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On today’s show, we’re talking about learning to sharpen saws, shop lighting options, and where do you get your horse butt.
Click here for the live video version of this episode!
What’s On the Bench
- Marc hosted a guild meetup at his shop and is beginning to pack up the house
- Matt is pressing apples
- Shannon made some panel clamps out reclaimed lumber
What’s New
- Check out Andy Klein’s new panel clamp invention:
- Kevin shared a page with us with really cool animated gifs of Japanese joinery
- Brandon shared a guitar making video that looks like a Japanese action show.
- Brian shared an article on pricing your work
Kickback
- Andrew also had a torrefied handle break on his Veritas chisels. They sent him a replacement of course.
Voicemail
- Tom is making Scorpion shellac
- David wants to make a treadle lathe but is having problems with the axle: use steel tapered alignment pins
- David wants to know whether to go with LED or Fluorescent lighting in his shop. Marc recommends this video from Andy Klein.
- Page is new to saw sharpening and wants to know what files to use and any tips for a beginning sharpener.
- Eric wants to know where to get horse butt strops.
How You Can Support Us
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23 replies on “WT328 – Don’t Want to Eat It But I’ll Squish It”
I am looking into some heated flooring. You may want to look into heated floor where you are moving.
William
Pikesville, Maryland
Hey guys, good episode. I had a comment about the LED shop lights. I like the idea of LED lighting, but look at the lumen output. For the money, fluorescent bulbs (T8) are still the most light output for the money. I know people say LEDs will last 20 years or whatever, but that’s the bulb, not the transformer or whatever powers them. They’ve not proven to last long enough for the average person to see the full savings, since they are so pricey.
Just browsing Home Depot. A Phillips 4′ T8 Fluorescent (2950 lumen, 20,000 hours, 32w) costs $9.47 for a two-pack ($4.73 each). A Phillips 4′ T8 LED (2100 lumen, 36,000 hours, 17w) bulb costs $6.97. That’s a little over two dollars more per bulb.
If we take average lifetime (according to manufacturer) into account. The Fluorescent fixture gives us 12,460,401 lumen*hour per dollar. The LED gives us 10,846,484 lumen*hour per dollar. So Fluorescent are about 13% cheaper up front for the light you are buying. While the LED’s cost half of what the Fluorescent do in electricity.
Modern electronic ballasts help, but Fluorescent lifespan is greatly impacted by what type and brand of ballast they are used with, probably more so than the transformers in LED’s. In the end, LED’s are a lot more affordable.
Reference on Ballast lifespan issues: http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/nlpip/lightinganswers/t8/05-t8-lamp-life.asp
One thought on your calculations. I have been working in energy efficiency (for small commercial sites or residential) for several years and have never seen anyone do that math. Very interesting! But, I think you may also need to take into consideration that the fluorescent lumens are not “directional”. They are going in all directions off the bulbs. I’ve heard estimates of 30-40% of the light you are getting from a typical T8 fixture is “lost” in that it doesn’t go where you want it to. LEDs are much more controllable and you can put the light where you want it.
Thanks again for the bit of math. Cheers – Kevin
Don’t forget the degradation of lumen output over time. This is more for fluorescent than LED
About the loss of directional light: generally you want 3 kinds of light in a space. Directional, in-directional (bounced), and softened (defused).
Go to costco for your led lights. http://www.costco.com/4%e2%80%99-Linkable-LED-Shop-Light-with-Pull-Chain-2-pack.product.100284402.html I have 10 of these in my shop. For $30 each they work awesome.
+1 on the Costco LED fixtures & AMZN tube replacements. I’ve retrofitted all of my FL tubes to LED and they are brighter and now plastic vs fragile glass.
What type of counter sinks do you use? I am looking for a good quality counter sink or counter sink set.
I know Mark was looking for a good set and wondered what he may have settled on.
Love the pod cast,
Paul
A little extra for the beginner saw sharpener. I have found it very helpful to take a piece of pine, drill a hole in it and jam the file in to it such that when you hold the wood level you get the desired rake. (breathing pause). Also I have found that slightly inconsistent spacing of the teeth really is a good thing. In fact the only thing I think really matters is that the teeth are at an even height, otherwise the saw will have a tendency to catch at certain points. At least that has been my experience.
I have two old tenon saws that I have filed my self and the Veritas molded spine dovetail saw. All are filed 12-14TPI rip, and they all rip great. However for crosscutting the Veritas saw really wants to grab the wood, and thus requires a really light touch for crosscuts. The two tenon saws on the other hand crosscuts just as well as they rip. I think this is because the extremely consistent teeth of the Veritas tends to start making notches at regular intervals, and suddenly all of the teeth fall in to these notches at the same time. While with the slightly inconsistent teeth means only a few teeth are in such a notch at any given time, which makes for a smoother experience.
If you use the right scorpion your shellac might fluoresce under black light.
I replaced some of my T8 fluorescent bulbs with LED tubes I got from Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Hyperikon-equivalent-UL-Listed-DLC-Qualified-Tombstones/dp/B00OMAIG2S/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8). I used my existing fixtures and had to do some simple rewiring to remove the ballast in the fixture. Worked well for me since I had one fixture where the ballast had stopped working so it was an easy choice to replace the flourescent bulbs with LEDs rather than replacing the ballast. These LED tubes run on 120v so there is no need to add a 12 volt transformer that is needed for the 12v LED strip lights I have used elsewhere in my house. I have several other flourescent shop lights that I will upgrade to LED when my existing flourescent bulbs burn out. You can check out the lumen output and Kelvin specs on the website. I am happy with them.
Hope that mini-split can keep up with the low temps in Colorodo. They say they are good to 5 degrees F but I find under 30 ours (Mistubishi) struggles to provide heat. Hope it works for you – nothing better than a mini-split.
-Kevin
I won’t be counting on it as my sole source of heat. From what I understand it probably won’t be adequate.
Well, it will definitely provide some heat and at a lower cost than other options. You will have lots of sun so perhaps think about some windows and passive solar. At the worst case, you will just give yourself more light in your shop.
Cheers
Kevin
Two advantages to the LEDs that weren’t mentioned, No Slow start in a cold garage and no broken fluorescent bulbs to clean up.
Shannon mentioned that he wanted to go to a lower power dust collector for his planer. I have the 15″ Grizzly (he has, I believe the 20″) and the manufacturer does specify a minimum CFM to clear chips.
I also do mostly handwork & use a lot of air-dried lumber. What I found with a low powered DC (Delta 1hp) is that on kiln dried the clearing was OK. On green or air dried, the chips tended to stay together more (not really sticky, but moved in a mass). I ended up going up to a 2HP DC with a canister & putting a vortex in-line. Also, even a 15″ planer will fill a trashcan with shavings really, really fast. The bag on the wall might work if you are only taking a single pass but resizing from 6/4–>4/4 for any amount of wood will probably require multiple halts to empty the bag.
A couple of things. First the horse but leather. I did an ebay search and found a number of sellers with nice pieces a good size for a strop. They are mostly round the $20 mark. In the end I got a good sized piece for around $20 Australian including shipping. They are mostly US sellers so they should be even cheaper for you guys. Second re the T8 LED replacements. I bought daylight boxes of 10 for AU$120 from ebay which were brighter than tubes and used less than half the power. The advantage for LEDs is that they do last way longer, they don’t fade after about 6 months and they use half the power. If you have a large area then the savings are substantial. Again they should be cheaper again in $US.
Having trouble downloading the latest episode as an mp3 file is this because of the the recent changes you mentioned earlier on with archives? What can i do to get around this problem.
P.S. love show
LEDs are great, only be cautious with the refresh rate as some of the cheaper versions have slower rate (hz) that can be seen on video. Won’t always be able to see it on the monitor but you will on playback.
I have been switching all of my lighting over to LED. I bought replacement lamps for one of my fluorescent’s that used T12 lamps. You disconnect the ballast so there is no lose there and they work great. At $10 a piece I’m going to take my time replacing all of them but the first set worked out so well I’m going to make the investment. Mine came from Amazon and were sold by Sunco
I’ve had good luck with American lights LED fixtures from rockler. they were 50 bucks. when I was building my shop our contractor got them for even less from a local lighting supply shop. They are The same shape and size as the T8 fixture, but there’s no ballast to replace. the LEDs are affixed inside a protective cover which I would think would be beneficial in a workshop setting
Has anyone considered or used the 2′ x 4′ led panels? Similar to a troffer setup but they’re less than a half inch and don;t have to be recessed. You can mount the driver remotely just like Andy did. I’m not sure if there’s a cost savings in getting them as large panels as compared to Andy’s strips.