The Splinter Report: June 13th

Welcome to The Splinter Report, where I gather the assorted interesting and amusing things I’ve seen in the woodworking world. This week we’re looking at a shop class survivor, a new hack from Reddit, and the latest Dewalt drill.

Tool News Quick Bites

Dewalt Launches 20V Multi-Head Drill Driver: While I try to avoid naming favorite tools in general, I do have several go-to tools that get used more often than others. One of those is my 12V Dewalt multi-head drill/driver. I used it in the shop for light tasks, but also all around the home and even some automotive use. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited by the prospect of a more powerful version.

Local Oddity: Shop Class Survivor Edition

This oddity is actually very local: my own three-season porch. My Mom picked up this piece of furniture nearly 30 years ago at an auction in South Dakota. She later passed it on to me, and for the past few years it’s been living in my porch/dive bar as a game cabinet. What stands out to me is that this piece is simultaneously very ugly, yet undeniably functional. Given the blotchy nature of the staining, questionable grain orientation, and exposed plywood edges, it’s certainly a DIY piece of furniture. I can tell that it was originally built as a record cabinet, which implies it was probably built by someone young.

That’s not featured grain, it’s brush strokes.

Despite its likely origin as a high school shop project, the cabinet has held up surprisingly well over the years, throughout several moves and a whole lot of abuse and sitting upon. It’s a good lesson that not every piece of furniture needs dovetails or hardwood to reach heirloom status.

Random Reddit: New Hack

Reddit user RustyPhoenixCo stumbled upon a strange hack on accident recently, as you can see below.

So I feel I’ve destroyed a woodworking hack. The
byu/RustyPhoenixCo inwoodworking

There’s a science behind it too, and Reddit user cowboyphoto breaks it down (long read but worth it):

Physicist here.

For just about any atom or molecule, you can excite electrons into higher order shells that are still stably bound to the parent atom/molecule, often by shining a light with enough energy for the electron to do so.

For something that fluoresces, these electrons happily jump back down to their ground state almost immediately, emitting a photon of light as they go (which is required for energy conservation). You can observe this as a light that is emitted from the object when you shine a different light on it, like say a black light, which is a high energy UV light that causes a lot of everyday things to fluoresce. Note that the light that fluoresces is lower energy than the input, which again is required for energy conservation.

Glow in the dark materials have certain transitions that are “forbidden”. It means that the electrons effectively get up to these excited states, but because of the requirements of certain quantum conservation laws, they can’t easily go back down to ground, and they often have to do so via an indirect path.

In effect, what this means is that the electrons are “stranded” at the higher order shells, and instead of immediately dropping back down to ground, they do so over a delayed time. This is the glow in the dark phenomenon.

This is also why a glow in the dark item has to be charged by light in order to glow. If you keep it in an opaque box, it doesn’t get any light, and the electrons can’t get excited by light up to the higher shells. If you leave it in the sun for a few hours, though, it will charge and then begin to exhibit glow.

Here’s the INTERESTING thing. The temperature here, even from the friction, almost certainly isn’t high enough to enable the transition to the higher electron shells. Instead, the tape is already charged because it’s in the light.

What’s actually going on is that the heat is speeding up the “forbidden” transitions! The already charged tape is actually emitting all the time that it’s exposed to light, but we just can’t see it because it’s so dim compared to the well-lit environment.

The heat that is added from the router bit friction is causing the already-charged tape to start emitting at a much faster rate than it typically would, which enables you to see it in the light!

You could confirm this by rapidly turning off the lights after observing this phenomenon. I’d suspect that you’d be able to see a delineation between the areas that were visibly emitting and those that were not.

Either the emitting regions would still be brighter because they are still hot and emitting faster, or more likely they will be darker or perhaps not bright at all because all their excited electrons have already been grounded!

Video of the Week: Learn More Than Expected

When I first started watching this video, I thought I was simply getting a how-to on making this particular project. What I was actually getting was a quick course on running a production shop, the challenges of ethical manufacturing, and yeah, a bit on how to build a gravity bar, if you’re so inclined.