Shop project: Drill press table

I swear I've had the pieces for this thing sitting around the shop for at least six months, it not more. The piece of MDF I wanted to use for the table has been around so long that all of my other scraps of 1/2" MDF hanging around the workshop are from a completely separate pieee that I bought for some other project.

Anyway, here's what I'm working with:

Some notes about that there particular set up:

• The throat depth (between the stand and the chuck) is really not very deep at all. 
• The handle at the back that raises and lowers the table sticks out far enough that it comes up beside the table. Which means that the new table has to sit forward far enough for the handle to clear the back edge. 
• That table is tiny. And impossible to clamp anything to.
• With so little room at the back, I need something reversible so I can set it up in FRONT of the chuck. 
• I need an adjustable fence and stop block - or else what's the point of having a drill press table, really?

After a lot of mid-process design changes (what else is new?) and a few false starts, here's what I got!

The fence can be set up either behind the chuck, or in front of it if the desired hole placement is more than a couple inches from the edge. Which is good, because after setting the table far enough forward to clear the stupid handle, there's not a lot of room left...

(The black dot in front of the two screw heads is where the drill bit hits... when the table is actually centered, anyway.)

So much more clamping space, adjustable integrated stop block, and constructed almost entirely out of bits I had lying around the shop (for the past forever)!

Anyway, it feels great to get that finally off my plate., and the pieces for it off the bench. So I can store the parts of the next project there. Oops.

Door surgery

We've been spending most of our shop time lately making some improvements to the layout and overall organization of the garage. Meaning we've come a long way, but I'm still moving that one pile of boards from the corner to the bench, back to the corner, to a different corner, to a different bench, to the other corner and so on and so on. (All the while hoping the War Department doesn't ask me why I insist on storing that huge stack of off cuts under the table saw.)

Anyway, that's what I was up to on the weekend when I came across a new door sweep that I'd been intending to put on the front door. The old sweep was getting pretty trashed, and I figured that what with winter coming on, a couple of minutes to make the swap would be time well spent.

HAHAHA! Nothing ever takes me only a couple of minutes!

Though in this case, it wasn't ALL my fault. See, this was THIS front door:

That's right - the door that looked like it had been cut by a spastic grizzly bear taking a running start with the world's worst circular saw. I'd forgotten just how bad it was, but once I removed the tattered old sweep, we were faced with a brutal reminder:

I could fit my hand right through the crack. I tried to just put the new sweep on, but even with it pushed down as far as it would go, there was still daylight visible between the threshold and the bottom of the sweep.

Did I mention that Sunday was the first really cold day we'd had this winter? There was no way I could leave it. So I convinced Amy to let me try to fix it, and - amazingly - she agreed.

I popped the hinges, and took the door around into the workshop. The first step was to clean up that awful cut, and try to make the bottom of the door solid again. Out came the circular saw and a whole whack of clamps, and hey presto:

Once it was all cleaned up, I found a nice sturdy piece of fir in my wood shed (did I post about my wood shed yet? Lemme check real quick.... damn it. Okay, stay tuned for that.) and carefully trimmed it to size on my table saw. Well, carefully enough, even though I did cut the damn thing about a quarter of an inch too thin. Sigh. It still worked okay, but man, that was dumb. Probably still feeling the effects of falling off the ladder on Saturday. Oh, yeah - about that.

The Injury Report

I was putting up the stupid Christmas lights on the stupid little flyout roof over the stupid living room windows and the stupid orchard ladder wasn't quite tall enough and the stupid extension ladder is too stupid and awkward and stupid and I hate putting up the stupid Christmans lights anyway and just wanted to get the whole stupid chore over with so I stupidly tried to pull myself up and the stupid ladder tipped over and sort of I fell off  even though I kinda of fell more down the stupid ladder than off really, but it was still stupid and now I'm no better than my stupid neighbour who falls off stupid ladders and I have a couple of stupid scrapes on my legs from the stupid ladder and a great big stupid bruise on my stupid fucking ego. So there.

Where was I?

Oh, right, so I cut off the bottom inch and half or so of the door, and then attached a new piece of solid fir right across the bottom (glued and screwed, baby):

I put the door back on its hinges, attached the sweep, and now there's no daylight and, more importantly, no freezing-cold air coming underneath the front door.

Sure, it's not painted and it ain't pretty, but we're thinking of ripping out the whole damn door and putting in a new one in the spring anyway. This is just to make sure we don't blow the entire new door budget trying to heat the front hallway over the next few months.