Paul Sellers has been known to use plywood jaws in years past, but he is using some nice stuff with a lot of void-free plies, and he is not putting dogholes in it. Honestly, though, even the material you have there, if laminated to 1.5" and with just one or two 3/4" dog holes, it should work pretty well and would be easy to replace. If you are on a budget but want to do hardwood, this is a perfect job for red oak.
Beautiful work! Really nice. Mix of solid walnut and walnut veneer ply?
Ultimately, you need both for good power-tool lumber processing, and the surface planer can at least accommodate a jig for face jointing. Get a good blade and you can make a table saw jig that can stand in for edge-jointing, especially if you also have a decent hand plane.
I love my Sawstop Contractor saw, but honestly the biggest upgrade was going from an aluminum jobsite saw to the then 20-year old Taiwan import Contractor saw I had before the Sawstop. I’d say it’s an even bigger step than going from an old-design 110v motor-hanger (of which the Sawstop is last man standing, I think) to a big 220v cabinet saw.
The HF Hercules might not be that bad; it’s lifted a lot of idea from the well-regarded DeWalt jobsite saws. I will second the other people on here and suggest you get something with a 27" cast-iron table, whether new or used (an old craftsman belt-drive can still be a good deal especially with an upgraded fence). The improvement in work handling, accuracy, and stability is absolutely night and day, not to mention that they pretty much all use induction motors which, while still loud when cutting, don’t scream like a banshee the entire time they’re turned on. Putting it on casters somehow will help you live with it in a garage shop more easily.
Barring that, I’d still say get something with the biggest table you can fit, probably a Ridgid aluminum table; consider a folding stand too. A table saw can be insanely versatile, but anything other than lengthwise ripping is a pain the ass without a big stable surface. If you STILL want something small, the DeWalts are the best, but then you’re gonna end up building some bespoke outfeed workstation to bolt it to and/or using all you saved in money and space to get a sliding compound miter saw.
More like you reap what you sow.
This is a question of recently changed House rules. McCarthy was so desperate to have a tenure, any tenure, as Speaker that he stripped all the insulation that even a hyperpartisan speaker normally needs to get routine business done. This has been a drag on Republicans, as congressional obstructionism is red meat for the base, but plays against them in particular with swing voters, so the speaker needed political cover to do the bare minimum to look like they’re functional legislators.
Any Freedom Caucus idiot can demand a vote now, and since Democrats have absolutely zero motivation not to vote for their preferred candidate, a narrowly divided house requires almost unanimous support from the GOP. This means you’ve got 7 or 8 unusually ripe assholes (even by Congress standards) holding up stuff that could easily have 80-90% support even in this political climate.
I think this latest shift to being almost explicitly pro-Russia is going to give pause to a small but noticeable number of of young boomer and Gen X republicans. Fighting Russian hegemony was literally the main foreign policy goal of all US administrations from 1946 to 1990, and it was always a huge talking point that Reagan “beat the Soviets.”
Then, domestically, there’s a move to no longer try to “win” debates in congress and get concessions from the other side, but to simply obstruct. The latest, frankly draconian, immigration bill should have been a huge win for Republicans, successfully locking in some extremely xenophobic policies, and all mostly to release Ukraine and Israel funds that proper Israel-loving Cold Warriors should want anyway! The fact that THIS bill got killed shows there’s no longer an attempt to win “normal” American politics, but to play some other, even scarier game.
So, being from America, my first thought after reading an article with a similar take to yours is that I wish this was the type of political problem that made headline news in my country.
Moving on, what do you think? Did the Irish people let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or was the language so fatally flawed that it could actually make things worse?
As best I’ve been able to suss out, living as I do in a very red state, “grooming” has simply been expanded out to encompass any activity that makes a kid feel like they don’t have to be a cis-het Christian to be a good person.
In Texas, the main consequence is that you can only vote in that same party’s runoffs, but you’ll also get texts and mailers from that party. You can vote for whoever you’d like in the general election.
My district has an R incumbent getting primaried by a Paxton shill but… I just can’t. I already held my nose and voted for some school board people in a general who are way to the right of me, but were obviously less crazy than their opponents, and fortunately it worked out. The incumbent here is barely any less crazy than the challenger, and shit, Paxton is not even on an ideological vendetta, but rather a personally corrupt one that is way more damaging to the GOP’s ability to get things done (which are always bad when not utterly mundane). Abbott’s obsession with vouchers that are always opposed by football-lovin’ rural republicans who don’t want their schools to close and their towns to die is the one that’s so baffling to me. I can pick through it and guess that it comes down to donations from people who stand to benefit from a private school industrial complex fueled by tax dollars, but it’s an odd hill to die on.
The GOP is toxic, and the Texas GOP doubly so. My adding to the number of people voting in a Dem primary will have to do.
By contrast, more Californians voted for Trump than Texans. It’s mostly an urban/rural divide at this point and whether your state government is a horror show or not depends on whether your cities are large enough to create a majority after districts are drawn.
Exactly. It’s a knock on-effect from the way our state and federal systems work that you can actually pull off a veto-proof legislative supermajority in a state like North Carolina, that went for Trump by literally 1.5% and has a Democrat as governor. Even in Texas, the margin in presidential elections is persistent and significant but is about 5:4. There is no one state full of assholes while someplace else is full of only smart and good people.
In this one, tiny, insignificant case, I’m going to give our asshole criminal buddy Trump the benefit of the doubt. This looks more like a transcription error and he really said, “that’s Biden.” The level of general evil insanity from Trump remains deeply troubling of course.
“But when I say that Obama is the president of our country bah bah bah, they go, ‘He doesn’t know that Spiden [sic], he doesn’t know.’ So it’s very hard to be sarcastic.”
Yup.
Also, for OP, pecan is basically interchangeable with hickory. They’re extremely close as trees and similar as lumber.