the end of an era...

Welcome back friends. This week I went to war with the planer, Jenny went to war with cold weather, Caleb went to war with me, and this is the last cutting board we ever made in the old shop and I almost threw it out. Stick around to figure out how you can get it. A funny thing happened when we started facing our fears. Our dreams came true. Now we fly into the world's most dangerous storms as hurricane hunters, we own multiple businesses as entrepreneurs, and we have an abundance left over to share with others. We have just one lesson to share. Don't follow your passion. Follow your fears and conquer them with your passion. That's how you achieve big goals. Hey guys, just a quick announcement. This week in the stud stack is going to be Soiree Sunday. It's once a month we hop in there and do a huge video chat with everybody. We give away a big prize every month and this month we're going to be giving away an iPhone. Not this one, this is mine, but another one just like it. Here is a list of all the things we've given away in Soiree Sunday's past, but yeah, just wanted to let you know if you've been on the fence thinking about joining for a while, get in this week, that way you can come on Sunday and be eligible for the drawing for the free iPhone. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled video. All right, there's been something plaguing us for a long time and I just walked into the shop through the wrong door, but I'm committed now and I got some stuff to say, so let's take a walk. We have been dealing with some planer snipe in our 20 inch grizzly planer. It's intermittent. It's the worst type of problem. It's intermittent. I don't know what's causing it. If I could force it to snipe every time, I could probably figure out why it's sniping, but I can't. So we've got about 80 more cutting boards that need planing, so I'm going to sacrifice one or two. All right, so I got it to snipe, which is good. I've not had much consistency with the snipe. It is sniping. You can't see it on camera, but it is sniping on the infeed and the outfeed side. Ooh, you can see it there. Okay, so this is where it rubbed on the bed earlier, but you can see there's some snipe here indicated by the wax line here, and there's some snipe on the other side. There's something wrong. I don't quite know what it is. I just know that it happens on the infeed and the outfeed side of each board. The table is perfectly flat. I have adjusted the infeed and outfeed tables a lot. They are perfectly flat. Is it the rollers? Is it the feeders? Is it the chip breaker? Is it the spiral cutter head itself? Is it the board? Am I doing something wrong? Should I be locking something in place? There's so many variables. I just don't know what to do. So I think I've figured it out. I found some very nice bearded men who were talking about how the rollers in the bed... Actually, let me show you. These rollers in the bottom are set from the factory to be a little higher than the bed itself. See how the board rolls on the rollers and doesn't slide on the bed? There's a little bit of rocking there. It looks about the amount of snipe that I'm getting. The suggestion from the nice bearded gentleman online said to lower the rollers level or below the table because those assist with rolling really rough stock through the milling process. I'm not rolling a lot of rough stock through here. It's mostly... I almost want a 120 grit finish on these boards when they come off. So I need to lower those rollers. I hope I never have to set those back up because I don't even know how I would go about setting them up the correct amount of height. I'm glad I'm getting them down and out of the way and I don't have to adjust them. But... All right. So they're not rolling. So... All right. Let's see if that solved the problem. I hope that did it because that would be a really easy fix to a problem that's been a thorn in my side for a long time. All right. So I ran it through a few more times and there's less snipe, but it's not completely gone yet. So I really don't know what the problem is. Maybe I've got to lower the feed rollers to compensate for the base rollers that I dropped. I don't know. I guess it's back to the computer for more research. So this is the part where I realized that I'm an idiot or more of an idiot than I already knew I was. Let me show you what I did. So before we moved the shop from the garage to here, I thought, let's go ahead and do all the preventative maintenance on the tools that I can so that all I got to do when we move into here is worry about re-squaring anything that got jostled during shipping. It says add oil every 24 hours of operation. So I just unscrewed the thing, dropped some oil down and screwed it back in. I didn't know that the height of how far they're screwed in had anything to do with the function of the planer. These adjust the tension on the rollers. And I think they're pushing down way too hard because I made them flush with the thing and they're supposed to be an eighth of an inch above. Why didn't they put that on the sticker? If you got a sticker telling me to oil it, you need to have a sticker telling me the tolerance of how to put it back in. Just whatever. So now I need to adjust these to where they're an eighth of an inch above and then check it out. See how that works. All right, great. We fixed it. No snipe anywhere. I would say that is about as good as I can ask for. Man, that's nice and smooth. Not only does the snipe look bad on the cutting boards, we're going to drum sand them. So that's really not a huge concern because I can get rid of it at a later step. But when we mill these little slats on the planer, the glue edge goes through the planer. And if there's snipe, that means there's little gaps here on the edges of when I go to glue all these up. So we'll ruin, we'll have to throw away an entire board because there's gaps right here that don't get filled with the glue because there's too much snipe on the ends. So this is really going to help cut down a lot of our scraps. I know a lot of you are just laughing in the comments right now at how I've got all this equipment and I don't know how to use it. But let that be an inspiration to you. I didn't know how to adjust anything on this planer, but it's already made us $30,000-$40,000 worth of products. So you do not need to be an expert. You just got to jump in and be willing to look like an idiot and the money will come. So it's been really cold here in Houston the last few days. At least for Houstonians. But Jenny's even colder because right now she's flying through winter storms with the Hurricane Hunters. It's one of the things that we do in the off-season for hurricanes is we fly through winter storms off the west coast of the United States. They carry a lot of moisture. They dump a lot of snow and ice and rain all over the United States and the more research we can do on them, the better we can prepare for big freezing events like you saw in Houston last year. Remember with all the blackouts and the energy crisis and all that? Yeah. And in tonight's top story, Houstonians wake up to record low temperatures, mountains of snow and sleet, and blackouts across the area. So it's just been me and Caleb here this week and we've been very productive. It's been really hard for Jenny because she was so excited to start off the new year and make a ton of sales and everything, but you know, duty calls and we got to go when these storms are active and that's right now. So man, even serving in the military part-time is still a huge time sacrifice. We love it. Don't get us wrong. Like it's a ton of fun, but it really does take a large bite out of our schedule. You guys bought all of our scrap lumber in like the first five minutes of posting that video. Remember the last video where we said we were selling our scraps? Yeah. So a lot of you were a little confused as to why we're selling the scraps. So let me try to help you understand. I printed off the order page from one of the guys that bought the scraps and I'm going to keep his name out of it and everything. But basically he's this guy from central Tennessee, far away from a hardwood dealer and he's in a wheelchair. So even if he did get in the car and drive two or three hours to the hardwood dealer, it would be a lot of work for the hardwood dealer to help him pick out lumber and load it in his truck and then he'd have to pay for it at full price and then drive it all the way home. And then he didn't even have a way to get it out of his truck. And so what he was telling us in this letter is that our scraps enable him to get cutoffs shipped right to his front door and he can pick up a 15 pound box of cutoffs, but he can't lift an eight foot long piece of lumber. And a couple of y'all were upset that, you know, it wasn't a good deal or, but guys like that, you, the scraps are not for you. The scraps are for guys like that in Tennessee who can't get to a hardwood dealer. And for him, it makes a ton of financial sense to buy our scraps. So we're just trying to make it a good deal for those it's a good deal for. And the rest of you who can drive to a hardwood dealer, go support your local hardwood dealer. Anyway, can't please everybody. So as I was packing up those boxes of scraps, uh, this is what I found. I almost threw this in one of the boxes scraps. Just looks like a regular cutting board, right? And I was like, there's no gaps, you know, from snipe. There's no, there's no imperfections. Everything looks fine. I'm like, why was this in the scrap pile? This was not in the scrap pile. This is the last cutting board that we made in the garage. And Jenny set it off to the side and I almost threw it out with the rest of the scraps. And then I thought, what in the world am I going to do with this last cutting board? I mean, it's just a cutting board. I mean, it's something fancy, but it's the last one that we made in our house garage. Like this is, this is really important and special to us, but we don't need another cutting board. So then Jenny suggested that one of you might like it. But then the difficult question of, well, who do we sell it to? How, how do we, do we just say first come first serve? Like what do we do? So what we decided to do was that we're going to sell this board. We're going to auction it off. And the money that we make on this board is going to go to helping people in our community. We're going to donate the money we get from this board to a local charity that helps feed homeless kids in our community. Homelessness is a huge problem in Houston and a lot of major cities in the US. And anyway, we're going to feed some kids. There's a link in the description below. Auction goes until I think Friday night. Give us your best bid and you can have this board. We're going to engrave it with whatever you want on it. It'll be just a standard board. But yeah, go bid on the board and money will go for a great cause. And you can have the last board that we ever made in our house, home, garage, shop, business area, place.