WWGOA LIVE! December 2019

All right. Well, at least we've got it on my phone. Sam says we're live. Hey, Facebook, how are you doin' today? Paul... Are we live, Paul? I think we're live. I think we're live. I'm gonna check right now. Yep, I see our lovely little faces. So, sorry we're two minutes late here. Right at the 11th hour, I'm pointing to our streaming box, our streaming box just completely blanked out. So tonight, we are very, very lucky, couple things, to be sponsored by Titebond as we always are, so thanks to Titebond for underwriting us and keeping it free for you folks. And, even mo' better, to have Paul in the shop. Now you might be familiar with Paul's work. He's done a lot of writing and a lot of videos for WWGOA and a lot of other stuff. So why don't you do a little bio, Paul, and tell us who you are and why the heck you're here? Sure thing. Thank you, George. And thank you very much for letting me be here tonight. So yeah, I've been writing for Woodworkers Guild for about, well, maybe a year or so after it started, so 10-11 years or so now. Long history. And I've been woodworking for about 23 years now. I started right when my, right around the time when my daughter was born. So that's kinda how I timestamp it. I build a lot of furniture. I've recently gotten into turning bowls, so I do quite a bit of that. It's kind of an addiction and I do a lot of tool reviews and tool analysis and that's kinda what I'm into in my ToolMetrix venture. Yeah, so in addition to Woodworkers Guild, you have your own thing going, which if people want to find you, tell them how to find you. Sure, I'm on YouTube. Look for ToolMetrix, Metrix with an X. And it's pretty easy to find out there. And on there I do some miscellaneous things. A lot of tool reviews and projects and kind of whatever my whim of the week is. All right. Paul's gonna do a little bit of show and tell. I want to mention, before we jump into that, WWGOA has got a contest going on whereby you can get a printout template for making a reindeer and then you can submit a copy of your reindeer and a picture of your reindeer, and then that goes into a contest where you could get a free platinum membership, an annual platinum membership. So be sure that you have a look at that if you're interested in making... I'll show you. Reindeer down. This is the project. That's the reindeer. And we've got the template and everything for you, the pattern. All right, let's do this, Paul. We have...we've got questions. So let's just jump in and then we'll come back and revisit the show and tell aspect. Sounds good. I'm gonna switch my pack. All right. All right, here we go. Ready? Ready? Ready? Ready? Are you switched? I'm going to take a question while you're dealing with it. No, I moved it. Okay. Jim from Rochester, New York: "A recent live event talked about flattening a board on a jointer. What if the board is bigger than the jointer?" I know you have an answer for this. I do, because I have only an eight inch jointer and I buy a lot of wide boards, 12-14 inch a lot of times. So what I normally do is, depending on the size of the plank, the length, but a lot of times I will rip it on the band saw and then deal with each of the pieces independently and then kind of glue them back together how they were. That's one way to do it. I can also sometimes use a hand plane and get it... kind of close enough. Now don't worry, George. Ugh, hand tools. It's not as bad as it sounds. Hand tools. So, I'm not great with hand planes, but I'm good enough to get it flat enough to where I can feed it through a planer and then flip it over, plane the other side parallel, and then flip it over and clean up my poor job on hand planing. Okay. I like that solution. So, another approach some people will use and I've seen Matt Cremona do a video about this. You can find Matt's stuff on YouTube. He actually does a technique where he takes the guard off the jointer and makes a pass, turns the board, makes a pass, and you can't get one or no, I'll take that back. What he does is he takes the guard off, he makes a pass. You end up basically with a rabbited really wide board. Then you put a shim under that and send it through your planer. But the best thing to do would be to look up Matt Cremona's video on that. All right. "A good brand of chisel for a beginner that won't break the bank" is from Jonathan. "And what sizes do you feel are mandatory when starting out?" So I assume we're on bench chisels. Do you have a flavor you like? I do, I think the, the ones that I like kind of in the middle of the pack are the, I think they're owned by Irwin now. They're Marples. Marples, I was gonna say the same thing. The blue handle, you know, so they're, you don't have to use a mallet. You could, if you ever wanted to, I've never hit mine with a hammer but in a pinch you could tap them with a hammer but they take a really nice edge and hold it reasonably well. And so then the next layer of that question, if you were recommending a group of standard sizes to start out with. Yep, I think that my set has a quarter, certainly a half, three-quarters and one inch. And I have two other sizes in the middle of that range. 'Cause I'd probably throw a three-eights and a five-eights in there. So if you did quarter, three-eighths, half, five-eights, three-quarter, that'd be great. And then probably plus an inch would be, that'd be... I mean, you're one quarter to one inch in eighth-inch increments, you'd be... Yeah, and that's plenty. That is gonna cover you for most of the stuff that you're going to do with chisels. Certainly dovetails. Cut a lot of dovetails with that set. Yeah. Um... David asked, "Might it be possible to add a braking mechanism to a Laguna bandsaw through the small window on the upper left of the machine? Something that would rub against the side of the upper wheel." Paul and I both have Laguna band saws, so this is a good question. I'm gonna say no. What say you? Yeah, I at all and in particular in that particular spot. I think normally where they put them is on the lower wheel and they'll use like a disc brake mechanism that looks like something off of kind of a high end bike. Yeah, it's exactly, I mean, it is a disc brake. It's exactly like a disc brake. Yep. And I feel, too, like there's just so many. Yeah. It's such a Rube Goldberg way to bring your bandsaw to a stop. And I think there's a reason, physics, engineering, whatever it is, like brakes around the lower wheel, not the upper. It just seems like a bad thing to start messing around. David says, "Happy Thanksgiving." Scott says, "I've been told that I need a bigger motor for my system. Is there a way to know what size I need?" You think, wanna just assume dust collection system on that? And I don't know. "I've been told I need a bigger motor for my system." If you're still online, Scott, Ah! Give us a clue what you're looking for, but... Yeah, so I'll, let's assume that that's dust collection and I would say... So his system doesn't suck. Enough, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a complicated question. And I guess the simple answer to that is, I would probably steer clear of swapping a motor on an existing dust collector, because there's a pairing of the motor horsepower with the impeller size and that's really important. So putting a bigger, more powerful motor on the same impeller could be a waste of time. Well, and riddle me this, Batman. Wouldn't it be that that machine has whatever it has. It's got a 16-inch impeller that spins a 34/50 RPM. So it took this motor to drive it. Going to a bigger motor, it's still turning at 34/50 RPM. Exactly. So you're still moving CFM. Exactly. If that motor was capable of spinning it, it's going to spin it at, a bigger motor is gonna spin it at the same speed, so... And changing the speed, I mean, not that you can do it with an induction motor easily, but... Right. Then you're maybe gonna cavitate air instead of move air. And it seems... So I think the answer is sell that one and upgrade. And that is a very complicated formula to determine exactly which dust collector you need for a given space. You know, we have some content on the WWGOA site that I've written to try to simplify some of the mystery around ducting and blast gate design and so forth. But I think what I, to oversimplify it, and I will get I'm sure is not accurate, but to oversimplify it, I would say if you're in a one car garage, you need a one horse dust collector, but that would not support a duct system. You're going tool to tool with that, but you can probably get away with that in a one car garage. If you have a two car garage, you should have at least a two horsepower dust collector, and a three car garage in that kind of size, at least a three horse. More is always better and I would err on the side of more. And the two and three horse are lending themselves to hard pipe. Exactly. Which the one horse will not. Correct, yes. And the most common problem that I think I come across with people in their dust collection set up, is they under power the dust collector and/or oversize the duct. And that's a terrible combination. I learned that the hard way. I had a one-and-a-half horse dust collector and six inch mainline pipe and I thought it was working okay, and then it just seemed like it was working less and less okay. And when I moved, I took that apart and it was full. 'Cause you weren't moving enough air to get the, to evacuate the dust. Exactly, the speed in the line was too slow and the dust was settling in the pipe. So, that was kind of a long-winded answer. I would say upgrade your dust collector. Look for something at least... you probably have a one or a one-and-a-half horse. Go at least two, preferably three horse. And, just get a system designed from the ground up with that kind of air movement. Alright. Harry's question is, "Hi, George. I have a couple of feet of down." I'm gonna put my cheaters on. "I have a couple of feet of a downed tree that I want to cut into cookies for small table tops. I'm not ready to do that yet. What should I do now to preserve the tree until I'm ready to work with it?" Cut 'em now . If you leave a log lay, it's probably gonna go bad. So you can hedge your bet by, if you know you need three feet of log, leave it five feet long so there's wood to cut off the end. You know, Paul's gonna bring us a visual aid. You gotta keep it as wet as possible as long as possible. Paint the ends so that they can't dry too fast but it's probably still gonna dry. So this is, this is an example. This is a table I'm working on as we speak. This is a piece of Bur Oak. And the real trick with this one is, I treated it with a chemical product called Pentacryl. Ironically, we were talking about this on a Facebook live earlier today. With Pentacryl, it soaks into the woods cells, and it helps them retain their shape so that as you dry, you don't get a bunch of cracking. This one got a little bit of cracking to it and it's 'cause the Pentacryl didn't, I didn't give it enough time to penetrate as deeply as it should, but that Pentacryl step was done while this thing was still dripping wet green. Got after it as fast as I possibly could. So the answer, Harry, is do the work as soon as you can. And other than that, keep that log as wet as possible as long as possible. If you live someplace where it's not freezing outside like it is here and you can hose that down with the hose every once in a while, that'd be a great idea. And without Pentacryl, that would for sure have had splits all the way out. Yeah. Through the side. Well, and I was saying that the sister of this cookie is still at my mom's house and it was untreated, and from the pith out to here there's a crack that on the rim is about three inches wide. So the Pentacryl wasn't perfect in this case, 'cause I got some cracking, but it's way more better than the one that was completely untreated, which for what I'm trying to do here, would have been unusable. And Clusson is in Houston and says, "Hi." Clusson, were you at the, were you at the Guild there? The club when I was teaching down there? And if so, when am I coming back? I was there in the summertime. Maybe we could do a winter trip. It'd be good to get to Houston from Wisconsin when it's 20 below here. That would be a nice thing. So dust collection. "If I can only get one, do you recommend starting with a dust collector or a hanging dust filter and why?" Great question. And I can tell you that I learned that one the hard way myself. I thought I could get by with the hanging filter style. And really what you're gonna find is that those, the hanging filter air circulators are really good as a kind of second line of defense, but they are really worthless if you use them without collecting at the source first. So what I found was, I hung that thing up and that filter was plugged almost instantly. And it certainly didn't do anything to prevent any mess in the shop. So... You're just not, it's not gonna get, and they're not really designed to get a hundred percent of the dust created on every tool you're using all the time. Exactly. It's more like they're looking, they're out sniffing for dust that your dust collector missed. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So an interesting evolution of that, it was, I then added a one-and-a-half horse dust collector, which did I thought a decent job until I took the ducting apart and found out it was plugged like I mentioned. And then I noticed, and I still ran that air circulator, and it still plugged up fairly quickly. But then a couple of years later, I upgraded my dust collector to a...let's see. I guess I went to a five horse dust collector then at that point. And I found that it almost never collected any dust in the air circulator because the dust collector was doing such a good job at the source. So I almost never run it anymore. The only time I use the one that hangs from the ceiling is if I'm sanding something that's bigger than I can put on my downdraft table. So if I had a big piece of furniture and I'm doing some final sanding, I would run that because, you know, I can collect a little bit at the source using the tool, but that's pretty marginal collection. So that's a really good way to, you know, keep the particles... The idea at the end of the day with the air filter concept, you're letting all that junk become airborne which means you're also breathing it. And even, you know, you wear a mask and all that stuff, but you're letting way too much stuff get into your environment which is not good for you. Yep. All right. Thomas is in Tacoma and somebody is in Vermont, I guess. Derek says, "I have a VERY small workshop and limited storage space. I quite often move out to my deck when working on large projects. I've been looking for plans for a work bench with storage that can hold up to the elements." So you want it to live outside, I guess. "But I've had no luck. Any ideas?" So it's interesting. It's an interesting concept of what then? A weatherproof woodworking bench that would just stay outside. Man, I wouldn't want to rely on weather proof to the point where I have tools in drawers under the bench. There are woods that are naturally weather resistant. White Oak is one of them. So you could build a work bench out of a naturally weather resistant wood like White Oak, mahogany. Jarrah is an Australian wood that can live outside. These new products Paul and I have seen, which are heat treated. I'm not saying that right. What is that ash? Oh yeah. Not heat treated. Thermally modified. Thermally modified. Where we are is thermally modified ash, but they're taking standard materials, thermally modifying them. That's the keyword, Google it. And it allows them to live outside for 25 years. But it's a good hardwood. Like in our case, it's ash. So first choice would be a good material that can live outside, exterior glue as you put it together. And there you go, you could build yourself a bench that could be outside. And that stuff is beautiful. The ash anyway that we saw is absolutely stunning. And the process only added about a dollar a board foot to the overall cost of the material which I thought was decent. And they took that to, I wanna say 400 degrees to... Yeah. He said it was within five degrees of it igniting . Yeah, it's a very, it's an amazing process. Yeah, very, very incredible. Gary asks, "Where can I get the saddle square you have?" So I'm assuming you mean this saddle square is a Lee Valley Veritas product. So Veritas. Or you'll see this one on eBay in a couple hours. Hey hey hey. You can bid on it. The tulip detector is going to go off. And another one for you. "What dust collection do you recommend for very small space? One car garage. Bench, table saw, band saw, jet lave, wood storage, bikes." Do bikes require dust collection? Yeah, they do . "And my wife." Oh no. "And my wife already says I have way too much stuff in this space." Okay, so one option would be, so the big question that you have to ask first is, am I going to set up a duct system or am I gonna go... Goose? Oh no, here we go. Well, it took 21 minutes before I got blindsided with a bad pun. Okay, so what you wanna do is, make that decision first. Duct work or are you gonna go tool to tool with a portable unit? If you're willing to do that, that certainly can, you can get by with a and smaller space, smaller footprint too if your wife's concerned. Which is certainly a valid concern. I started in a one car garage as well. There is a wall-mounted unit that I've seen from Rockler that is decent. You might wanna take a look at that if you're willing to go tool to tool. Otherwise, if... And it's cool, they've got that pretty well figured out. Yeah. There's a hose reel. You can wind up the hose when you're done. Yeah. And it's almost like a vacuum in a carwash kind of a concept. Yeah, and I have not measured the CFM. My thought is it's probably on the edge of what you would want. So you always want at least 400, preferably 500, to most of the tools. There's a chart you can find online that shows tool by tool what the OSHA dust minimum CFM requirements are. But if you're in that 500, my guess is you're probably more down in the 300 range. That's a pretty long flexible tube or hose that it has. But anyway, I think pretty neat. Otherwise you can get a one horse 650 CFM unit and roll it around tool to tool. Don't have more than a 10 foot hose would be my recommendation to keep your air speed up. Those flexible hoses are killers on CFM. So keep that as you know, if you're gonna move from tool to tool, keep it 10 foot or less of flex hose. If you can go, if you can talk your wife into letting you have a little bit bigger footprint, you could go with a two horse and set up a ducting system. With two horse I would say probably gonna want to stay with four inch main line. Some people do run six inch. I think it's, I think it's right on the edge and maybe risky to fall below your minimum 4,000 feet per minute velocity in the line before to keep dust particles from settling. So I would think my recommendation is to look at one of those two options. Okay. So you go ahead and do a question while I mess with this microphone. All right. We're good microphones. Let's see, "There's a book called 'Cameron's Hydraulic Handbook' that sounds complicated. Gives the formulas you need for handling air flow." And handling air, yeah, it is. There are a lot of charts. Look at Bill Pentz's website. There's a lot of good information there. I have just for show and tell brought the instrument that I use to do air flow. So I've done my own system. I have also done some manufacturer consulting where I've done verification of airflow measurements that they've gotten from manufacturers on a couple occasions but this is called a, it's pronounced manometer but it's spelled man-oh-meter, and I can only imagine how many chuckles there have been around shops based on that term. But, you know, basically you hook up this meter with a rubber tube and insert this non-corruptive element into the hose that you're measuring from. There are also anemometers, and they are not the right tool for measuring this, because they themselves will disrupt the air flow and throw off the results, so you'd use those for other airflow applications. But it's complicated. And that's why to simplify the message, so that you don't have to get a PhD, and I certainly don't have one, you don't have to get a PhD in Airflow Science to choose the right dust collector. So using those kind of rules of thumb, or working with a vendor that has a good understanding of their systems and can size the right dust collector and help you with your duct design, all really important good design principle. "...stuff away have over 110 feet inside, and exhaust outside a hundred feet under the drive to woods. Exhaust works extremely well at distance for anyone's information." So, yeah, and I think exhausting outside if you're out in the country can do that, you know, dust collection, one of the tricky things is, air-dust separation. The air is supposed to, by the time it hits the filter, all the dust is supposed to have dropped off into the bag or the bin and, you know, dust collectors and cyclones vary in their ability to separate that out. If you are in the country and can vent that outside and not run it through a filter, then you don't have to worry about air-dust separation. You send the air out with the dust and everybody is happy. Let me, hang on just one sec. Alright. Audio? Okay. Yeah, I tried changing mics but the other one wasn't picking up at all. So we'll try this one. Wanna check this Triton one? "I recently purchased a Triton router specifically for use with a router table and I'll be using most often for building raised panel cabinet doors. What are the best options in your opinions regarding table material?" Oh, you want to build a table. "Or would you recommend a complete router system?" Oh, I don't know, that's a big, "It depends." Um... I don't know. Some people like to build everything that they have in their shop and some people like to buy. So, I've got a Woodpecker table and a JessEm table. The Rockler tables are a fine product. A lot of commercial manufacturers do still use MDF for router tabletops which has been laminated both sides with plastic laminate. That's a viable candidate for if you want to make your own. Anything else you want to throw in? I am crazy about my router table. And unfortunately, the company that made it is no longer in business. It was a family operation up in Canada. And there's some really neat elements to the design, but yeah all those that you mentioned I think are great. They just keep seeming like they getting better and better and better. Yeah. All right. There's the book you talked about. "Best finish for plywood?" Yes is the answer to that . Depends. Can you spray your finishes? Do you wipe on your finishes? Is a piece gonna live inside or outside? So there's nothing... So one, with finish, it's rare to assign a finish to a material. So for instance, I spray lacquer. I spray that on plywood, solid wood, MDF, on anything I'm finishing that's gonna live inside, gets finished with lacquer regardless of what the material is. So it's more about what works in your environment as far as being able to apply and what it's gonna get used for. We've got some great information on the site about choosing finishes and that would be worth a look. If you, on WWGOA in the upper right-hand corner, there's a search window. And if you just put in there finish or finishing, there's a boatload of information to help you choose top coats. Part of that is based on performance of the top coats and method you have to apply them. Let's do a little commercial timeout for two things, three things, one, once again, thanks to Titebond for sponsoring us and keeping this thing going. At the very bottom of the page upon which you're watching, looking, there's a thing that says, there's a banner that says "Wooden reindeer contest." And if you click on that you can a template for a reindeer just like this. Then you can make your reindeer, submit a picture of it. There's a contest going on, and the winner of the contest will get a one-year platinum subscription for free. That's the prize. So go down to the bottom of the page and have a look at that if you wanna make a reindeer. And then, Paul, give us once again the Cliff Notes version of who you are and what you do, please. Why are you here? Sure, thank you for letting me be here. I've been watching this since you've been doing them and I've, you know, really been looking forward to being on them. So I've been woodworking for 23 years now and I'm hopelessly addicted. Recently added wood turning to my addiction. And now it's kind of a struggle. Do I build a piece of furniture or turn a couple more bowls? My wife keeps voting for more furniture because she says we have enough bowls, but sometimes those bowls win over. I've been writing for Woodworkers Guild since shortly after it started a little over a decade ago. And I have been for the last couple of years I've been working on my YouTube channel, which is ToolMetrix. ToolMetrix with an X. And it's fairly easy to find on YouTube. And I also do the question and answer. I'm kind of the first line of defense on questions and answers that come in through the various means within Woodworkers Guild, whether it's Facebook or chat or email. Or through YouTube, or yeah, if you submit a question, in all likelihood it's Paul that provides the answer. All right. "How about the best portable dust collection system and what do you think of one from Harbor Freight?" Yeah, that's a popular question because of the price point on that. It's very inexpensive. And then of course it's always on sale at Harbor Freight. So we have a review of that, actually, on the Woodworkers Guild site. Seth Keller, one of the contributing editors, did a review on that, oh, I dunno, five, six years ago, but I don't think that the design has changed on that dust collector. I think it's a good unit for the price point. I think it's rated at two horsepower. I don't know if it would truly compare with other two horsepower units. I'm guessing it's probably more comparable to most one-and-a-half horse units, but I owe it to myself to take a good look at that and do some airflow measurements on it. I think it's fine if you're gonna run four inch duct. I know a lot of people do run six inch duct, but I don't think it has the room for much of a six inch duct network. The one thing that I would encourage you to do if you get that is the standard bag that comes with it is 30 microns, which is not- The filter bag. Sorry. Yeah. Is the filter bag on that is a 30 micron unit, which is too coarse. Now basically, you know, the term that Bill Pentz uses to describe something with a filter that coarse is a dust pump. So it's collecting dust and putting the the coarse stuff in the bag and pumping all the dangerous stuff that is gonna get into your lungs back into the air. So Bill Pentz's point is you're better off without a dust collector than a dust collector with a 30 micron bag. You're better off just letting it hit the floor and sweep it up, and I agree with that. Now you can buy aftermarket bags that will fit onto that unit. They're not super cheap, but they're worth it if you're gonna buy a dust collector that comes with a 30 micron bag. Now you bought a very nice bag for one of your dust collectors. Yeah, we can have a look at that. And I actually did this twice. Let's go, there's less junk on this side of the shop. So the rationale for me was, I have a Penn State dust collector. There. And when I first bought that, it had a pleated filter on top of it. And in the end that pleated filter didn't work well for me. It clogged very, very, very quickly. I spent more time cleaning the filter out than anything else. So from a company called American Fabric Filter I bought that filter that went on top. I called 'em, told 'em what I had for a dust collector, how big the neck was there on top of it. They sized that bag for me. I believe I paid about $150 for that bag, but that's the dust collector that's connected to my CNC machines and the frequency with which I have to clean that filter is significantly less. My air flow stays good for a really long time. And that's 'cause of the significant amount of square footage inside that bag. So it was a great investment for me. I'm gonna stay back here for a sec and do this 'cause one of the questions there is, "What router bits should I use for jointing on a router table?" And my answer is a flush trim bit. Oops, sorry. Like that. And if you jump on a WWGOA and you go to that search window in the upper right-hand corner and you search jointing on a router table, we've got articles and videos that cover this, but the flush trim bit with its bearing is the easiest one to set up for jointing. All right, you wanna hit a question, Paul, while I'm putting my router bit away and finding my way back? Yes, there was a question. I'm out of order here, but there was a question about turning oak bowls. "Have you had any luck turning oak bowls in regards to having them not crack? If so, what's the secret for oak?" I have had about... oak has been probably my worst species for cracking. I would say I have... Even dried? Starting with dried stuff? No. So starting with green. Starting with, that's a really good clarification. 'Cause I have turned some smaller ones from dry and had no problems. Okay, 'cause then it's just like any, if it's kiln dried or air dried, it's like any other way. Exactly. Okay. So, but turning from green for whatever reason. So it sounds like whoever made this comment, this question, is having a similar experience to me. I would say maybe 50-50, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. I had one that I thought would ultimately explode on me because I encapsulated the entire pith in the bowl. It was from a limb which is gonna be typically less stable and I had the pith in it and that one is perfect. And then every salad bowl style I've done, probably 50-50, a lot of cracking. So it's a thing with oak, I guess. And I can't speak to it 'cause I turn a boatload of bowls but I don't think I've ever turned a green oak bowl. I mean, cherry, walnut, maple, birch, pine, probably every specie but oak. Not for any reason, just... Yeah, and I've had almost no other, I've had problems with almost no other species in that regard, but just the other day I turned a butternut bowl and no pith anywhere near it. The wood was just pristine. There wasn't a blemish in it. And that thing is cracked from top to bottom. Just kind of randomly. So. Go figure. "Hi, George and Paul. Love the site." Thank you. "And the live discussion." Thank you. "I know this is a pretty subjective question but is there a certain exotic wood you both recommend, easy for a novice to work with?" Um... I don't know. I mean, Padauk is a fairly soft wood. Redheart is a very soft wood. But it depends so much on what you want to do. You wanna turn it? You wanna make a knife handle? You wanna... I don't know. I don't know. I don't have an answer. It's just, there are so many, it depends. I don't think we can give you a great answer. James says, "I'm making a cradle from curly maple for my new granddaughter, and I'd like to keep it as natural as possible. Is there an easy way to get the figure to pop without a complicated process? The wood is so beautiful. I'd love to keep it as natural as possible. I have tried some dyes, boiled linseed oil in a 3:2:1 mixture but it didn't seem to make the curl pop." So the way I've done it is pretty simple and it popped pretty well. And there's an article on the site of a table that I made where I used an approach that I saw from Charles... you probably know him. Bender? No. No. Someone probably knows who I'm talking about. He's just a phenomenal finishing guy, but so all he does is takes aniline dye, dilutes it, floods it out onto the surface, lets it soak in, sands it down with a random orbital sander, and if he doesn't like it, he does it again. If he gets, you know, he'll make it a little darker or oops, too dark, he'll sand it off and apply it again and lighten it up. And it's really quick. And you know, I think the table that is in that article on the site, I probably... it was probably my third attempt before I liked it. So you put it on, the idea is it's gonna soak in more deeply into the figure, into the curl. So you layer it on the whole thing, sand it off evenly, and you'll see that it's penetrated in deeper. And then you put whatever top coat. I just put oil-based poly on top of it. And it popped pretty well. I've seen examples of it, you know, better with a, you know, complicated process, but I was really pleased, you know, I think it's... And I'm in the same boat. I think if you wanna pop the curl, if you really want to pop the curl, it takes a little bit of dying. And so the alternative to this and the research I did for a coffee table that I built was linseed oil because it's so amber, is a fairly common choice for this 'cause it introduces a lot of color just by itself. But if you tried linseed oil and it's not giving you what you want, then the dye like Paul was talking about, I used Van Dyke Brown dye. Same deal, mix that up, spread it over the top. Then you just very lightly sand the surface to leave the dye in the deep part. But it took me, I probably experimented with scrap four, five, six times before I had the color right, the spread right, how much sanding do I do? I did a lot of experimenting before I did the coffee table, but once it hit, I mean from across the room now with that coffee table, you can see that striking curl in the maple. AJ says hi, by the way. And AJ also points out Ipe is another good outdoor wood, which is true. Um... Stan is in Vermont. Gary says, "My shop's in the back nine. Could run a dust collector through the wall. Does that sound doable?" Like I wonder if he just means having the whole dust collector outside. Yes. Yep, that is possible. There's sort of a, the jury is out on whether or not you have to return air into the shop. I would say most of the time I see where people don't bother returning air into the shop. As long as you have a, you know, a window cracked or something like that. Well, but I think so, a couple of things. Two questions down, I'm assuming it's the same Gary says, "Without a," it says without a bad, but I think he means bag. Yeah. So I think he's thinking just blow, basically blow the dust outside. And that you already advocated, like if you're in an environment where nobody's going to care about the dust. The thing I would say on sucking air out is, if it's a 1500 cubic feet per minute dust collector and you're heating your shop like this one you're sucking 1500 cubic feet of heated air out whatever per minute anytime it's running. And that's the downside of not returning it is you're sucking a lot of warm air out of your building or cool air in the summertime. We have somebody watching from Thailand. That's very cool. Where he says it's, or she says it's 16 degrees. I'm assuming that's Celsius. "I have ash that is air dried to 9.5%. Safe to start making a project with it? Live in Northern Minnesota." That's pretty dry. I'm gonna say no, so... And so, I've got an example of that. So in my shop, and I'm not in Northern Minnesota, I'm in Twin Cities, and I typically air-dry and my wood will stabilize kind of in the 7 to 8% range. I've always felt that, you know, you should be okay, anything under 10 should be fine. And I did make a project with moisture content at about 10% and I had a lot of problems with it. So, the real answer is if that's equilibrium, you're fine. If it's done changing. If it's done changing, it's fine. If it's 9.5 and you know it's gonna get down to 7... So, part of your answer is, it's 9.5 and it's been 9.5 for six months. Exactly, then you're then you're good to go. Then you're good to go. Somebody's asking, um... "What instrument do you use to measure CFM? Where can you buy one?" Yeah, so this is a manometer and this is, there are a couple different ways to do it. This is one of the right ways to do it. And you can use a, there's a, this is a digital one. There's an analog version of this as well. You would, I got this on Ebay but the company is Dwyer and I believe that they sell them direct. Otherwise, you can buy them through kind of industrial supply houses. They're not cheap. I found it relatively inexpensively on Ebay used, but new this is probably in the $400 range. $300-400, I'm guessing. So Dwyer, D-W- Y-E-R. So Dwyer manometer. Google is your friend. There you go. And this is the Series 475. Mark III. "Best stain for Ipe decking?" We don't know. You'd need to ask somebody who knows more about outdoor finishes. I don't think it's normally stained though. Yeah, I don't know. But your answer stands. Yeah, I would go to go to a Sherwin-Williams or Hirshfield or ask an expert who's gonna know more about good outdoor finishes for that. "As a new woodworker, what would you purchase first? A planer or a jointer?" You say it first, and then I'll say the other one. I'll say why I would say the other one. Or do you want me to go first? No, I'm just... I'm legitimately thinking. I owned a jointer before, I went without a planer for a really long time and I'd re-saw material. And then I would use a portable, a handheld belt sander to flatten the surfaces. So I was making do without a planer. For me, a jointer is a hugely effective way to get a good straight edge which is a very important starting point for a project. So I would say jointer. I actually would too. Cool. Yep. All right. For the same reason. I probably use mine about twice as much as I use my planer. Yeah. All right. Um... We already answered the router bit question. Was the name of the... So this guy is asking the name of the your router table in case one was available used. Yeah, I think it was the RT for router table 100 or 1000. And if you Google around for that, and I know that the owner of that company was pretty active back in the day on Lumberjacks and you can probably find some of his posts out there. And he used to have a YouTube channel and there were some kind of videos that were demonstrating it. So you might be able to find some content out there. And yeah, if you can snag one that is it would be worth your while. Bob says, "Will you demonstrate proper technique for using a hand planer?" I guess is what he means. "Whenever I try, I don't get an even cut." We could maybe do that in Paul's shop. We can't really do it here 'cause I don't own a good hand plane. I just don't. I don't use 'em enough to have one on standby that we could throw. The next time Paul is here. I'll bring one. He can bring a good hand plane. I'll bring a couple Lie-Nielsens. Steve says, "Recently, WWGOA sent out information on Ambassador tools. Have you done a review of the table saw? I couldn't find much information." I'm not familiar with them at all. It must've been some kind of ad. Have you heard of them? Seen 'em? Nope, I have not. Dennis or Denny asks, "Can a CNC be built DIY as someone has plans to buy? Scary, I think." Yeah, there are kits out there and there are, I've never done it, but there are systems whereby you buy the electronics, you buy some of the drive mechanisms, and then you build a lot of it out of like Baltic Birch, you know, a good multiply plywood or similar product. So it can be done. I don't know what kind of accuracy you get out of those. The machines I have here, all commercially made. I have no problem making mating parts. They hold tolerances very, very, very well to allow me to do that. Whether a shop made machine would allow that or not, I do not know. "Are we gonna do any workshops in Buffalo or Toronto for those of us north of the border?" Sure, if you go to your local whatever store and say we want George or Paul or George and Paul to come and do classes and they want to bring me in I would be happy to be there. I part of the world at this time. Charles Neil? Is that the finishing guy? That's the guy! There you go. Charles Neil. "Are there differences in walnut?" Air dried, kiln dried. Yep. But I think, unlike like other woods, like there's Red Oak, White Oak, soft maple, hard maple, but Black Walnut, I think. I think so too. There probably are subtle species variations but there is no such thing as White Walnut. That is a... This is true. That is a sucker move. If someone is selling you White Walnut, what is it? It's cottonwood, right? I don't know. This is news to me. I thought you were just making a joke. Oh no no, apparently that's a thing, right? So, Matt Collins, who we both once in a while was on Instagram feeding logs into a chipper. He said it was white Walnut. And I almost jumped out of my chair and, and said, "Matt, don't grind that up. I'd love to turn bowls." He said, "No, it's Cottonwood." Oh. Apparently that's a joke, so. All right. Going back to the bowl turning discussion, "What is your preferred method for drying?" We have two very different things here. I've soaked them with dish-washing ." Never heard of that. "Anchorseal or wrap with stretch wrap, paper bag, and without shavings. With and without shavings. What do you prefer and why? Any luck with a microwave method?" The way I do it is... Wrong. Saw that coming. Well, I learned it from you. Oh perfect. So change your answer. Perfect. So I take it, pack it in the bowl with shavings and let it slow dry that way. It works great. I have very, very few cracks doing that. Now, the one technique that I used one time, well, one time on six bowls. In fact, this bowl being one of them, because they were so huge. Careful with that one. Lift with your legs. So I turned six bowls. These started out as 22-inch blanks and they were about 80-pound blanks each. And so, and I was doing this for a video project, and so I wanted to kind of accelerate the drying process a lot. And I heard about this technique of using denatured alcohol. And I did that and they were drying really fast. Like, I want to say within just a few weeks, maybe a month or so, those bowls and they were two... well 10% of the thickness, right? So the rule of thumb is if you're gonna do a 2" rim on it. That's when you're rough-turning green. When you're rough-turning. So I do a two-step turn where I turn it rough, let it dry. It gets oblong, then put it back on the lathe and then finish turning. So between the first turn and the second turn, I soak each one of those bowls in denatured alcohol. About actually a 24 hour soak in denatured alcohol, and then paper bag with some of the shavings. And they were dry so fast I couldn't believe it. And no cracks, so it worked great. No color change or anything like that. So now that was expensive. I bought a, I think I had 10 gallons. And I can't remember what the price was, but it was really expensive. So I know you've experimented with microwaving. Yeah, so my primary thing, the reason we do this very differently, what I mostly do is I start green, I finish green. So I turn the whole bowl, start to finish dripping wet. Biggest problem with that is you're sanding it at that stage. The sanding process kind of dries it out but you can't necessarily get the super lustrous finish on that bowl that you can get on a perfectly dry bowl. And I have microwave wood. It's way more of an art than a science. There's very little I have found predictability about it. Go slow because if you overdo it, you'll crack the blank or the bowl just like that. 'Cause you are zapping it and you can overheat it. But it's... Paul's method is more tried and true. The method of turn it, leave a thick wall, pack it in a bag with shavings, for about how long? Six months? Yeah. And then come back and it will be dry enough for you to finish. And somebody made the point too about if the dust collector's outside and you don't have an air return you could possibly be sucking exhaust gas down in the furnace, which is a good point. "Is a dust collector like the Axiom Stratus enough for the hobbyist woodworker who doesn't have a dedicated shop space?" Well, it's not... so the Stratus is not a dust collector. It's an air filter. You're not gonna hook it up to your machines, but it's a great, I've got one here. It moves a lot of air. It'll keep a space very, very clear. Clusson says he built three CNC machines and Woodsmith has plans for one. There you go. We have just a few minutes to go, so we'll get wrapped up here. A cheap air compressor? Harbor Freight. Harbor Freight. Following up on a question. I asked of Rockler in Salem, New Hampshire, where I was about a month ago, commenting on the difference in color of air-dried cherry as opposed to kiln dried. Question was if in the end the color is the same. Well, yeah, and I still don't know. So what we were talking about there was cherry turns that beautiful dark color over time. And one of the things I was mentioning was when you bake wood, when you put it in a kiln, walnut significantly changes color, cherry significantly changes color. So with cherry, does it equalize if we start with this beautiful rich air dried and this big kiln dried, a year from now are we not going to know the difference? Because they both are going to UV out the same. And I still don't know what the answer to that. I don't know either, but I would say it's risky. I wouldn't mix those two in a dining table top as an example. No, no, no. "When I use shavings to dry bowls, I get mold." So may as though... It's too hermetically sealed, I would say. It's too.... Your environment's too tight. Like a brown paper bag is a good choice for wrapping that. This will probably be about our last question. "Setting up a new shop, 900." Square feet, I guess. "With a 12 foot ceiling. What size dust collector would you recommend? Are cyclone dust collectors better at separating debris?" That's a, yeah, that's a tough one to take on with two minutes, but I would say, you know, you're probably going to want something in the five horse range, you know, a good size, either two bag system with a single stage or a good size cyclone. Cyclones are better at separating air and dust, but they're not perfect. Even the really good ones are not perfect and I've had several . My controversial recommendation is if you're going to be a heavy drum sander user, those are very difficult to separate for even the best cyclones. And so you're going to spend a fair amount of time cleaning the filter on your cyclone if you're using a drum sander a lot of the time. So if that's the case, I would recommendation either getting a bag system or what some people do is get a small bag system directly hooked up to the drum sander and use the cyclone for the rest of the time. And that would work great. But I have taken filters out of really good cyclones and they've been caked after using a drum sander a lot. All right. Well let's, we're gonna wrap up here. So thanks for the patience with our audio. It's something that Paul and I have zero control out of. We are given microphones that we strap on and here we are using them. And outside of talking through this, through that, to that, there's nothing I can do about it. So I'm sorry if it was not everything it meant to be. It's way out of my control. And don't forget the reindeer contest down at the bottom of the page at wwgoa.com is that banner. You can click on that, get a template, make a reindeer, take a picture of your reindeer, submit it, and we'll go from there. Any closing comments, captain? How's that for alliteration? Thank you very much. It was really fun. All right, well, Sam is gonna take us out and we will see you folks not for a month after the new year. So have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year and be safe if you're traveling. See ya. See ya.