Tenons are cut to slide on the top. To drawbore the leg braces, I drilled the mortises through, inserted the tenons, tapped the same brad point bit to mark the tenons and then drilled the tenons 1/16" tighter than the mortise holes.
It's exciting to fit the base joints. I've been planning how to build the top, which will slide onto tenons cut into the tops of the legs. It will probably be the common setup with front vise and tail vise, just reversed so that it will fit into the place in the basement directly to the left of the fridge. I prefer the tail vise designs that use wooden guides and an inexpensive bench screw to the fancier and much more expensive steel rail setups.
Last winter, a very generous friend of a friend let us haul away a truckload of old oak timbers.
The timbers came in a few lengths all over 1m and with varying conditions at the ends. Some had fancy looking old joinery that was still viable and some were decomposed.
A little TLC revealed lots of very usable oak. These will be the legs of my new workbench.
My good friends Mike & Mali and I have started making iOS apps. Here is the first one - a simple matching game showing off Mike's iconic illustrations of alphabet letters and vegetables.
We followed the standard 16-oz "Pound Cake" instructions this year and things came out well. This time I smeared shortening into every nook and cranny and then heated the mold for 20 minutes at 375. Then I let it cool completely and poured in the batter.
I've been having a hard time trying to train a Self-Organizing Map to categorize a large pool of short documents by my selected keywords. The initial results were promising but I couldn't adjust the training parameters well enough to train the error sufficiently low that I would be confident of the categorizations, even after several days of training.
Lauren gave me a classic 10" radial arm saw for my birthday after we moved (and have a garage). I've been testing its ability to cut accurately. Ripping this walnut and maple to one inch felt reasonably dangerous and I'll probably build the jig suggested in the original manual for ripping small stock.
This code draws a Mandelbrot pattern on the 132x132 Nokia 6100 type screen with Epson controller (will not work for the Phillips) from an Arduino. I started with the code example from this post and made some optimizations- especially to the serial communication code. Then I ported the Mandelbrot algorithm from here.
Here is a prototype two-axis pointing device designed to aim a laser diode's beam. It operates via USB to Arduino with my modified Firmata and AS3 Glue code and two EasyDriver stepper motor controller boards.
This design is movable over virtually the entire sphere but it's difficult to build a well-aligned bearing and gear or pulley system.
