Still Kicking

It has been a terrible winter for me. I don't mind the cold, if it gets cold and stays cold. This Mississippi winter though has been a roller coaster ride for temperatures though, and that keeps me in terrible pain all the time. So I haven't really done any of my normal project all winter. Well, I've done nothing since my last post actually.
I've gotten emails lately though. First of all, thank you all for your concerns about my well being. Because of you readers who have emailed me, I thought that it was time to post to let you all know that I'm still kicking. As soon as things get back to normal for me, I'll be posting again. I promise.
In the meantime though, let me show you a couple things I have been working on.
This picture shows the type of stove we did have in our house. It is the insert type that goes into the counter top. Then we had a small oven that fits into the wall, or wall of a cabinet actually. Anyway, the one in the photo is the second one since we moved into this house. Just like the first one, the heating elements have started failing on it. We hate replacing it, because they are not cheap.
Also, my wife absolutely hated the oven. It was simply too small. As most of you know, my wife and I have eight kids, seven still living at home. When my wife cooks, she doesn't cook snacks. She needed a full size oven.

So anyway, we got a full size stove, with full size oven, and ceramic top, a feature my wife had been wanting. I got the stove to my shop and had it sitting there, still in the box. My plan was to do it in the spring when I feel better. I could tell every time she walked by that box though that she couldn't wait to get her full size stove in.

So, after some cabinet butchering, I, along with some help, got it in. It wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. The hardest part of the job was fixing some wiring issues. The old stove was straight wired, and after disconnecting it, the line wasn't long enough to reach and install a plug for the full size stove.

The stove job is not finished. As you can see in the photo, I still have to trim around the stove area. Also, the now disconnected oven still has to be removed and I will be refinishing that cabinet area to make use of the hole where the oven is now. She has her stove where she can use it though. The rest of it can wait until a pretty spring weekend when my older sons are off work and can help me.

The other project I've been working on off and on, as my health allows, is a wooden band saw.

Now I know when someone thinks of a shop made tools such as this, they probably think it's something thrown together that isn't safe or accurate. If there are any doubts though, you can go here and check out finished photos and videos of what we're building.

I say "we're", because there is actually two of them being built in my shop. I got into this with a friend of mine from Clinton, Mississippi. He's the one who first proposed the idea. I was skeptical at first. However, after going and researching the guy who designed this, I felt it was worth my time.

I have wanted a good band saw for some time that was capable of resawing wide lumber. This will save me time, work, and money. However, a factory made band saw of this size can run upwards of a thousand bucks, easy. When we finally complete these, I feel we'll have something that is as good, or better, than anything we could have bought, and we'll each have a little over a hundred bucks in it. That price does not include wood because, between the two of us, we had enough wood to build them.

This is something we are putting a lot of time into. The guy who designed this built his out of mostly spruce. Ours are going to be done in all red oak. When we're done though, we both want a band saw that will do what we want and still be around one day for our grandkids to say, "my grandfather built that".