mauvehaus

My grandmother had a washing machine with a manually fed electric wringer until she moved into assisted living. It would've likely been no newer than the immediate postwar era, as that's when she moved into the house she lived in. I doubt she would've owned it earlier (steel being needed for the war).

It was a bit of a production to do laundry with it. I can buy the argument that it was tough to sell machines that weren't fully automated. It looked fun as a kid, but I can't imagine it's fun for more than a load or two!

Edited to add: they lived north of the Mason-Dixon in an area with very few Black residents.

Corrected. Thanks. So the OP is playing with a variant where the original player landing on it doesn't get the first bite at the apple at the printed price?

A couple Thanksgivings ago, I played with a couple of alpha finance types that I'm related to at a distance of several marriages. It's certainly a more interesting game the way they play it, no doubt helped by everyone being amply lubricated and some enthusiastic brotherly backstabbing. Whether it's more fun or not probably depends on exactly how much you care about the outcome. It still took the better part of a couple hours though.

The buses running along the I-91 corridor in VT/NH USA centered around White River Junction VT and Hanover/Lebanon NH have been free to ride since around Covid. And those are two transit agencies. Broadly: one serves north of Hanover, the other south.

Birch bark canoes are the traditional construction in e.g. the Boundary Waters region. Wood-canvas canoes are built superficially similarly but don't use the tension of the canvas structurally the same way a bark canoe does.

Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America by Adney and Chappelle is basically the main source for information on bark canoes and how they're built.

The Art of the Canoe with Joe Seliga is out of print, AFAIK, but is a good overview of how wood canvas canoes are built.

The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee is more narrative and worth a read too.

Laminated wood strip canoes are a more modern invention. Bear Mountain Boats has a good book on how they're built, and Nick Offerman did a video on building one.

And yeah, modern Kevlar boats are ridiculously light. The canonical Boundary Waters touring canoe is the Wenonah Minnesota II, and the lightest version is 43 pounds in Kevlar. I believe graphite is the same weight but stiffer. Fiberglass construction is basically comparable, but heavier, as are some of the Royalex-equivalent materials.

Thanks! The three-way joint where the stretchers come together is wild too. It's a three-way finger joint (for structure) with a three-way miter on top (to get the profiles to come together nicely). Drawing it is one thing, and cutting it is a whole 'nother thing :-D

The beveled profile on the top was the clients' touch. We went through four or five iterations on it. They have great taste and are a ton of fun to work with.

I'm in the middle of ginning two prototypes of a chair meant to go with it. It's as yet unclear if I've made my life any easier than the table or not.

Uh, I spent a lot of time playing with Legos as a kid, but if you can find a time machine, there are probably a lot of way more profitable ways to put it to use than giving your past self some Lego sets.

If I'm taking apart things on my car, I'll do one side at a time even if it would be more efficient to do both at once so I have an un-monkeyed-with side for reference if I get confused putting it back together.

I tend to stay away from taking apart and reassembling electronics; I can't fix anything inside anyway unless there's an iFixit guide that I'm blindly following.

Most furniture projects break down into at most three (or thereabouts?) hierarchical steps for any single assembly. Which is to say, my spatial/assembly skills probably aren't actually that developed via building furniture.

Which is to say, great news if you want to build some furniture! Pick a simple project and wade in!

Thank you!

Thank you!

In most applications, it doesn't matter if the piece ends up 1/16" (1.5mm for the rest of the world[0]) undersized and I wouldn't worry about it. If for some reason the finished piece had to be 24.5" wide, I'd account for the off-nominal thickness of the plywood and charge more for the hassle of it :-)

Generally though, if you're putting something into an alcove and want a fitted look, you'd build the box undersized by some amount (1/4" to 1/2" depending on how square and plumb the walls of the alcove are), set the box in place, and then scribe a face frame to the walls.

Drawer boxes tend to be where you have to work to the tightest tolances. Side mount drawer slides don't have a lot of allowance for the drawer to be undersized and basically none for it to be oversized. Under mount slides are a little more forgiving, but I definitely still account for my actual material thickness on them. In either case, you're definitely building the drawer boxes to the as-built size of the opening they're going into and not the platonic ideal opening from the plans/drawings.

[0] Yes, I know. Slightly more than that, but this is woodworking tolerances.

Having just gone on a tear about why everyone should make their own shop drawings, I have to say that this is really well done. Nice work on this, and good job on incorporating some really good, practical woodworking knowlege.

I try like hell to stay out of the business of plywood boxes, but they're inevitable sometimes. I'll try this out when I have a project it's a good fit for.