Your Backup Hobby

Sagrilarus wrote: I fear the sink hole. I need to cut in without an edge to start from, and I think I know how to plunge the blade in. But I’ve never done it. So this may be a $380 mistake in the making, and that doesn’t include medical bills or the prosthesis.

Drill a hole through the block (inside the sink area!) and start there. Something like a 1" spade bit is ideal, but anything you can fit the saw blade down into will work. Make your own edge, because plunging with a reciprocal is purely for demolition or other rough work.

You don't even have to line up on the edge of the sink hole (I wouldn't, because it's easy to mess up), but anywhere near it and cut to approach your line.

I was going to plunge a circular. It’s more or less four straight cuts.

I agree with NotSure. I asked my brother in law who works in construction, his advice is to use a spade bit wide enough for your jig-blade, pop a hole in each corner, and cut from there. Most sinks have a collar so if you check the template first you might not need to be super-neat with making the hole.

Ok, a circular is a lot easier to get a good plunge cut with. I assumed jigsaw for a sink outline. You're probably still going to have to jigsaw the corners if you have rounded edges, and be careful about the runout of the top vs. bottom edge of the saw or you'll get nasty lines poking out from under your sink lip. I'd just jigsaw the whole thing, but I think either will work.

My brother can do amazing stuff with just a circular, but I don't trust myself to do that when it counts and so I usually reach for the jigsaw.

Good luck, hope it all turns out nice!

My cunning plan is to do 90% of the big long lines with the circular saw and a jig to guide it. I used a long 2x4 and four clamps the last time (just running one short edge) and it was super-easy to get right. Everything could be reviewed before the blade touched the wood. It's a big sink, so the circular saw work will cover about seven feet of the perimeter.

Once I have the 90% done in the edge middles I'll come in with the jigsaw to turn the corners. All of this is to be buried under the sink, so short of really screwing the pooch this should be the easiest, fastest, most dependable way to knock the job out.

Although Mezike's comment has me thinking on my second read of it. If I can hit the rounded corner with a drill bit that matches the curve of the bend I could finish with the circular saw entirely. Either will be fine I'm sure, but that sure would be fast and easy.

My wife is still mulling her waterproofing options. She's oiled the butcher block on the other side of the kitchen and, frankly, it looks stunning. There's a richness and warmth to real wood that marble and the like can't hold a candle to.

But this piece will be around the sink and will certainly deal with more standing water. So the option is to get a waterproofing lacquer for it, which she's purchased, but it makes the wood shine where the oil does not. This is 8+ feet of counter and she doesn't want to lacquer the entire thing but I'm not sure she has much choice. The other option is that we just keep it really oiled and really dry as much as possible.

hey i became a twitch affiliate, so thats pretty exciting.

ubarose wrote: Rediscovered an old hobby.

We decided to un-pack the final half dozen boxes that we never unpacked when we moved back into the house. The first two boxes we pulled out were full of Lego. Lego that had once been completed models Lego that had once been carefully sorted into bins by size and shape. All tipped out and dumped unceremoniously into two huge cardboard boxes. A seriously ridiculous amount of Lego in a state of total chaos.

We have spent the past two weeks sorting Lego and reassembling models. We have one model left to put together tomorrow. After two weeks, I would have thought the Spawn would have been sick of Lego, but she asked for another model for her birthday next week. So I guess our back-up hobby, for now anyway, is Lego.

My wife is a big Lego fan and I got her the Fiat 500 kit. It is a super cute kit to put together. The Wall-E one is really great too. Just in case you are looking for kits to muck about with.

Ah_Pook wrote: hey i became a twitch affiliate, so thats pretty exciting.

To celebrate becoming a Twitch affiliate I'm going to do a special long stream tomorrow Saturday 3/20 starting at 10am EST. I'm going to play through an entire campaign of Dungeon Degenerates (or if we don't finish, at least a whole lot of DD). I'm going to give away a copy of original Dungeonquest at some point too. I try not to spam, but hey it's a special occasion if you're free and want to come hang out you would be more than welcome!
www.twitch.tv/ah_pook23

Oh, that's fun, might catch the VOD of that.

This past winter I started noticing with the leaves down I could see some gaps in the woods around my property. So the other day I took a preliminary walk and roughed out what I hope will be a mtn bike trail around the perimeter of my almost three acre parcel, with a few elevation changes and twists and turns. Not long, but will be fun for some exercise in both building it then riding it in as it burns into a hard packed trail. Today I got the start and finish parts cleared of branches and partially raked down to dirt.

Cool!

I am far from a serious mountain biker - it's not a hobby, I just have one and ride it on dirt tracks and fire trails around here - but that sounds like fun.

Today I went for a ride, there is a big long muddy puddle on one of the tracks I use - i've ridden through it before, no issues, went through it today one way, no issues, on the way back , went in , hit something, totally stacked in to it. Good fun. I suggest a water feature in your setup

Dragging out the fishing tackle, since it's warming up a little bit. A present to myself this Christmas was a baitcasting reel. Relatively cheap, but it got okay reviews. The very first cast made such a bad birds nest that I had to cut it out and put new string on the reel. But after a bit of practice I can cast it with the magnetic brakes turned all the way down. Still not 100% sure where the lure will go yet, but I'll get there.

I strung it with 30-lb braided line so I can throw lures into brush without fear, but I might take it off and replace it with 10-lb monofilament. Or at the very least take all the line off and put it back with much more tension. I thought I had enough tension when I spooled it on the reel, but the line gets caught often enough when casting that I know I didn't spool it onto the reel quite right.

ETA: Caught the first bass of the year out of my pond. Had bought my wife a baitcaster too. She doesn't like spinning reels, and quality spincast reels are thin on the ground. I was using her pole, since it was Texas rigged and I was feeling too lazy to mess with mine. I always have good luck with these mud bugs , in a muddy green color.

Your post reminds me, I need to get back out with my fly rod, the canyons are getting hotter so I need to get in there now.

I have been thinking of getting into the trashy alternative to fly fishing, magnet fishing. Hoping to find abandoned multitools and old handguns, but will probably end up with rusting scrap metal and lost MudBugs.

So is the plain old junk catch and release, or are you now responsible for what you haul out?