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My current series of newsletters, titled, "The Frugal Woodworker's Journal" will be devoted to introducing various simple projects made of salvaged wood obtained from discarded scrap. From items such as trashed wood pallets, boxes and crates. Items that would otherwise have found their way into a local solid waste landfill.
While there is certainly a wealth of economic advantage available through your use of trash wood as the material of choice for many simple projects needed by every home woodworker, there are other benefits too. It is the most practical material for the beginning craftsperson to use, as it can be used without any concern about ruining it. After all, how in the world can you possibly hurt scrap wood? But, I don’t intend this to be reserved for them alone. This information will prove to be as useful to the very accomplished woodworker as to the novice when any of those many utilitarian projects are built. And who says you can’t teach an old dog a new trick? I keep learning new ones each and every day.
Come join me and enjoy the distinct pleasure of making something useful out of material that others have considered worthless and doing it in a completely stress-free atmosphere.
Step one is easy too. Just add your e-mail address to my database and I’ll take it from there.
Jerry Buerge
PS Due to AD restrictions preventing the display of diagrams here it has been necessary to move the publication of this newsletter to Yahoo. You will find it available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheFrugalWoodworker/
Newsletter Dated: 7/12/2001 3:20:39 PMSubject: The Frugal Woodworker's Journal - The Work Surface Today, I needed a large flat work surface to assemble a few parts I had been working on. A strong twitch in my back told me that I didn't want to bend over while doing so.
While my usual fix for this problem is to clamp a few planks on a pair of sawhorses I use in my garage when I want to work on a raised surface, I needed a larger more comfortable work area than normal and looked for something that was more appropriate.
The pallets I had collected yesterday seemed to be easily strong enough but were a bit large for my immediate purpose. They were of standard pallet construction, having three 2x4 stringers, with four 1x4 deck boards bridging their tops and three 1x4 base boards bridging their bottoms.
As the entire pallet was too large for my purpose I decided to modify it slightly. I cut through both the deck and the base boards, flush with one face of the center stringer and thereby created a smaller-sized platform that better fit my need. The open structure allows me to clamp it firmly to the sawhorses and to then clamp the items I am working on to the top of the remaining surface area.
Whenever I want a continuous surface in the future, I can always add additional deck boards between those present. I can also then add a thin sheet of plywood, OSB, hardboard, or perhaps cardboard should I need a seamless surface. Whatever is needed to satisfy that future need.
This same structure can easily be used as a portable potting bench, a small picnic table, a rough surface craft table, or a garage sale display table. It can even be used as a cooking table for our electric hot plate should we want to transfer the heat from our kitchen to our patio when the temperature rises as high as it is today, almost 100 F.
At that point, realizing just how versatile this thing actually is, I made another one. The second one was made with a continuous fixed top surface and I even gave it a coat of paint that matches the other items on our patio. Now I can use one for the rough and ready jobs and the other for more formal needs.
Jerry
(c) July 2001 Jerry Buerge
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