I Have the Weirdest Resume

Greetings once again everyone, and welcome to whatever this is!

This week’s episode features:

• News about my next job.
• A story about a home made router table and how it helped me make progress on the headboard.
• An unexpected store.

Shall we get started?

Let’s get both the title and the “big” news of the week out of the way first. As mentioned in previous posts I have been interviewing for a job, and I just accepted it. That means I get to add another in a string of very different job titles to my resume. In the past I have been a:

• Computer programmer
• Volunteer firefighter
• Fencer
• Entry level automotive repair technician
• Stone sculptor
• Stone carving instructor

To that list I can now add:

• Substitute shop teacher

The paperwork is still winding its way through the system, but when that is done I will be one of two people able to fill in for the full time shop coordinator when he’s on vacation or out sick. At some level I find this hilariously funny, and yet it is also important and meaningful. It won’t be a lot of work, but it will keep me in touch with the faculty and I will spend some time with art students, helping them accomplish things and being amazed at what they are producing.

That’s really valuable. It’s motivation, and am very happy it is coming to pass.

I have no idea when my first day back on campus will be, but I should mention that any time I wind up working on a Friday the corresponding post that week will probably be delayed. I’m sure you’ll cope.

Changing gears completely, last week I mentioned that I was thinking about making a router table. Well, I did so. I have an ancient router that I hardly ever use for several reasons. It’s clunky and awkward in its design and it’s not a plunge router, so it’s less than ideal for some kinds of work. But if it is permanently attached to a router table it could do me some good.

So this happened all in one day, from design to build to first use:

The first photo shows the new router table clamped to my mobile workbench, the second shows the router hanging from the interior of the table, and the the third shows it stowed in the empty cabinet space in the bottom of the mitre saw stand. It was sized to fit there, and was built entirely with scrap wood. The only things I needed to buy were the 8–32 screws to secure the router itself to the table.

As mentioned, it’s already seen use. Here’s some of the headboard before I used a roundover bit on the MDF component parts:

The first photo shows the bottom right quadrant pieced together, and the second shows some of the bottom left quadrant.

As it happens, MDF 1x2 is rounded over along the sides in basically the same way I am rounding things all the way around. Once I’d completed that, things looked like this:

Well, sort of. In the first photo the right side is fully rounded over and the left side has not yet had that done. The second photo is a close up of the right side.

Next I had to see how the headboard would look when it was painted. These first two decorative patterns are very different, and I needed to know if that would be distracting in the final result. It’s true they will be mostly hidden by the bed, but if I decided they would bother me I could make the top two — visible — quadrants symmetric or identical.

To figure that out, I patched most of the nail holes (the various MDF pieces are glued and nailed to the plywood backing) and applied a coat of primer.

These photos show how things look once that is done. Even with some additional patching going on, and the pieces missing from the ends where the whole assembly will be screwed down, it’s clear the irregular patterns won’t bother me. As a result, I can create new and different patterns in the top two quadrants, and I am sure they will look great.

One thing you can’t see is how I used the router table to round over the edges on the bottom of the various pieces of MDF as well the tops. That’s because of glue squeeze out. When I glue and nail these things down, some glue inevitably oozes out the sides. I wipe it off, of course, but it might still prevent a good fit if I miss a spot. By rounding over the corners on the bottoms I eliminate that issue. The resulting MDF pieces will fit together as closely as the cuts allow.

I am also filling gaps that are too large to paint over. There are a few of those since, as I have mentioned before, nothing here is (or can be) perfectly straight. But once filled and painted you can’t even tell those gaps existed.

All in all this is starting to come together, and I am happy with it.

Finally I want to mention a store that I didn’t know existed. In fact, I would never have guessed it could exist, though now that I know it’s there it makes perfect sense.

As I have time I am working on preparing my indoor studio. I need drawer storage space there, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to get that as part of a really big, solid work table.

I found a cheap, wood, kitchen island countertop that I can use for the work surface. Used furniture seemed like a possible way to get the drawers, and some internet searches eventually lead me to Anzico Hotel Furniture Liquidators.

When hotels remodel, what do you supposed happens to the old furniture? Well, in this area, one of the options is this company. They buy it up and resell it to people like me. If you need 45 identical wall lights, they might be worth considering.

It turns out they have some drawer units that had lights or TVs on top of them, which means they have holes in their tops. But they are durable, large, and cheap. Perfect for my needs. So I went over to the store to pick up two of them. While wandering around examining their stock I took this picture:

You know how every hotel room has art of some kind in it? Well that winds up here too, and for just $10 a copy you can take home quite a few copies of the same piece.

I’m certain most of these are mass produced copies of an original, but at least one stack was made up of many nearly but not quite identical paintings. It makes me wonder where such things actually come from, and who is paid to create art for hotels and office buildings. I can’t imagine it’s a lucrative job, but there is the distinct possibility it pays more than the average artist actually earns. There’s a thought.

Anyway, if you want ten copies of a random painting for some reason, now you know where to go.

That brings us to the end of another update. Tune in next week for all the random weirdness that is fit to share. Cheers!