I finally sanded the bulk of the flooring last and this weekend.  After sanding, I planed both sides - then over to the table saw to remove the tongue & grooves that's not needed (and has lots of what I would call schmutz on it).  


It cleans up nicely and is really beautiful.  The smell is the same as construction lumber which reminds me of something a little sweet & sour mixed with something musty.  Definteily difficult to describe.    

After that I needed to start making a jig for a modified box cut.  Of course even though I seemingly have tons of odds & ends for hardware, I lacked a thick enough bolt, so I'll need a trip to the hardware store to complete that.  

So not huge progress, but getting there little by little.

Beginning of a jig...

Where's my blanky?

Well, it's that time again for a new project.  There hasn't been much activity at the ol' Flop as of late (for all the fans); however, that does NOT mean it's been idle.  Far from it.  The issue was more or less that I was doing projects that weren't that interesting for me to document as I wasn't performing with any novel woodworking skills or designs.  

All that's changing of course as I embark on my newest project, which is ostensibly going to be a blanket chest.  The design is going to be a bit different than a traditional blanket chest.  Difficult to describe in words - but oddly the design did come to me in a dream I had which, believe it or not, I don't often dream about.  

The piece will be made out of fir and white oak.  The first order of business is to prepare the fir - which in this case is currently in the form of used flooring.  

A small rant - it just seems crazy to me to believe that some majestic tree (OK, maybe it was in a shabby location) grew for some several hundred years and was felled 50 or 80 years ago and milled into flooring.  And it wasn't just any part of the tree - it was chosen for looks as it couldn't have any obvious knots as this wasn't acceptable at least here in the NW.  So you have this CVG fir and either through disuse or more likely a design choice (and a questionable one at that) a homeowner decides that what they really want to do is to rip up this otherwise pristine flooring and incredible wood and replace it with something from Lumber Liquidators (ugh!) or worse, maybe some 'exotic' Brazilian Cherry (i.e., former rainforest that's been turned into a cow paddie or soya farm).  

So now I have this stuff.  The only problem is I have to remove the top layer of grime and stain/poly before I can put it through the planer.  I attempted to use a card scraper with one board, and though it showed some promise it was obvious that it was going to take way too long.  So I figured I would try the drum sander, but the feed belt finally bit the dust.  The random orbital sander took off the schmutz, but I think that will take a while.  Hmmm, what to do?  

Meanwhile, I need to actually figure out the dimensions on this thing.  I can tell this is going to take a while...

The stock

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 One ready to go - quite the color difference.