Susan Gets Lazy: Friday Update
I have two topics this week, updates on the Lazy Susan and an update on my blog content. Before we dive in, it was in the 80s and 90s up here all week. Beautiful weather to sit on the patio with an ice cold beverage, not so great to be in a hot, dusty shop sweating profusely, but I managed.
The Lazy Susan
The saga of the world’s largest Lazy Susan continues with more progress. I started the week with a big panel. You’ll notice the panel is not a square. That’s because I like to cut corners. Here, let me explain.
I made roughly a 48 inch square to cut out a 46 inch circle. Square corners would have wasted 642.1 square inches of wood. By leaving the corners of the circle off to begin with I was able to save a whopping 340 square inches of waste wood. That translates to 4.7 board feet (volume of wood,) and at $5.77 a board foot that means a little measuring equated to saving $27.11.
I also realized I had just barely enough wood for this project. By barely, I mean I didn’t have enough unless I cut some corners. So not only did it save me an enormous amount of money, it also saved me a trip back to the lumber yard.
All that to say, I took a somewhat circular looking object and made it a true circle. I used a router jig I purchased from Rockler. It’s a simple jig for circles, but doubles as an ellipses cutting jig. For a circle it’s simple. Screw the jig down in the middle of the board and use that as a center to draw a perfect circle around the board using the router bit.
Progress shot. The jig is attached to my router with the black thing in the center being it’s center finder. The ring is the Lazy Susan hardware I am test fitting. And you can see the outside ring is cut. It is currently filled with sawdust. This process created a ton of dust.
I made two light router passes before resetting the jig to cut the circle for the Lazy Susan hardware. This way I knew the jig would be perfectly centered. All I had to do was figure out how wide and deep I needed to make the circle for the hardware.
Finally taking shape, and it spins! You just can’t see it because this is a picture.
Once both circles were cut, the jig could come off and I could finish cutting the outside with a jigsaw. I did it this way to remove the excess waste so the router didn’t have to work as hard.
If you are not familiar with cutting in the middle of material with a router I’ll give you a brief explanation why I did this. See, the router spins a blade in a circle, just like your car spins it’s wheels. Now cutting with the wheel will cause problems. The bit will want to act like a wheel and take off, ripping the router from your hands. That’s why you cut against the spinning motion so the router wants to push itself into the cut, rather than pull away.
When cutting straight through material the router can be a bit jittery, wanting to run away but having no where to go, which can leave a rough cut.
The way around this problem is to take very light passes, but that takes forever. So the alternative is to cut off the outside bits so they aren’t in the way, then do a deeper pass but removing less overall wood as it’s just a thin sliver left behind.
But how can I do that in a perfect circle if I already removed the jig? I’m glad you asked. I use a flush trim bit. The bit has a bearing the exact size of the cutting shaft. I can run that bearing along the edge I cut initially with the router in the jig to clean up the leftover and have a perfect circle.
And before we move away from the router, the last cutting action I had was to create an edge profile with a few different bits to somewhat match the clients table. It won’t match perfectly because the existing table is 2 inches thick and this is only 3/4ish. So I opted for a combination of bits used in a specific sequence to get the profile shown.
Oh, and I took a hand plane to the entire thing to get it flat. The bottom isn’t flat, but close enough at the edges to make it look good.
With that, this Lazy Susan is ready for her makeup (finish) so she can be nice and pretty for delivery.
The first finish step is to seal the wood with water based polyurethane. Next, I will paint, then scrape/distress the paint and coat that with more polyurethane.
Traffic shift
When I started my blog and for the first year the traffic to it and my site was largely driven through my efforts promoting my blog. I promoted largely through social media sites such as LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.
The way my analytics work is I see four sources of traffic. Direct, Social, Search, and Referral. Direct is people typing in my website name or going through bookmarks. Social are clicks through from my posts. Search comes from a search engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, whatever that is. And referral is when a site has a link to my site and the traffic is directly from them (backlinks to other blogs for example.)
But recently I have seen a shift. The single highest traffic source has shifted from a near tie between social and direct to search. So far this month search traffic is about 40% of my overall traffic. On top of that my traffic has gone from roughly 200 page views per month to 500.
This is not to toot my own horn, but to share an observation I am seeing and let you know what that means for my blog and the articles you love to read.
The top performing blogs are those where I am teaching a woodworking skill. Turns out people come to my site to learn. Good thing for me because I built this blog to teach.
Interestingly, I’m seeing the same trend in my video traffic. They aren’t my best performing videos, but my teaching videos continue to grow even months after release. Retention is high, views are on the rise, and why? Because I’m teaching.
I’m sharing this to say, it’s working. My mission is to help others grow their craft, to learn new abilities, to pursue their passion.
What does this mean for my blog? My Friday Update will not change. This is my forum to share what I have in progress. But you will see more woodworking centric content. I plan to teach more skills and help other woodworkers learn and grow their craft.