Decks and power washers
Someone asked how to use stripper and a powerwasher to strip a solid color stain off their 300 square foot deck.
My Reply . . . . .Stripper and a power washer are a pretty scary combination.
I use a power washer set at it's lowest setting to clean our house and I still get me and anything else close by pretty wet. I'd hate to think what it would be like if it had stripper in it and enough pressure to strip a deck.
You could end up stripping the paint off your house and the neighbors house too.
The stripper could kill grass, flowers and trees.
I'm kind of chicken so I think I'd get down on my hands and knees and strip it off.
Sawdust CollectionThe Shop-Vac has been the old standby of sucking up sawdust and other debris practically forever, at least since the early 1900's when the first electric vacuum cleaner was invented.
My first Shop-Vac was a big red and black 32 gallon garbage can size thing that would suck up anything that would fit inside it's 2 1/2 inch hose. It could make a big hickey on some unsuspecting soul that turned their back while I was using the vacuum cleaner too. It made short work of the huge amount of water that came from a plumbing job that went awry in a 40 x 75 foot building we were preparing to move into.
There are several different shop vacuums, but generally the generic name is Shop-Vac. They come in different sizes from 5 gallon to 32 gallon to fit everyones needs. I have a 5 gallon size now that cleans up small messes, is handy for vacuuming the car and since it's wet/dry it's good for small puddles. Actually, if you poured 5 gallons of water on the kitchen floor it could be considered a pretty good size puddle.
I would have thought there couldn't be any improvement to the Shop-Vac, since it does so much, but someone came up with a tank that goes between the sucking end of the hose and the ShopVac that collects a huge amount of sawdust. It's a  Dust Right Vortex™ Dust Separator. You can even use the little 5 gallon Shop-Vac to catch dust in the 10 gallon dust separator.
Since the dust is removed before it gets to the Shop-Vac the filters last a lot longer and you get cleaner air squirting back into the room.
Keeping the air you breath cleaner is important to your health and keeping the sawdust vacuumed up so you don't track it into the house can be beneficial to your health too, except running is good for your health too. It's just if you don't run fast enough that can be hard on you.
Screws Can Confuse
There are many types of screws with different heads, different threads, different torque strength, different names, interior screws, exterior screws and so on.
Many long years ago a person working with wood only had to be concerned with a screw's diameter and length, because the screws had a particular type of thread and a head with a slot in it to fit a screwdriver. Different Types Of Screw HeadsNow the head is just the starter with drives of slotted, phillips and square slot as the main choices for wood screws. Screw Head ShapeNext is the head shape. Most woodworkers will use either a flat, oval or round head. The flat head can be countersunk to accept wood filler or a screw hole plug. Flat heads can be left flush with the surface if appearance doesn't matter.
The oval head screw will stay slightly above the surface and the round head is flat on the bottom of the head making contact with the surface and a rounded top of the head above the surface.The Screw Shank Comes NextWood screws rarely have threads clear up to the head and some will leave a bare shank of 3/4 to 1 inch or more depending on the total length of the screw so that after the screw thread enters the second member which is having something screwed to it the threadless shank in the first member will just spin allowing the two members to be drawn up tight against each other.Screw Threads Are What Do The HoldingWood screws have a fairly coarse thread and are tapered to drill into the wood easier.
Lo root screws have a very coarse and very deep thread to hold soft materials such as plastic, particle board, drywall and any other soft substance.Drill A Pilot Screw HoleIf you screw a screw too close to the edge of a board you can figure that it's guaranteed to split the board. Always drill a pilot hole slightly smaller diameter than the screw to have better splitless luck. It's always a good idea to drill pilot holes anywhere you put a screw.
To make a screw go in a little easier keep a bar of soap handy and make a swipe across the soap with the screw threads. Be sure to get all residue of soap off of the surface though, as paint or a clear finish won't stick to soap and stain won't penetrate soap.
Patina - What Is It? Where Does It Come From?
Patina on wood is an appearance that comes from many years of rubbing and polishing and tender loving care in general. The appearance is a deep sheen with a bit of glow. Light plays a big part in patina on furniture too.The main contributor of patina is age.
Patina on wood isn't like patina on metal, for instance copper turned green due to oxidation is considered a patina. Patina on wood isn't a change of color it's more of an aura, difficult to describe, but fascinating to see.
I guess, patina on people would be wrinkles.
If you were to take a 100 year old well cared for oak table and set it beside a new off the assembly line oak table with a polyurethane finish even the least discerning eye could see a definite difference.
The really sad thing is when someone takes a nice old antique and goes after it with a sander sanding through the finish, patina and everything down to the bare wood. Then, to make matters worse, put a polyurethane finish on it. If you put the newly refinished table beside the new, off the assembly line table you would have two tables with the same plasticy appearance.
Some times, such as when a piece of furniture has so many coats of paint that it's become lumpy there's not much choice whether to restore or refinish, but other times a piece can look pretty grungy and will come out fantastic looking with some tender cleaning
. More restoration information can be found on our pages restoration and restoration procedure.
Healthy Ventilation
 If you have a hard time getting proper ventilation while woodworing an Air Powered Dust Respirator would be a good investment. Dust can be very hard on your lungs and health in general.
Proper ventilation should make it so you may smell only a very small amount of wood dust.
Cross Breeze VentilationYou can achieve positive ventilation by having a large fan set up so you are beween the fan and your work and with doors and/or windows open to let a good amount of outdoor air in.
Open Window With Suction VentilationAnother good method is to have a door or window open on each side of your work with a fan in an open window to create a suction out of a window and a cross breeze to carry the tainted air out.
Powered Filtered Air VentilationIf you can't manage to get good ventilation, then a powered respirator could save you some yucky feeling from breathing too much dust laden air.
The full face cover shown in the pictures is good for eye and skin protection as well as ventilation.
The air system draws room air in and filters it and blows it across your face keeping the bad air out. They have a battery pack to power the fan in them.
These respirators are good only for filtering dust from woodworking or other sources and are not good for filtering chemicals or fumes.
Make Kitchen Cabinet Shelves More Useful
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All too frequently what you're looking for in your kitchen cabinet is on the very back of a shelf or that infrequently used item is always stored in the back on a shelf where you have to remove a lot of items to get to the back of the shelf, then go through contortions to get to the item you want.
A quick, easy and not too expensive way to make the shelves more useable is to add another shelf on Drawer Glides on top of the old shelf.
I used 3/4 inch plywood for the new shelf and I had some side mount glides already so I used them.
Drawer glides come in both bottom mount and side mount. They also come in an extension model, but I don't recommend that you pull the shelf out any more than is necessary to access the back of the shelf, because the weight could put unnecessary stress on the glides.
Since the glides are mounted flat down on the old shelf weight shouldn't be a problem with judicious use.
The top picture shows bottom mount glides and the bottom pictures shows side mount glides. The side mount glides fit nicely on the edge of 3/4 inch plywood.
If you have a real wide shelf it would be a good idea to use an extra glide in the center of the shelf.
If you have a shelf with two door access with a center member between the doors you can use two pieces of 3/4 inch plywood the width of each door opening.
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Repair A Picture Frame CornerPicture frame corners seem to loosen up after a period of time just by hanging around. Wood expands and contracts quite a bit with temperature changes and humidity changes and over a period of time will loosen the glued corners.
Picture frame corners are fastened using different methods. Older frames were glued and fastened with a brad or a small nail depending on the size of the frame. Smaller frames generally had one brad inserted from one side of the corner and larger frames and sometimes smaller picture frames made by an enthusiastic framer would have a brad inserted from both sides of the corner.
There is more in depth picture frame corner repair with some illustrations on our page Picture Frame Corner Repair and even more information continuing from corner repair to Picture Frame Restoration
Cotton Gloves When SandingIt's always good to keep a pair of cotton gardening gloves handy when you're sanding. No little rubber nubbies or other add ons, just cotton gloves.
After you've sanded and cleaned the surface you're sanding put your cotton gloves on and run your gloved hand over the surface. If you can feel any snags on the glove you need to sand some more until the surface is all smooth and no snaggies.
This is a very important part of surface preparation, because if there are any rough or fuzzy places they will soak up more stain and will be darker than the rest of the surface. For more information see our page about sanding and another good page is unfinished furniture.
Sorry, we had to make some cuts
We had to close down our guestbook, because spammers were filling it with inappropriate content.
We discontinued our newsletter, because too many email filters thought we were spamming because of the length and too many people forgot to put us in their good guy filters so our newsletter could get through, consequently we got floods of returns.
We had to discontinue our answers by email, because spammers got ahold of my email address and the spam email numbers were into the thousands per day making it next to impossible to get the good stuff out of the bad stuff.
To top it off this is a one person operation. My only staff is orange, kind of chubby and says meow. Actually I guess it would be better to say I'm his staff.
Excursion to renew sanityWe needed to get away for a couple of days to renew sanity and decided to go to the Okanogan Country in north central Washington state. That part of the state has some very significant history and a few ghost towns, as well as some of the most beautiful scenery you've ever seen. It was typical early April weather, the sky was overcast and there was still enough snow on the ground to get our granddaughter (11 years old at the time) excited, but the temperature was in the high 50's and you can't mask the scenery there with clouds and overcast sky, it's fantastic under any conditions.
Eden Valley Guest RanchThe most pleasant and enjoyable part of the trip was our stay at Eden Valley Guest Ranch, a working ranch with cabins and many activities. There's too much to describe here, but a trip to their web site will give you all the information and pictures.
Pat and Robin Stice, the owners, are two of the nicest people you would ever want to meet, not only down home friendly, but also very knowledgeable about the area wildlife, flora and history.
If you want relaxation plus, have a visit to their working ranch. The working part is the real thing, but they put the comfort and enjoyment of their guests first.
Okanogan CountryThe Okanogan Country is beyond description for scenic beauty. The following links are to some pictures. When you click the link it'll open in a new window. Just close the window and you'll be right back here. The first is a lake scene
that invites just looking or dropping in a fishing line. One of two large herds of deer
that we saw and a couple of members of the herd
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Molson, Ghost TownThe town of Molson, WA was a real bustling place at one time, but now is mainly home to ghosts of the past. We didn't see any ghosts, but they're probably friendly enough that they just stayed back and watched us instead of making us jump. If you have any ghostly dollars to be taken care of you could deposit them in the Molson Bank
a teller just might appear in the tellers cage
if you have the right currency. There's lots of antique furniture
on display and a comfy antique chair near the stove
to warm your bones on a cold day.
There aren't any non-ghostly stores in Molson, so if it's getting close to lunch time be sure to take your own.
Be sure to take all your litter with you, because the ghosts may not be so friendly if you litter their town and I sure wouldn't want to run into a cranky ghost.
Have you priced the cost of resilvering a mirror lately? Pretty expensive. I used to see kits for do it yourself resilvering, but the chemicals are so extremely toxic that they don't seem to be available any more.
Take a look at our page about a trick to 'resilver' a mirror without any chemicals, no ventilation required and very little cost.
A supplier of art, painting, picture framing and a lot more. Have you ever visited Dick Blick's web site? It's chock full of lots of interesting things from artists supplies to Zig 2-way glue. Heh, heh, that was easy finding a Z item they have the alphabet along the top of each page to help find the items you may need or to browse to discover the items that make you say, "wow, I'd like to try that".
Dick Blick has everything you could imagine for the artist, craft person, picture framer and lots of things for the furniture refinisher, such as pigments to get your stain exactly the right color for your furniture or kitchen cabinet refacing project. They have spray paint in lots of colors and types to make painting projects easier. Go have a visit it's a wonderful site for window shopping.
Refinish Furniture dot Com, How we happen to beI always said that I didn't have any plans to retire, but as you reach that age in the business we were in furniture seems to get a little heavier, as well as the waistline, chemicals seem to be more potent, even with good ventilation and it seems that it would be a good idea to lay down the stripper and scraper and move on to the next step of the journey.
Sitting twiddling your thumbs can keep you occupied peacefully for at least a good 10 minutes, than retirement seems like it's not the finest idea in the world.
I took a computer programmers course in the mid 1960's, but ended up staying a railroad telegrapher and house remodeler for a few years more, then decided to just do antique and furniture restoration. After twiddling my thumbs for a while after retirement I got a pallet of old computers and took them apart to see what makes them tick and discovered there was a world of difference between modern day computers and the one I learned programming on, even the older computers I was using to discover the world of cyberdom.
To shorten this part of the story, I discovered the fascination of the Internet, which wasn't available, as we know it, in the 1960's. I figured that might be a good way to keep me occupied and out of mischief and to share the knowledge about furniture refinishing and repair, working with wicker and chair caning, custom picture framing and most anything else I had experienced over the years.
A furniture repair and refinishing site was born on a free web site hosting service. It was one page long and before long had blossomed to four or five pages. It didn't take long for it to become popular, so I decided it was time for it's own domain and RefinishFurniture.com was born.
RefinishFurniture.com now stands at well over 200 pages of information and I'm adding more frequently. People look at our pages over 1,500,000 times a year and I receive thousands of emails a year requesting additional information. How's that for retirement?
The whole thing has become fairly expensive, but I've added links and ads for products that people need for their projects and I get a tidbit every time someone buys from them and it's enough to keep the information free and flowing. It's a great pleasure to be able to give information that can help others and a lot of the email that I get thanking me for the help that I've given is very heart warming and makes the whole thing worthwhile.
Some times it takes some real sleuthing to help people find what they need. A man a few states away from my location in central Washington state wanted a product he couldn't find, so I went wandering through cyberspace and found the product in a hardware store two blocks from his home. I've found furniture services and products for people in other countries through that still fascinating medium, the Internet. I'd like to help everyone who sends me an email, but there just isn't time to answer them all. I apologize to those of you who don't get an answer to your email question that I know is very crucial to you.
Some of the pages on the site are the originals that I wrote in 1998 and throughout the past years I had decided that changes needed to be made for better navigation and clarity, so as you can see there are a few different styles of pages on the site. I'm in the process of pulling it all together and making everything more standard appearing and to make it easier to find the information that you need, but I'm remodeling while the free information store is still open, so It'll probably take a few months to accomplish.
Computer generated eyestrainI read an article at WebMD about eyestrain from squinting at a computer screen.
A year or so ago I read about Cathode Ray Monitors having an indiscernable squiggle that can cause eyestrain when you stare at the screen for many hours a day. The squiggle can cause eyestrain and headaches, which I was beginning to have. I went to a 19 inch LCD screen, which sits stable and squiggless and lo and behold, no more eyestrain and headaches. I always increase the text size when I have a lot of reading to do from the monitor too.
Did you know that you can change text size by going to View at the top of the screen in Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer and choose text size in Firefox and IE and zoom in Opera?
With Firefox you can either click the choices in view/text size or you can use "control" + or - to increase or decrease the text size.
Netscape works the same as Firefox.
In Opera you can use view/text size and the choices or you can use "shift" + or - without the shift to change the size.
In IE you need to use view/text size to change.
If you have a wheel mouse you can use "control" and your mouse wheel to control the size of text in all four browsers.
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