearing - they aren't holding up the house anyway - I put a wide channel in the back of the studs and putting a plywood backer across it to staple wiring to. Covering all this I put a chair rail that can be removed easily to get to the wiring. To run the wiring to the other side of the shop I'd just need to remove the current box, take the existing wire and run it over one more stud bay and then up to the ceiling. From there I could install a junction box, run a new wire across the floor joists, down the closet wall and into a new box.

Seems simple enough, right? Well, my plan did work out; however, there were a few challenges along the way.

The first challenge was getting the current wire loose. My electrician had done a very quality job putting the wiring in and had stapled the existing wire to the stud. I was going to have to remove the T1-11 panel below the chair rail to get the wire loose. Fortunately I'd used deck screws to put up the T1-11 so it was just an issue of pulling a dozen or so screws that had been painted over.  Unfortunately after pulling the screw I realized both sides were trapped. The right side by the adjacent T1-11 paneling the left side by trim around my water closet(*).

The T1-11 came out with a little flexing of the panel, some prying and a lot of grunting.

With the panel removed getting the wire loose and into the next stud bay was easy. Getting it through the top plate a little less so. There was barely enough room to get a drill and a spade bit between it and the floor above. It wasn't pretty but I got the hole drilled.

With the hole drilled I used my wire fish to pull the wire up through the hole and into the junction box I'd fastened to the floor joist.

The closet side was much easier since the wall cavity was still open. I could get to the bottom of the top plate and drill a hole up through it. Then it was just a matter of running a wire from the box through up the wall and through the hole and then across the floor joists to the junction box.

All that was left was tying it all together, black to black, white to white, ground to ground.


(*) My water closet isn't a water closet in the British sense. The main water line for my house comes in through my workshop. Since I really don't want to break it by accident and flood my workshop. That would be unfortunate. I built a closet around the pipes to protect them.

[I did this work back in May...  Just getting back to blogging and found this one unpublished in my queue.]

It's woodworking season again!

The weather outside is cold, dreary, rainy, dark...  just plain yucky.

So what have I been doing all summer? Well, stuff... Some outdoorsy stuff, some indoorsy stuff. I did keep a few woodworking projects moving over the summer but not too much.

I bought a Harbor Freight 4'x8' folding trailer this summer. What's the big deal with that you ask? Well, since I traded my Silverado in for a Forrester I've not had a good way to get plywood home from the lumberyard. The Harbor Freight trailer was such a good deal. It's normally a $400 trailer but I got it on a better than normal sale. Great price, I just had to put it together.

I may have picked a poor day to start putting it together. I started bolting it together in my garage and part way through I started not feeling well so I laid down on the concrete to try and cool off some. I figured it was just a matter of having a typical software engineer physique. Turns out it was a 93 degree Fahrenheit day in Upstate NY in October. Set a new record high. <sigh>

Anyway, over a couple of weeks I got it put together, learned how to grease trailer wheel hub bearings and how to wire a trailer. All of these things are easier than you might think if you haven't ever one it before.

This last weekend I bought a sheet of 3/4" PT plywood to deck it with. Adding the plywood decking was quite annoying. The first step was to use a spade bit to make recesses for the bolt heads sticking up through the frame. That went pretty well except for needing a few tries to get everything lined up right.

The directions called for using 3/8" cross head bolts to fasten the decking to the trailer except I couldn't find them in my Home Depot. I substituted carriage bolts and they seemed to work out well enough. The most annoying part was trying to get the bolt holes in the decking in the right place. What I found worked for me was getting a couple of bolts in place then folding the trailer so I could work on each half vertically. I drilled a hole in about the right spot then when I figured out where the hole was I'd angle the drill bit to get it through the hole in the frame and then straighten the drill. So some of my holes are slightly elongated but I don't think it'll matter in the long run.

What else did I do over the summer? Well, I flew to Chicago to pick up my dad then drove to Carbondale, Il to see the eclipse. How was it? Well, I laughed, I cried, it was better than cats.

We experienced about two and a half minutes of totality; however, unfortunately a cloud occluded the sun for about two minutes of it.

Very sad but at least I had the presence of mind to take a picture of what I could see of the 360 degree sunset. In the panorama below, there's about 20 minutes between the two photos, the lower showing a chunk of the 360 degree sunset during totality.

Regardless  I got to spend a long weekend with my father and 100 or so new friends from Astronomy Cast's fans as well as Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay.

And now! Back to woodworking season!