The forced hiatus keeps on going.

Still no tablesaw... but I got around all this with a pair of handsaw and a rethink of my workflow to involve the bandsaw and jointer. What is really getting in the way of woodworking now is that we have decided to get our tiny house on the market. So, instead of cutting mortices by hand, I ferry stuff into storage. The upside is that getting a workshop 2-3 bigger than I have now is a hard requirement for the new house.

So I tell myself as I walk by the pack of pimento burl veneer, hoping to get to it soon enough.

Tablesaw woes

I haven't posted in a bit, and this is mostly because the switch on my tablesaw unexpectedly died while I was in the middle of a highly productive streak. Worst than that, I took a day off to get some headway on my TV stand, and the tablesaw failed about 40 minutes into that "day off". I thus spent the rest of the days either cleaning up the thing, or taking it to the service centre to test RIDGID's warranty.  Two weeks later, still no tablesaw in the shop as the RIDGID service centre is not a RIDGID dealer, doesn't keep an inventory of parts and has little to no interest in having me as a client. Grr.

The upside is that I decided to venture into hand tools in the meanwhile. I was quite hesitant to start with a new system now that I had established a works with the tablesaw. However, I bought two small joinery saw from Lee Valley (20 tpi RIP and 16tpi CROSSCUT). To my surprise, I seem to be able to get almost the same level of precision by hand than using my machine (almost). What is left outstanding now is how I will handle long rip cuts with my simple stanley general purpose saw. However, I think that the teeth pattern with this saw is more rip than cross cut.... I suspect that I better cut generous and finish the cuts on the jointer...

More to come. With winter drawing to an end, I'm afraid that my perfect dry fit 40 pieces skeleton will start to swell. I better get the cabinet part assembled before this happens.