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Step 3Preparing the wood
The first thing I did here was to clean up the wood. It had been laying around in that pile for quite some time and there was plenty of dirt, spider webs and so on.
While cleaning I noticed a lot of old rusted nails. Again, take the time to remove them, I had a few reluctant ones which I cut down with my dremel (be carfefull with that since nails can kill power tools and probably hurt you pretty bad in the process).
Once clean, the next step was cutting down every board lenghwise. This makes your planks a more managable size and actually doubles your quantity of wood ! :D
Mistakes I made :
Being uber cheap that I am, I first tried cutting down the planks with my jigsaw... bad idea, burnt the motor and the cut was horrible.
Being a little less cheap, bought a circular saw, thinking this would be best for the size of my living room and would probably make a cleaner cut than the jigsaw. NOT.... the cut was actually worse, see the problem with the circular saw is that while it looks like it's going straight, it can go off in the wrong direction, once that happens, forget about bringing it back on course! My boards turned out worse than with the jigsaw....
Now at that point I was getting desperate.... all this wood and no way to cut it
Then I decided to get over my cheap ways and buy a bench saw. I got the cheapest one available which cost me about 120$ can. But that turned out to be worth it's weight in gold! I cut the whole lot in less than 1 hour when 1 cut with the jigsaw or circular took longer than that!!
N.b. This is is good spot to give you a bit of advice.... As I mentionned earlier, I live downtown and I have neighbors. A bench saw makes A LOT of noise... and it's not fun nois like a blues guitar we're talking about here...
So warn your neighbors that you'll be making noise. Some of my neighbors are noisy themselves so they know they can't bitch to much, others just didn't care. Lucky for me I had no noise complaint. I did do all of the noisy work around mid-day so that I would maximize the number of people that were at work.
While cleaning I noticed a lot of old rusted nails. Again, take the time to remove them, I had a few reluctant ones which I cut down with my dremel (be carfefull with that since nails can kill power tools and probably hurt you pretty bad in the process).
Once clean, the next step was cutting down every board lenghwise. This makes your planks a more managable size and actually doubles your quantity of wood ! :D
Mistakes I made :
Being uber cheap that I am, I first tried cutting down the planks with my jigsaw... bad idea, burnt the motor and the cut was horrible.
Being a little less cheap, bought a circular saw, thinking this would be best for the size of my living room and would probably make a cleaner cut than the jigsaw. NOT.... the cut was actually worse, see the problem with the circular saw is that while it looks like it's going straight, it can go off in the wrong direction, once that happens, forget about bringing it back on course! My boards turned out worse than with the jigsaw....
Now at that point I was getting desperate.... all this wood and no way to cut it
Then I decided to get over my cheap ways and buy a bench saw. I got the cheapest one available which cost me about 120$ can. But that turned out to be worth it's weight in gold! I cut the whole lot in less than 1 hour when 1 cut with the jigsaw or circular took longer than that!!
N.b. This is is good spot to give you a bit of advice.... As I mentionned earlier, I live downtown and I have neighbors. A bench saw makes A LOT of noise... and it's not fun nois like a blues guitar we're talking about here...
So warn your neighbors that you'll be making noise. Some of my neighbors are noisy themselves so they know they can't bitch to much, others just didn't care. Lucky for me I had no noise complaint. I did do all of the noisy work around mid-day so that I would maximize the number of people that were at work.
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Oct 19, 2011. 8:34 AMjashaw2
says:
You can also get a speed square to use w/ a skilsaw for straight cuts.
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Jul 7, 2011. 12:46 AMgrd
says:
I recently bought a cheap hand held metal detector wand (the kind security guards use to check for weapons etc.) from a Chinese web site. It is wonderful for detecting almost invisible screws, nails, staples etc. in reclaimed pieces of wood. Get one; your tools will thank you for it!
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9
Jun 13, 2010. 10:24 AM
jwilliamsen
says:
jwilliamsen
says:
Good tools are never a bad investment - you can always sell them when you're done using them and recoup some of your money. Quality tools will sell for much more of their original price than a cheap tool will, and the time and effort saved combined with better quality is usually well worth it. The old saying goes: Buy Nice, or Buy Twice :)
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