Clay Dowling's Blog

New woodworkers are often intimidated by the prospect of cutting their own lumber to length. This is made worse by the constant dire safety warnings about how saws will take your fingers off (which they will), and the fact that as a society we condition women to be timid and to think of machinery as "guy stuff." As more women come into wood working, they're having to confront this issue head on.

I've been playing with game management websites a lot lately. I've been running the RPG-Campaign experiment for over three years now. It does a lot of what I wanted. My chief problem with it is that it's spam bait, and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources is a pack of killjoys that won't issue me a hunting license for spammers. The other problem is that it doesn't have a mechanism to conceal content from the players.

My mother in law needed a small stool for her assisted living apartment. The selection of stools in stores is either something large and imposing from a furniture store, or a rickety, tacky looking thing. Neither option was appropriate for my mother in law, so I took an evening and made her one. It's made from a wide white pine board (11 1/2") that I was lucky enough to find at a local lumber supplier. White pine is ideal for it's combination of strength and light weight, because my mother in law can still move it around if she needs to.

When I started in woodworking, one thing that I didn't understand that well was clamps. I knew what to do with them, but when I went to the store I didn't know how to tell the good clamps from the bad clamps. And I have learned the hard way, there are such things as bad clamps.

I'm in the final push on the Jefferson Shelves now, and my box joint machine is getting a workout. I bought a really good box joint blade, a Forrest Woodworker II, and the cuts it makes are gorgeous. Unfortunately I was having trouble getting consistent spacing on the cuts, so that assembly involved wailing on the pieces with a deadblow hammer and strong language.

Putting the final surface on the Jefferson shelves has been one of the big sore points. Hard maple is not fun to plane, and I was making very slow progress. So I bought a thickness sander. I've actually had the sander for a while, but until this weekend what I didn't have was the correct dust collection setup. You absolutely can't use one of these without a good dust collection system: I produced about seven gallons of very fine sawdust in three hours.

I've been experimenting with spray finishing and joint finishing. The bad news is that trimming up case joinery still sucks. I have to plane end grain immediately surrounding by face grain. And I have to do it without gouging up the face grain or blowing out the grain at the end of the board. So far I suck at it. I need to prevent corners from gouging, and the blade from chattering.

I didn't set out to build a shelf. This was supposed to be a laptop stand for my desk at work. But I was experimenting with ways to cut dovetails faster, and in the process I forgot a bit of basic geometry. So when I flipped the top to cut the pins on the other end, I flipped it in the wrong direction. I realized my mistake after I had cut both sets of pins. I could have trimmed off one of the ends, but I decided this shape looked more interesting. And it makes a killer shelf for the reference books that I keep on my desk at work.

Last week I read an article about an alternative way to set up a plane. This alternate method puts the chip breaker tight to the cutting edge of the plane, 1mm or less close. The difference was remarkable. My jointer was leaving finished surfaces that were nicer than what I used to get with my smoother.

The chip breaker also needs to be sharpened and honed, so that the shaving slides over it smoothly. I'm told that if you don't, the shavings come out tightly crinkled and have a tendency to clog.

I've been thinking a lot about how to secure a network against intrusion. I'd like to start a discussion about better ways to protect the availability, privacy and integrity of computer networks. One of the things that I've given a lot of thought about is the fact that on a network, you can assume that at least one computer will be compromised at some time. In the typical computer network, if one computer falls they'll all fall in pretty short order. Researchers have show me logs of attacks where the time between initial penetration to total network ownership was