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A quick and easy pizza peel. Peels aren't quite as easy to find in stores as stones are, so it's a handy and easy project.
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May 20, 2008 20:55
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 18:00 |
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It's a pretty easy project all in all. I used clear spruce battons or burlaps which you can get at any home center or building supply store. They are about 1.25" wide and maybe 3/8" thick. The edges are rounded over slightly, so I used a table saw to snip off 1/8" off each side, leaving me with perfectly squared up edges suited for gluing. Spruce has, I think, the best strength to weight ratio of all the common woods. That said, a nice piece of maple would be so much sturdier and nicer looking for a project like this, but I used what I had around, and it should work fine, though it's a little soft compared to a nice hardwood. Anyhow, regardless of what type of wood you go with, what follows is the most important part to get right. You need to arrange your strips until they form the rough shape of your future peel. Use a jointer, table saw or hand plane (whatever you have) to get the edges good and square. You don't want to see any gaps between the pieces. Use pipe or bar clamps to apply end to end pressure, making sure you also apply weight from above to prevent the board from cupping up as it adjusts to the lateral pressure. I used cinder blocks for this step, but if you happen to have high quality bar clamps, you may not need to bother since they tend to apply nice, even pressure parallel with the work. I didn't take many pictures of the construction process, but here's an annotated illustration of the board before it was glued and clamped.  After gluing I used the same method to fix a reinforcing piece on the tongue of the peel. Shaping can be accomplished a number of ways depending on what tools you have available. I used a jigsaw to cut out a template, and the used a router with a trim bit to trace along the pattern. This ensures that your work will be symmetrical, since you only cut out one half of the pattern, and then flip it to cut the other side. Then sand the whole thing good and flat. If you were careful during glue up, you shouldn't need to do much to level the surface. This may either make no sense, or it may be completely obvious. The project invokes some fairly standard woodworking tools and techniques, so you may find just by looking at it carefully you can guess what I did.
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May 20, 2008 22:54
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My shop has been without a router table for far too long - store bought millwork is way too expensive, and the wood will never match the rest of my project. So I bought this one a while ago, and finally built a suitable home for it this weekend. A really basic stand/cabinet outfit made mostly of 3/4" MDF. Joints between panels were dadoed for added stability. I made standard frame/panel doors for aesthetic reasons. I made space inside for these plastic drawers that had recently been made vacant after I cleaned out my room and got rid of the old computer parts that they had once contained.  I might put it on casters; my workshop is so small I can expect to be moving it a lot. funny song about politics fucked around with this message at 01:40 on May 29, 2008 |
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May 29, 2008 01:37
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This is true. The sun will deposit a colossal amount heat in your car and actively removing it would require a gigantic cooling system. You can consider, just as shorthand, the fact that your car's built in air conditioning compressor, being sufficient to cool the car down, requires a notable amount of energy to operate (enough that it makes an appreciable difference in fuel economy). It's unlikely that you'll be able to muster that much solar power, and no matter what means you use to actively remove heat (be it evaporative, thermoelectric, etc.) you'll be facing similar energy demands. My dream system would be to somehow run your car's existing blower off of solar energy, thus keeping air moving through it. You could, at best, get the inside temperature of your car equal with the outside temperature, but that's much better than the greenhouse temperatures cars can reach with no air movement.
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Jun 3, 2008 15:09
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Last summer I built a TV stand by laminating strips of plywood end to end. The pieces were stacked vertically, with a large concrete top on which the television sat. The inside was hollow and virtually unusable (what with having a tv and a block of concrete on top). I brought it home this summer and set about refinishing it and making it better looking a more practical. It is now a much lighter color, the concrete top is gone, the edges have been rounded over, the inside smoothed over and painted flat black (for that 'all consuming black hole' look) and the box sits on its side for a better flowing look. I just finished painting the inside the other day, so here it is: 
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Jun 14, 2008 17:30
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 18:00 |
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Over the Christmas break I finally finished this hutch I started over the summer.    
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Jan 4, 2009 19:10
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