I finally finished up the magazine rack I wrote about earlier. Here it is in production …

I’m quite happy with the end result. It’s a simple, clean design with a few nice elements. I’m also very happy with the way my first dovetails turned out. This is in fact a “sliding dovetail” (I think). You can see them in action in the feet of the stand.

To finish the piece, I began by sanding it with my beautiful Festool RO 150. <gush>There’s something to be said for great tools. Whether hand tools of electric, a well machined tool is a truly a pleasure to use. This sander is smooth and comfortable and does an incredible job at any speed and grit.</gush>

Now that I have that out of my system … I sanded to 320 grit. I have been using a bit of Shellac lately so I thought I’d apply it to this job as well. In the past I’ve found that it can give too orangy a finish for my likening so I thinned it out making a 50/50 mix of Methylated Spirits and my Shellac mixture. Applying three coats of this gave me a really nice solid finish which still showed off the wood grain.

The finish touch was a very thin coating of wax. I haven’t worked with this before but after my initial experience, I really like the end result. Reading all the tips on it’s application, I took care to only apply a very thin layer of it. Now, the piece is nice and smooth, not sticky in any way and the wood grain shines beautifully as it sits on our loungeroom floor.

Another project done!

After a few weeks getting our house in order, I’ve finally been able to spend some quality time with my tools.

I’m making a very simple magazine rack. My hope is that it will hold my New Scientist and American Mind magazines, but I fear it will end up stuffed with Marie Claire and New Idea instead.

After planning the project and measurements, I began by cutting the pieces that will form the “walls” of the rack. The Festool power tool system came into great effect and use here. In the picture below I have a piece of Tasmanian Oak ready to be cut to length. The Festool TS-55 saw, guide rail and the combination angle make this really easy. The thing I love about it is that you don’t need to worry about drawing your cut line perfectly square. The combination angle attaches to the guide rail. One arm of it sits along the length of the timber keeping it at the your desired angle. Then the saw glides along the rail ensuring your cut is at the perfect angle.

Next came the tricky bit, dovetails. I’m using a dovetail joint to attach the bottom rails to the walls. I haven’t done work like this before so I put my trust again into the Festool system. I also built a little jig to help me keep the joints uniform and repeatable.

Unfortunately, my first results were terrible. I might as well have bashed the hole out with a hammer it was that bad. Perhaps it was my lack of skill, or the fact that I was going about it all wrong. I know you can produce excellent dovetails with the Festool system and a dovetail jig, but I didn’t have the jig and was also a little impatient.

The main issue was the huge tearout the router caused on the right end of the dovetail. I thought about it and realised that as the router bit reached the right hand side, the clockwise rotation of the bit pushed out the wood fibres and caused them to split.

My solution was go back to hand tools. Something I’m not very practiced with yet but am looking to do more of. With a tenon saw, I cut the ends of the dovetail first at exactly the right angle. I then placed the piece into the jig and used the router to clear out the hole. This had significantly better results and gave me a really nice clean edge and flat bottom. It became very clear to me that power tools, although faster, are certainly not always the best tool for the job.

This isn’t about the Jeff Kennet addition to our Victorian number plates, but rather our house move over the weekend. Still with a throat infection, we managed to get it all done in daylight and rain on Monday.

As much as I enjoy bagging other companies out for their poor customer service, I enjoy giving kudos to those few who are an exception. Metro Movers is one of those great companies.

Before the move

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful periods of change you can experience in your life, so I was keen to make it less so in any way that I could. This is where the Metro Movers website gave me my first boost of help. Their FAQ has some great pointers on packing and organising stuff for your move. Many of which I put into practice immediately.

Making this information free to the public, gave me a sense of trust for them. Immediately they appeared to be some type of expert in the field. They realise that moving house isn’t just about moving day and try their best to make the entire experience as stress free as possible.

Loading the truck

Matt and Jess turned up early, in the rain, and immediately set to work. Emma and I haven’t moved like this before so we were exceptionally nervous about things breaking. The blokes exhibited a wonderful balance between fast and careful which put us at ease. Furthermore, they had our entire unit packed up in a little over 2 hours. It was like watching a giant game of tetris albeit a slowish one.

Throughout the entire experience, they both offered advice on how best to organise things and exactly what we could do to help. We couldn’t pack my treasured plasma into the truck (they didn’t have the right box for it - which I forgot to order!) but they did wrap it up carefully and load it into the back of Emma’s car.

Unloading the truck

This went much faster and still with exceptional care. Both Matt and Jess were very careful to not drag mud into our newly cleaned house and helped us to move all the boxes and furniture to exactly where we wanted them. This took a little over an hour with the added difficulty of pelting rain which didn’t seem to bother the guys at all.

Rewarding your employees

Watching these two at work, I suspect that Metro Movers staff are rewarded for exhibiting their organisation’s values. I caught a side conversation which happened whilst loading the plasma into our car. I deduced that our movers would’ve been paid a bonus if nothing was broken during the trip. If it was, they wouldn’t receive their extra $100 odd. This encourage them to take care of people’s belongings - one of the main fears in having someone move your posessions.

This is similar to Zappos paying their new employees $1000 to quit shortly after bringing them on board and training them. In this case, money is used to weed out the people who aren’t interested in delivering exceptional customer service.

I wonder what we could do in our field to motivate our staff to exhibit the values and behaviours? It’s a tricky one because metrics can easily be dodged. For example, if you want to limit the number of bugs in released software, you essentially doom yourself to limiting the number of bugs actually logged/recorded, rather than reducing the actual bug count.

I wonder what other software teams and organisations do to encourage positive behaviours?

On his blog, Scott proposes a new type of credit card account. Essentially a debit card, with an interest free period attached to a savings account. It’s an interesting idea and one which anyone can put into place with a little discipline.

It prompted me to briefly explore our situation. We have a home loan with a bank that forces us to have credit cards. These cards have enormous limits which are a huge risk for us (we can easily tend to overspend!)

What we also have on offer is a 100% offset account. This works by calculating interest on your savings at the same rate as your loan. This interest is then notionally paid off your loan, reducing your monthly repayments. Let’s take this simple example:

• $300,000 loan
• 9% interest rate
• 25 year loan period

In normal circumstances, you would be paying $2517.59 per month on this loan.

If you used your credit card to defer payment of all your bills, and had $5000 sitting in your offset account, your monthly payments would be $2475.63. Saving you $40 a month. Over the 25 year period of the loan, you would save almost $40,000 in interest payments and have your loan paid off a little over a year early.

It sounds like free money. The nice thing is that you don’t have to pay tax on this interest earnt (which is considered income) as you never actually get given it. It is automatically deducted off your loan payments tax free.

In contrast, were you to deposit this money in an interest bearing account at the same rate as your loan, here’s what would happen over 25 years:

• $5000 deposit
• 25 years
• 9% interest
• $47,425 earnt

Not a bad outcome. By saving this money in a compounding savings account, you end up slightly in front over 25 years. Of course, this doesn’t take into account any tax you would need to pay on that amount, nor the fact that is it quite difficult to find savings accounts paying an interest rate the same or higher than what you can borrow at.

For us, we use a little of both tactics. Offsetting our loan payments and using any savings generated to go into an interest earning account. Here’s an example:

Loan:

• $300,000 loan @ 9% interest and 25 year term
• $5000 in loan offset account
• $40 saved each month in loan payments
• $39,188 of interest payments avoided at the end of 25 years

Savings:

• $40 deposit each month into a savings account
• 9% interest rate (for the sake of simplicity)
• $45,089 earnt at the end of 25 years

Even at 7% interest on your deposit, you end up with $32,500 saved.

Whether this is the best use of our money, I’m not sure. I haven’t spent too much thinking about it. But in practical terms for us, it works quite well.

Scott has been anxiously waiting all holidays for pictures of my next backyard adventure, so here they are.

I spent a number of days shoveling soil and rock in 40° heat. Just so we could “finish” our backyard in time for New Years Eve. So in summary …

We started here:

And ended up here:

and here …

A job well done by all if I say so myself!

I finally got around to finishing up our paving on the weekend. What a task - much harder than I initially expected it to be but our yard is all the better for it.

Getting everything nice and square and level was definitely the tougher part of the gig. Plenty of detail work involved in that part.

Unfortunately though, it’s shown up a few other things I need to now get done. Have to get the garden bed in, raise the washing line (’cos I keep head butting it) and build in one more step on the drop into the garage.

Here’s another shot from the other side:

Quite revolutionary for me. Beautiful weather this weekend so I spent it outdoors starting yet another project. This time however, I finished it!

Whilst the Huon Pine coffee table is still a work in progress, I whipped up a nice little outdoor bench out of some smaller pieces of Huon I just happened to have laying about. I wanted to make sure it didn’t have any nail marks so had to resort to using dowel joins.

I am not particularly good at the dowel join thing but I think the end result is still pretty good. I just wouldn’t sit on it!  :-)

Yes, I started another project today. BUT, I finished it too. Well as much as you can finish a garden bed.

After having constructed our deck, we always intended to plant a little garden bed along the end fence-line. Today, I finally got around to doing it. After a drive down to Arthur’s Seat to visit AustPlant, a native nursery near home, a arrived home a little poorer but ready to get stuck into it.

The image shows what it looked like to start with.

I purchased two Pandorea Lady Di climbers and a few Canostylis candicans (Grey Cottonheads) for ground cover.

Of course, it’s never quite that simple, there was some Osmocote stuff (plant food I think), wire, garden ties, etc.

After a bit of measuring and mathematics, I got stuck into the digging, putting in a little plant food for lunch and popping the plants into their new homes. All in all, a pretty easy job and quite rewarding.

I spent the rest of the afternoon stringing up wire so we can guide the climbers and doing some other work on the other side of the garden (with the yet to be completed paving). Will be interesting to see how quickly these things grow. Will post some more photographs in a few months once it’s all established.

Before I got further into finishing my coffee table, I did the typical male thing and started another project. In fact, I started another bigger project.

We’ve been thinking of paving the remainder of our yard, so before summer hit, I thought I’d better get a head start on it. Not knowing anything about paving, I looked to my oracle to help.

A bit of research, some measuring, a few trips to Bunnings for parts (and a sausage), and it’s finally taking shape. The most difficult part was getting the sub-base nice and even. Way difficult when you have a very uneven soil level to begin with.

Compacting the sub-base with a plate compactor made for a few headaches. After a trip back to Kennards and a new spark plug we were back on track. The more I compacted, the more I realised things were quite even. More shoveling rock, more compacting, more leveling.

The end result is pretty good so far. Next week, I’ll be adding the sand, leveling it all up perfectly and then adding the pavers. I’m not good with patience, so the next stage will be quite a test.

In an effort to “get back in touch with nature” I’ve begun my next project. It’s a coffee table. Not just any boring old square coffee table, but one made from Huon Pine and with no electrical assistance.

We bought the block on our trip to Tasmania earlier this year and it has since been sitting in the garage. Last weekend I gave it a good rough sand and clean-up. In doing so, I quickly discovered I had a lot to learn about manually working with wood. A belt sander and electric plane would have done the trick easily, but I wanted a challenge.

Wasn’t that a stupid idea! There are a few marks from the original saw which will take some time to work out as well as some rough edges which I want to keep (but tame somewhat). I bought myself a hand plane and started using it yesterday. It is a lot harder work than I expected but am actually enjoying it.Not much progress to date, but I’ll endeavour to do some work on it each weekend.