Hi,
I’m Aaron Rivers (please feel free to call me Aaron or Squarenuts) and have taken the mantle of 2022 Wood Shop Lead.
I’ve been a proud MakeICT member since 2016 having been in the very same Wood Shop Safety Class as Outgoing Wood Shop Lead Doug Wilson. I’m grateful to Doug for his dedication and passion for learning, teaching, and building our maker community. I hope to fill his shoes and continue improving our wonderful program here at MakeICT.
I bring over two decades of woodworking experience and look forward to learning a great deal from and in collaboration with you.
I’ll be in one or the other Wood Shop on Maker Monday’s and will be scheduling more dedicated time within the next few months. In January I’ll be teaching Wood Shop Safety, but hope to expand my class offerings soon thereafter.
I’ll also be putting together lists of projects, repairs, needed tools, possible classes and so on for the smooth running and continued improvement of the Wood Shop. While my ability to make changes will be limited, I would greatly appreciate all your comments and suggestions.
The remotes to turn the dust collector on and off are finicky and unreliable. This has been an issue for a long time. I’m willing to help wire up a replacement system that would turn on and off automatically when tools are in use. This could probably be done for $10-$20 per machine in parts.
The oscillating spindle sander seems to be missing at least one of its rubber drums and I couldn’t find any replacements sleeves for the smallest size: the one that is currently on it is beyond worn out.
I couldn’t get the scroll saw to turn on at all. The fuse looked fine and I tried two different circuits, but I got nothing.
The green belt sander is a pain to use. Anytime I try to run a longer flat piece on it I hit the shroud on the left hand side and/or the shroud for the disc sander. Perhaps this is down to user error, but I think that an angle grinder and a couple inches of extra thickness on the table would make it much easier to use. Also the piece of MDF that used to be on the bed has been removed and now there is a much larger gap which seems to cause it to tear things up a lot more.
Organization in general could certainly be improved, but this is true for pretty much every area. We need to work on making it easy for anyone to find things and return them to the appropriate place without any prior knowledge of where they should go.
Having a place for everything will be a great help - it needs to be easy for folks to do the right thing. Perhaps even a designated place in each area for tools that are lost, confused and don’t know where they belong rather than just stuffing them in the first void…
The green belt sander is a pain to use. Anytime I try to run a longer flat piece on it I hit the shroud on the left hand side and/or the shroud for the disc sander. Perhaps this is down to user error, but I think that an angle grinder and a couple inches of extra thickness on the table would make it much easier to use. Also the piece of MDF that used to be on the bed has been removed and now there is a much larger gap which seems to cause it to tear things up a lot more.
The piece of masonite/MDF/hardboard/cardboard/joke that was carpet taped to the table was far from flat. Because of this, trying to sand anything square was near impossible. I am currently serving out the remainder of my COVID quarantine, but I’ll come look at it again when I can and see if the table can be adjusted. Else, a better work surface could be built that would hold its flatness.
For sanding long items, the belt sander really should be laid down. The workpiece can then be allowed to run long past the drive and idler wheels. Ours doesn’t have it, but a fence exists for using the belt sander in this horizontal position. It wasn’t really designed to support sanding long pieces perpendicular to the belt. As an alternative, you mentioned the table needing to be higher. An auxiliary table could be made, basically a riser box, that would let you move the workpiece above the disc sander, if that would help you get around the limitations of the machine design.
@cathyb,
Too true. Big plans in place for reorganizing, putting tools in places that make sense with work flow.
I like the idea of a place for people who don’t know where things go to place stuff too.
@xrunner,
Developing plans for another dust collector. This will change things quite a bit, and I don’t want to put in too much work just to redo it in a few month’s time. Also, with the luck we’ve had with the current remotes, I hesitate to throw good money after bad on the same type, and better units may require a better (and more expensive) controller. Need to research it with the erp guys.
@james.a.seymour,
Sharpening is another aspect of the woodshop I hope to improve. Classes should be forthcoming concerning sharpening in conjunction with classes on hand tool use.
What I was suggesting was to replace the current remote system entirely. This would be independent of the actual dust collector, so it wouldn’t matter if you replaced it unless it somehow functions in a fundamentally different way. I think that we could set up a wired system that turns on/off automatically for somewhere in the ballpark of $100-$200. If you’re interested I could do some research and testing and come up with a BOM.
I fully support this project the remotes suck and for a little investment we could save a ton of time walking around to different machines to play ‘will it fire’ dust collection fob roulette.
DWH
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