As I've grown older my body has become much less tolerant of dust.

I used to do woodwork and DIY with nary a thought to the dust and stuff I was inhaling, but now if I don't wear a mask of some kind when I'm sawing or sanding I end up with a godawful sawdust hangover. Of course, I was also drinking more then so I may not have been able to separate a dust hangover from a beer hangover, but on the other hand I use more power tools now.

One of the larger projects on the list before baby arrives is to set up a workshop curtain in the garage so that the dust thrown up by the small collection of power tools in our possession is not distributed evenly over the cars and the gear we have stored out in the garage now. This is what I was working on last night.

I started off with a couple of 8' lengths of 2"x1" hemlock which is the perfect size to accommodate shower curtain rings. If the truth be known, I had bought the hemlock for another project (some shelves in a wardrobe) but this curtain needs hanging before I get on with any other project, so I'll just buy some more later.

The first thing to do was to measure up and manufacture any brackets that might be needed. I only needed to make one, in the end, using some steel straps left over from installing the garage door opener and bending the metal in the right spots so that I would have something strong and relatively rigid to attach the rails to the ceiling.

I already had a good bracket to attach the other fixed end to the wall, and some lightweight chain to suspend the free ends from the ceiling.

I decided that a rounder top to the rails would be good for a smoother glide than the square cross section the wood came with (as well as provding more clearance for the tops of the curtains), so I whipped out the router table and started setting up a roundover bit on it.

The first cut was very bad since this was the first time I had used the router table, but I got the hang of it. After about an hour of farting around I ended up with two nicely rounded lengths of hemlock - the picture shows the before and after.

I also had a large pile of sawdust (glove shown for scale). This isn't even all of the dust - I used the hoover to clean off the router table.

Next up: hanging the rails. That should be pretty quick.

Posted by Dunx at May 19, 2005 08:18 AM