Michelle (10) and Emily (8) Campbell invited me into their father's wood shop where they had prepared a series of demonstrations to illustrate basic safety precautions for kids working with wood.They walked us through the differences in various types of eye protection, insisted on providing heari...
Carpet or tile adhesive can seem almost impossible to remove from a concrete or wooden floor, especially when it has been there for a long time. If you try sanding, it will heat up and clog up the sandpaper. If you wire brush it with a wire wheel on your drill, again if you let it heat up, it w...
Radiant Heating and Convection Heating are the two primary types of ways we heat our houses. FORCED AIR HEATINGConvection heating means moving hot air -- what we usually call a forced air heating system simply heats air and moves it around the house through a system of fans and ducts. Forced air...
The mortise & tenon was the basic woodworking joint used before the advent of modern fasteners -- and since. It has been used in everything from barn building to fine furniture. If you have ever tried to make this matched pair by hand you might have been frustrated by simply not having the ...
How do you get floor boards or cabinet making lumber from old growth trees without cutting a single tree out of the old growth forests? You pull it up off the bottom of the Ottawa River and its tributaries and mill it at "Logs End" near Bristol, Quebec.Those where the major waterways where the b...
Driving a screw directly into wood forces the grain of the wood apart. Soft wood will crush a lot and allow the screw to force its way through. Hard wood is much more likely to simply split when the screw forces its way between the wood fibres. Either hard or soft wood will split when you scre...
In a previous show we watched the salvage operations of a group called Logs End from Bristol, Quebec, where they were fishing up old growth timber that had sunk to the bottom of the Ottawa river a hundred years ago.This week we visited the saw mill.That great stack of timber tells a lot of storie...
We got this question from a store customer who was trying to decide which blade to buy?Wobble Washer Dado BladeThe first photo shows what we call a "wobble washer" blade. Actually the blade itself isn't wobbly, but the washers on both sides are bevelled. You can rotate them to skew the blade in...
Any wood product will expand when it gets wet, some worse than others. Today we have a wide variety of wood or wood like flooring products.Massive HardwoodFirst you should understand that even massive hardwood, if allowed to stay wet or overly humid for too long will swell up and potentially buc...
Mark in Mississauga has a semi-circular staircase and he has to replace the floor moldings that will make a semi-circle. How to bend the moldings?Water or steam will allow most wood to bend, and is especially effective with oak.The Pipe SoakerOne simple rig is simply to take a large PVC drain pi...
