Andrew's View of the Week

21 Guns – A Poem for Memorial Day

Posted on 05/29/2011 by Andrew Reynolds

Twenty-one Guns

The tour bus rumbles past
the quiet monuments to the fallen.
Shutters click as the tour guide
speaks the litany of the shrine,
that once was the Lee estate.
Now it is that hallowed ground
where solders come for that long rest.

The Quick rumble past the carved stones
of the Dead, that once placed
boots of war on their feet.
Their soles now silent.
Now day-trippers take aim and fire.
Cameras, not rifles.
Pictures, not prisoners taken.

The bus stops. The microphone is silent.
To the left a horse pulls a caisson carrying a flag-draped box
That contains a name who once walked.
The warrior sent at our command.
The sightseer sees and falls silent
And hears the echo of guns.
Three volleys and then the mournful notes.

Boys became men
And men became names
And names became graves
Gone is the sun,
Day is done.
God is Nigh.

I wrote this poem a number of years ago after a visit to Arlington National Cemetery during a visit to Washington DC. I’ve been privileged to have three visits to our nation’s capital in my life and each time I go, I enter the gates of Arlington to pay my respects to the men and women who gave their lives in the service of our nation. It is my hope that we will learn to live in peace so that no one ever again need surrender their life to defend our freedom.

Posted in General, Poems | Tagged Memorial day | 1 Comment

From The Workshop – Table Saw Stand

Posted on 05/24/2011 by Andrew Reynolds

I built my table saw stand over the weekend. It wasn’t a difficult build – except for the part where one middle-aged man had to wrestle with a 4×8 sheet of plywood in a very small space. My shop space isn’t that large and full sheets of plywood are much heavier than you think. Normally I have the lumber yard cut the sheets down to a manageable size before bringing them home but I ended up with a full sheet. The stand is cut from the single sheet of ¾ inch exterior grade pine plywood – i.e. cheap wood. Also, it was just taking up a bunch room in the shop and using it freed up a bunch of space. It isn’t fine furniture but still it is my creation and satisfies my need to build stuff.

The technical details go like this:

I rough cut the sheet on saw horses with a skill saw in the side yard. I’ve got a couple of long aluminum straight edges I clamp down to guide the saw. Then I took the rough cut parts over to the table saw and cut them to their final size. The table saw is much more accurate and once the fence is set you can get the same size rip cut on multiple pieces – that will never happen with my skill saw. I used pocket screw joinery using the Kreg pocket screw jig http://www.kregtool.com/ to assembly the whole thing. A little glue along with the pocket screws and this thing is solid and not going to fall apart. I put locking casters on so the whole thing can be moved but still locked into a safe position for use. I put the wheels on at 90 degrees to the saw blade to help prevent movement when pushing a piece of wood through. The DeWalt 744 is really just a portable table saw and not really suited for sheet goods so most of the pieces I cut on it are small. I manage a fair amount of work on it and have a set of bookcases I built using this little saw.

Push from this side

The whole project took about three hours to complete (not counting design and drawing time). I had planned to put in a shelf and a couple of doors but once I got the stand built I decided not to, as they didn’t seem that useful on the finished piece. If I find a need for doors or another shelf, they are easy enough to install. I will build an out feed table for it which will double as an assembly table. My shop is very small so everything has to do double duty around here – hum this out feed table could triple as the table for the vacuum press I am going to order this week…

Now, I’ll admit that the stand is just down right ugly and not all the joints are square. On the good side it is functional and will give me a place to store all my table saw accessories like my extra blades, dado set and my soon to be built crosscut sled. Yeah, I know it is kind of silly to build a sled for this cheep saw but I’ve always wanted one and can’t really justify a new saw but I do have some MDF (medium density fiber board), oak scraps and a couple of aluminum miter bars…

But then this is whole thing isn’t about being perfect or doing the right thing. It’s about doing something. It’s taking all my skills, as flawed as they are, and making something. I drew the plans, I cut the wood, I glued the parts together and proudly set the saw on top. There are woodworkers who could have done a better job, but this one is mine – I made it.

Posted in woodworking | Tagged Shop tools, woodworking | 1 Comment

Into the Workshop – Table Saw Stand

Posted on 05/21/2011 by Andrew Reynolds

The table saw stand I am going to build

Today it is time to get into the wood shop and create some saw dust. Hopefully one or two useful projects will come out too. One of the first will be this table saw stand for my DeWalt 744. It will get some wheels and will be more compact and stable than my current stand. It will also let me build a fold down out feed table and side support table. Plus it will improve the dust collection and give me another storage space for tools and jigs.

Posted in woodworking | Tagged Shop tools, woodworking | Comments Off

The joys of repetive strain injury

Posted on 05/20/2011 by Andrew Reynolds

My view of this week has been clouded my by arm. It hurts. Repetitive strain injury, RSI, is the reason it hurts. Basically I’ve spent too much time – hours, days, years – on the computer. Between clicking on the mouse and pounding on a keyboard I’ve managed to over use my right arm to the point where I now have a painful version of tendonitis – a bit like tennis elbow but without all the sweating on the tennis court.

and there was the episode with the bricks and the two cubic yards of dirt…

Hum? Oh the bricks. Well, there was this pond in the backyard that we decided should be filled up. It was lined with brick – about 8 wheelbarrows full. I know I moved each one. It made an impressive stack after I got them all out – 4 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet high when all stacked up. Took me most of a Saturday to do it. Then I filled the hole – about two cubic feet of dirt – by hand, yup, me, a wheelbarrow, a shovel and several hundred pounds of dirt. I guess there are somethings that middle-aged men shouldn’t do, like thinking that we’re still 25

Now my arm hurt a bit before that with all the extra blogging I did over Easter week (okay and the video game I played for hours on Monday okay video game!) but by the Thursday after the pond project my arm felt like it was on fire and I could barely type or click a mouse. Which is a bad thing. One it means I haven’t been doing what I wanted to do with this blog and as a software engineer it made doing my job painful. It did give my a chance to slack off at work, but no video game – that is just beyond tolerance.

The pond episode was two weeks ago and I finally went to see the doctor this last Monday. Now I could say that this is the first time I’ve ever had RSI but then a lightening bolt would shoot out of the sky ’cause I’ve done this before. SO I kind of knew what I had to do – rest, ice, Advil, fix the ergonomics of my workstation and hire someone to move the bricks. Well, I haven’t hired anyone yet but I’ve also just let the brick stay where I put them. I’ve done everything else but the arm still hurt so in the hope that the doctor knew more that I did, I made an appointment and went.

The good news is that it turns out that I am treating the arm correctly. The only two things extra things I was told was to take more Advil and to get a tennis elbow brace. I always like it when the doctor agrees with my diagnosis. I think I made the doctor happy because he got to play with his ultrasound machine – using it to compare the size of the tendon in my good arm to the bad arm. Not sure he really needed to do that but it seemed to make him happy and amused me enough to forget for ten minutes that my arm hurt.

My arm isn’t 100% today but it is healing and I’ve got a bunch of new toys for my computer – a vertical mouse, curved keyboard and this weekend I install the adjustable keyboard tray. All of that should fix the ergonomic problem.

I’ve also tackled the amount of time I’ve spent typing by spending less time at home on the computer and more time in the wood shop.

One of my other purchases was a USB microphone so I can start doing audio podcasts rather than typing these long blog entries. We’ll see how that works out.

Next week I am taking some vacation time to putter around the wood shop and take a few day trips. Haven’t decided on where we’re going on the day trips but in the wood shop I’ve got a few projects on list: a Murphy bed for the guest room, bookcase for the guest room, a shed to store wood, a table sled, a new stand for the table saw, a sanding table, and start on my next marquetry piece – it will have sheep it in. Also there will soon be some new power tools in the shop. More about that when the bundles of joy arrive.