Captain Aggravated

It’s a bit like how you’ll see things advertised as being made of “aircraft grade” aluminum.

I’m an aircraft repairman, there is no such thing as “aircraft grade” at least in the United States; the aviation industry does not maintain its own standards for metallurgy, it uses SAE standards, and a lot of different alloys get used in aircraft for various applications. Sheet metal skin and structures is usually 2024-T3, you’ll see 6061 or 6065 in castings, hell they make pure aluminum rivets for fastening placards. So most things that say “aircraft grade” on them usually mean they’re 6061-T6 or similar. which is legal for use in aircraft construction if its properties are called for in the design. It’s just some wank they can legally get away with putting on retail packaging.

The plan is the same for people stealing spikes and rail to sell as scrap: Railroad police don’t fuck around.

Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so it’s better to burn it. It’s also better to burn the methane that is going to be released from sewage anyway and leave fossil fuel gas trapped in the Earth’s crust.

Thanks! I just put the last coat of varnish on a little table for my porch, I’ll probably post about it on woodworking@lemmy.ca tomorrow.

First of all I thank you for your kind words about my work. I didn’t really set out to become a shaker woodworker but I find myself attracted to the elegance that comes of simplicity. I plan on tackling some mission-style builds in the not too distant future as well.

I’ve been considering what values I’d want to run a furniture shop under, and here are a few I’ve got:

I don’t want to use exotic foreign timber in my work. What business do I have shipping birch, ebony and mahogany from the other side of the planet when I’m surrounded by oak, walnut and cherry? I live in a forest, my work need not involve a container ship and a trans-Atlantic voyage’s worth of bunker oil.

Even then I would like to use storm fallen or culled timber rather than farmed or clear cut. There’s a storm fallen white oak laying in my uncle’s lawn that I really need to haul off to the sawmill.

I would love to run my shop on rooftop solar and tell the power company to suck some of their coal ash back out of the Cape Fear.

And I would really like it if I could put my sawdust and small scraps to good use, even as stove fuel. I am aware that there are forests being torn down and the wood chipped and then sent by bulk cargo ship elsewhere in the world as “biomass fuel” because “lol not fossil fuels.” Which isn’t fucking great, to say the least. I would much rather find uses for what are otherwise waste products, like my sawdust.

I’m gonna play this a little closer to the chest but I also have similar ideas for exactly what furniture I build and how I build it.

Oh shit I’m starting to develop a reputation.

I have briefly looked into doing it myself, and it’s just not there near-term.

Not only do you need a pellet press, you need a hammer mill to make sure the sawdust is the correct consistency, and then there’s apparently also an ideal moisture content. I use kiln dried lumber so there may need to be some adjustment there…it’s a few thousand dollars of equipment, I have no personal need for wood pellets, so it would just be easier to find someone who is already in that line of work to sell or even give my grit to. Starting a business and

I smelled a business opportunity as well; because when I make a trip to the dump to haul out sawdust and offcuts and things like that, I pay about $10. If I could sell the same amount of sawdust for $10, I’m $20 up. It would be a way to turn an expense into an income.

I can’t be that accurate about the sawdust I generate for a few reasons: 1. I’m still working as a hobbyist for the moment, sometimes I go weeks without building anything, sometimes I build two tables at once. 2. Sometimes I build a bookcase out of plywood and it generates very little dust, sometimes I mill my own rough sawn oak and a single table makes a garbage bin full of shavings. 3. Some of my equipment gets used outdoors and I don’t bother gathering the chips (yet). It ends up blown into the woods behind my property. Last year I hauled 2 mostly full 200 gallon garbage cans of dust, chips, shavings and small scrap to the landfill.

Well here’s a wrinkle: I’m a woodworker, a hobbyist at the moment but I’m thinking of starting to sell furniture. Even at a hobbyist level building a table every couple weeks, I can generate pickup truck full of sawdust in a year. I currently dispose of this by hauling it to a landfill. I know of at least one fuel pellet manufacturer that will buy sawdust and planer shavings. Which would you rather me do with my granular wood waste?

Water heaters can work via the refrigeration cycle as well.

It is exactly that. “Heat pump” is the term used for an air conditioner that can run both ways, it can pump heat from inside out in the summer, and from outside in in the winter. An “Air conditioner” only runs one way.

What does “a good heat exchanger” look like in this case? You compress air, the pump heats up, so you ventilate it to keep it cool. The air in the tank is hot, and starts to cool as it sits in the tank, and this causes a decrease in pressure, which is why even with no leaks a shop air compressor will run for awhile, stop, then after awhile cut back on again.

I get that I’m applying a shop tech’s “machines that I can move with a hand truck” understanding to factory-size operations here but…

pumped water or flywheels maybe? you lose a lot of energy compressing gas to heat dissipation.

I build or repair for myself where I can.