What did you do today?

[dbhost]

Chunking away at more of hte office remodel. I am doing something stupid on the filing cabinet but I like the look. I am using Behr stain as it was what Home Dpot had, and am applying it with a disposable junk brush. I got sidetracked for the day after brushing on a heavy coat on the first draywer and liked the look. I am now brushing the stuff on like paint and letting it set up. Takes about 2 to 3 days but once done, it looks awesome. So by mid / late week I will slide the filing cabinet in place and start filling it. The filing drawer in the desk is where I begin though... All of my tools still have their manuals, I am organziing them and filing them alphabetically.

Not WW related, but I am crusing the various shopping sites looking for an EZ Up Spectator instant canopy in Royal Blue. My now 15 year old EZ Up Pagoda (Same general design, but older features) is getting tattered and the top cloth is no longer available... Sigh...

It was on Friday, but I returned the replacement regulator / filter after I found the suitable diaphragm and rebuilt the Central Pnuematic unit. The Amazon one was hard to adjust right out of the box, and just, persnickety.

Continuing with hte spring cleaning / reorganization of the home office / studio. My wife does not like the dark desk in the bright room, but I love it. I think she wants to swipe my desk for her use in the other room...

[LCHIEN]

97th Birthday for my mom celebrated tonight. Chinese Banquet with ten courses including Peking Duck and Lobster

She got to hold her 4 month old great granddaughter. My friend suggested I call this first one "Hands of time".

[LCHIEN]

I doubt my pump is bad, Cuisineart has multitudes of QC issues, two samples leaked and another's programming locked up when doing descaling and never worked right again. I saved the parts from one out of curiosity and packrat-itis and now I am tripping over them,

[leehljp]

IF you guys have not tried the multi-stream, you are missing the point by a long shot. I was about to go back to, or at least try once a week for the rich flavor of perked or brewed coffee. Then I saw the multi stream on Amazon. Believe it or not, I kept saying that the single needle of Keurig wasn't getting all of the flavor of the coffee in the pods. On many occasions, I backed down the cup serve size to 6 oz and it was better, but not great. I often use the custom cup of my favorite coffees in fine grind. It is with these that I noticed how the single needle streams worked. Hot water was pressured through from the center, a dimple in the middle where the water squirted through and it appeared that a the water did not equally or evenly flow through all of the coffee in the custom pod that I filled. I saw this repeatedly. That flaw and weak coffee taste has been fixed - by the multi-stream version. It tastes like the brewed coffees I used to drink in Japan. (I have used a Keurig since returning.). My problem with brewed is that I will drink one or two cups in the morning and just hate to pour out the rest. I hate two and three hour old coffee, or coffee that has been re-heated, so a 4 to 6 cup of brewed coffee is half wasted. For me it has been a battle - flavor and waste some, or no waste and little flavor. Now I can have my cake and eat it two. I have found in one week that my coffee drinking has picked up, because It is instant, it is not wasted, it is highly flavorfully fresh. BTW, I use the custom cup/reloadable use my own flavors and decafs. The Multi-Stream is nothing like the older single stream Keurigs. Oh, and one more thing - My first cup of coffee in the morning is Hazelnut by the Coffee Beanery. Been using that since the late '80s. No other hazelnut tastes like that. but the kCups were weak. Now it has the flavor like it did when I used drip coffee times.

[dbhost]

I get the attraction for light coffee drinkers. Convenient, and very little if anything to clean up. just pop the pod out and throw it away. No carafe to clean, but the water vessel can get funky. However I now digress...

The K cup brewer has a certain appeal for quick no fuss make a single cup approach to coffee, and it certainly beats the snot out of instant coffee, or those funky tea bag coffees of years ago.

If you have flavors that rarely get used, yeah pods for guests kind of make sense. I personally go through a LOT of Private Selection Caramel Truffle. And i use one of those 30oz stainless tumlbers... I bet I know why I have insomnia though...

[twistsol]

I have a drip coffee maker with a single cup brew thingy attached. I have pods for hazelnut, vanilla and carmel something or another. Guests use it, I drink french roast by the pot and making one cup at a time seems inefficient to me.

[leehljp]

Loring,
Thanks for two things -
1. The offer. But, I spent enough time on it yesterday and am ready to discard it. It is already in a trash bag. And I am VERY happy with the new multi-stream Keurig. I didn't know that Keurig had introduced the multi-stream until my old one went on the blink. The new one and the flavor it brings out so well, that I am not going back.

2. While I hate that you had to go through that too, Your trials kinda confirms my suspicions that it was probably the pump. Years ago, I would have tested it, but not now. I got to the pump motor, but I didn't wish to go to the trouble of taking it out and testing it in a trial situation. All the electronics were working, the valves were clear and working, which left the pump motor.

Thanks again for the offer but I will pass.

[dbhost]

I've never gone in for the pod type coffee makers. The disposable pods seem wasteful to me, and a refillable pod, which they do make, well it puts you back into the territory of why not buy a good drip coffee brewer? My BIL on the other hand uses the reloadable pods and LOVES his...

I think if my Ninja Coffee Bar started acting up, I would do what I could to fix it and keep it going.

[twistsol]

The finish is Rustoleum Hammered Metal Gray. It comes in rattle cans, which I've used once but it doesn't built well. I buy it in quarts. Shelf life is about 5 years and I'm close to that on the can I have left. It is applied with either a roller or a brush, For large flat surfaces like this, I pour it on and roll it out and then use what is on the roller to do the edges. The only issue with it is you need to do both coats within four hours otherwise you are supposed to wait 7 days to add an addtional coat. I did a test on MDF where I did three and four coats an hour apart and after three months neither had cured. It goes on fairly thickly and has a stippled texture to it by design.

Also, cleanup is with Xylol which will eat garage floor coatings in a few seconds. Assume your roller cover and brush are trash when you are done. I've never tried to clean a roller cover and have been unsuccessful cleaning a brush.

I've used it on my metal hardware storage cabinet, my Festool systainer racks and Shopsmith cart, both made of birch plywood, my miter saw fences made of a combination of plywood and MDF. It cleans up with a damp rag and for sliding surfaces, takes paste wax well.

I did have an issue with this application. I let the roller sit between coats, about two hours, and got a lot of roller fuzz in the second coat. Once it fully cures I'll give it a light sanding with a 3m pad to remove those and if it dulls the finish too much I'll add a third coat with a new roller.

As for living in the shop, we do have three spare bedrooms, but if you take that option, you need to deal with all the neighborhood kids that know I work at home and request bike repairs, help with roller blades, toys that don't work need a snack or a bathroom etc.

[GrumpyDad]

Can you give more detail on the epoxy finish? Brand, application, durability...
And can I come live in your shop?

[LCHIEN]

I have some pumps from a Cuisineart K-cup coffee maker.
My wife went thru about 4 of them on warranty and some they just had me prove I cut the power cord off before they sent a new one.
Interested?
Will it worK? I can get the voltage off of it. I seem to recall its either 12 or 24 volts DC

[leehljp]

Last week, my 6 year old Keurig started being real slow in making coffee, the stream was about half of what it normally is. We have very soft water here from artesian well water about 2500 feet deep, so minuscule scale at best. I run the descaler for Keurig about twice a year anyway to clean it out. By last weekend, it was down to putting out about 1/2 the amount of water/coffee that I selected.

So I ordered another Keurig, this time the Keurig Supreme Plus with Multi-Stream. It came in Tuesday. FINALLY Coffee with taste like when we made coffee in a pot. The single stream Keurig give coffee flavor but weak unless one chooses 6 oz. The MultiStream injects the water through 5 needles. GREAT flavor. For general use, I like Columbian, and now the columbian flavor is much more than before in the older single stream Keurig.

TODAY, I spent about 4 hours playing with the old Keurig, taking it apart, putting it back together, cleaning tubes and valves. Looking at YouTube "Fix your Keurig" videos. One would say, clean the bottom valve, (which wasn't the problem to begin with); another, clean the top needle which is one of the first things I did last week; Another said to clean the valve in before the needle. That was interesting and on taking it apart, I could see how it might be the problem, but it wasn't. Put it back together and the same thing - 1 ounce of water, pause, slow stream.

In addition, I had my air compressor hose and blew air here, there and yonder in the different pipes. From the beginning, knowing that all valves were clean, I suspected the pump in some way was weak. I blew the motor out, and thought about spraying WD-40 and then decided not to. On occasion, it would work fine as long as I didn't have any pods in it, but add a pod and it went slow. The slow stream going through the pod acted like drag on an engine. The engine works fine without a load, but add a load and it could not handle it. This is what was happening. Again, all valves, needle valves were clean, clean clean, as were hoses. The only logical conclusion was weak motor.

Spent the day troubleshooting the old Keurig. Couldn't fix it.

But I do have a MultiStream Keurig and plenty of FLAVOR now.

[twistsol]

Installed the new out feed table on the tablesaw this morning. The epoxy takes 7 days to fully cure, and it was still a bit tacky this morning. Hopefully this will cure enough to use before the end of the week. I'll be working on the finishing booth and wide table today and tomorrow so shouldn't need the tablesaw for a while





No legs yet so it is being held up by my old out feed stand which I'll be happy to see go away. It worked, but it never seemed to be in the right spot



Next up is removing, trimming to proper size, and trying to flatten the wide table on the table saw. This was a piece of prefinished maple plywood that got a huge scratch across it. I tried to fix the scratch and match the finish and made it much worse. I have enough of the epoxy leftover to paint this the same as the out feed. The epoxy will hide the scratch!

[twistsol]

After a year, I finally got the cutting in done on the stairwell to the shop. I hate ladders, and hate ladders on stairwells even more.

I also managed to get a couple coats of epoxy paint on the outfeed table and the extension table for the table saw. I'll let those sit overnight and get them installed on tomorrow, and then back to work on the finishing booth.

[twistsol]

About half of what I build and nearly everything for the shop is from salvage/scrap but I don't usually call it out. Below is my current salvage stock that will become face frames, doors and drawer fronts for the office cabinet build. It is mostly 7/8" birch pulled out of a remodel, the top shelf is nearly all quarter sawn oak barn find but there's some other stuff in there as well. It is rare to find sheet goods that are good enough that they can be used for projects but bad enough to be discarded. The one exception is here. ShopSmith Storage Cabinet



When I'm done with the office cabinets, I'll see what I have left and if I can build the buffet for the dining room my wife wants. The plywood for any cabinets not going in the garage or shop is always new. It s hard enough to untwist and flatten new stock vs waste. Until recently the cost / benefit of using salvaged sheet goods wasn't there.

Finally, I do mostly remodeling projects and there really isn't a point in posting remilled baseboards and crown mouldings.