What’re you doing?

By Bobby Neal Winters

Everyone once in a while--or maybe even twice in a while--someone will ask me what I’ve been up to.

If they are from my part of the country they’ll say, “What’re you doing?”  

Well here goes:

Toward the end of last summer, I got a couple of pick up loads of rough-cut wood.  “Free” rough-cut wood.  I’ve got the quotes around the free because that feed wood has cost me quite a bit of money.

The first expense was in buying a DeWalt planer.  I am not going to tell you what it cost, but on a per pound basis it would be comparable to Eye of Round.  After getting the planer, I began the process of getting a handle on dust collection in my wood shop because planers generate a lot--and I do mean a LOT--of saw dust.  You can fill a five-gallon Home Despot [sic] bucket with saw dust quicker than Cooter Brown.

I got a Harbor Freight dust collector and built a lean-to on my garage to house it.  I will describe my results using language I’ve learned as an administrator: They were not entirely successful.

Now all of the wood was in my wood shop--a converted 2-car garage--taking up floor space.  I mean really taking up floor space.  I’ve got a tablesaw on a table with wheels on it. I’ve got the planer on a table with wheels on it.  I’ve got a glue-up table with wheels on it.  I’ve got a bandsaw with wheels on it.  I have a rack to hold my long clamps that has wheels on it.

That’s a lot of wheels, and the ideal implicit in all that is moving the items around to places that are more convenient.  However, all of the “free” wood was taking up space to the degree that everything might as well have been nailed to the floor.

Something needed to be done.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, but I am a glass half-full sort of guy.  Indeed, it is a full glass. I’ve got a bunch of free wood; I’m having a blast making stuff with it.  Nothing but blue skies ahead, right?

What brought it all to a head were my “not entirely successful” efforts at dust collection.  The Harbor Freight Dust collector was not working for me.  Saw dust was getting loose and getting into everything.

Everything.

It was all up in my shelves in every stinking thing on every stinking shelf.  I wanted to clean the shelves off, but I could not because there was no floor space to put the stuff on.  I had half a dozen items on wheels and they couldn’t be moved because the wood was taking up all the floor space.

Now is the time to recall that I’ve written earlier about having built a lean-to to house the not entirely successful dust collector.

Had I not already filled that lean-to with other stuff, that would’ve been a good place to put the wood.  However, it had been immediately filled with lawn chairs and other items appropriate to the back yard.

However, having built a lean-to once, building another one was easy.

Not only was it much easier the second time, I did a much better job the second time around.

Apparently I can be taught.

I’ve moved a sizable fraction of the wood into the new lean-to.  The floor space that I freed enabled me to end the gridlock of my tables.  I’ve disconnected my table saw and my planer from the dust collector and have connected them to a shop vac instead and that is doing a much better job of dust collection.  

This will enable me to reorganize my shelves, and clean the saw dust off them at the same time.

In the meantime, I will be making a study of how to implement my dust collector in a more successful manner.

So that’s what I’ve been up to.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.