Brian K.'s Profile

@925juliebean

The only thing that could harden it up is a coating of some kind. Lacquer helps quite a bit. I made a crib out of cherry, which is moderately hard, but you could still ding it without too much effort. After adding a layer of lacquer, it's hard as a rock.

@elee
with regards to most of the woods, the hardwoods all work very nicely, but some are harder to work than others. everything listed is pretty easy on your tools. its not until you get into more weatherproof woods, like teak, where your tools get worn down because of silica (i.e. sand) in the wood fibers that grinds your cutting edges down. mesquite is another particulary difficult wood to work. these basic domestics don't really have any downfalls when it comes to working them. finishing is another matter, and some of these woods (cherry, pine, soft maple) are prone to blotching when staining. two ways around this are to use more of a gel stain instead of a penetrating stain, and another is to do a very light washcoat of shellac which will help to seal up the pores, but of course the stain won't penetrate nearly as deeply.

@cbauch:
the color differences are just due to the heartwood of that tree. chatoyance, which causes things like pommele, curl, ribbon striping, etc., is due to the direction of the wood fibers themselves. figured wood is a whole other post though and can take up quite a bit of space.

Umm...sorry to burst your guys bubble, but "fast-growing" and "hardwood" are usually mutually exclusive. Furthermore, why would you go to all that trouble of using wood, then painting it, especially a hardwood. This could be done much more simply with MDF or plywood.

First, how do these hold onto the chair without keeping the tray table on the back from coming down? Second, how much does this interfere with pulling your seat cushion off to use as a flotation device? Third, what happens if there is a fire? Is it flame-retardant like the current seat covers are?

Sorry, I'm an aerospace safety engineer, so these are the questions that immediately pop into my head.

well, one way of doing it is by hanging some new drywall off of some RSIC clips attached to the ceiling.

http://www.acousticalsurfaces.com/rsic_clips/risc_clips.htm?d=46

These would effectively decouple the new ceiling from the old. These are used a lot in home theaters to prevent sound from propagating to the rest of the house.

Here is an article as well:

http://www.acousticalsurfaces.com/blog/?p=5

If I was to reproduce this, the easiest way would be to create something in Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. Then, give this to your local machine shop that has either a laser jet or a water jet, and have them go to town cutting everything out. It would get programmed into the computer, and it would come out perfectly. Additionally, you could have them even powdercoat it for you, but that's more $$. Then, you get your cutout from them and spend a while making the bends as you need them. Cutting it out by hand would take forever and a year, not to mention a mistake would be disastrous. You could probably recreate something like this for less than $150.

Guys, 3-Form offers their offcuts in various sizes for quite a bit less. So if you don't need the entire 4x8 sheet of material, usually you can find something that will work for quite a bit cheaper. I've used their stuff in the past for various projects where a $400 sheet of resin was out of the question.

And coco....sometimes eco products cost more because the base materials cost more, and you just can't do much about that.

It's called "vinyl dye" interestingly enough. Couple different brands around. Check auto stores. Also, I've seen Ace Hardware carrying Krylon Fusion paint, which is pretty much the same stuff, and comes in a wider variety of color.

Either paint is great for plastic because instead of coating it, it softens the plastic and dyes it. Then when it dries, the plastic gets hard again. As a plus, it doesn't wear off like paint does, because the plastic is actually dyed instead of covered.

v in boston:

Actually, temp fluctuations is bad. Going from hot to cold or the other way is what will cause these bowls to shatter/break. Taking heat though is what these things can do! You can boil water in them if you want. You can apply open flame, and they will be no worse for the wear. It's the same stuff that lab glass is made out of, and think of everything those vessels can handle.

I've seen one in person. They only had the one leaf open and it was very stable. The draw slides very nicely as well. I posted some links in the last drop-leaf thread. It's made by a company called Skovby.

Here's the linkage
http://www.skovby.com/uk/home/flashsm101.html

SM101 is the style