G'day from snowy Ontario!
G'day all. Originally from Holland Park in Brissie I moved to Toronto 10 years ago to be with my bride to be and we are now married 5 years with 2yr old twin daughters. We bought our first home in Aug 2007 to the East of T.O. in Oshawa and I finally got around to putting together some decent tools in early 2008. So far I have my ts, router, planer, spidle/belt sander and a variety of power and hand tools.
My furniture from home arrived in August this year and I've been restoring it a bit at a time while trying to keep up with my girls and putting the house and yard into some kind of shape. I haven't had much time or space to build much yet, just some jigs, a fence for my router table and the odd knick knack so far. I was planning to surprise my in-laws with a magazine rack in roasted curly maple for Christmas but I ran into some problems including an end unit falling off my assembly area and shattering so I have had to delay the gift giving for now. I'm also half way through building a mobile workcentre to house the table saw, a new router table unit, a downdraft sanding station and all the accessories for those items. I finished my mobile planer stand with infeed/outfeed tables a couple of days before Christmas.
I'm coming home for a couple of weeks in January and I'm hoping to find supplies of hardwood that I can have shipped back to Canada as the availability of Aussie board stock is pretty slim around here. The store I drive to on the other side of T.O. for my r-c-m had some Mallee burls and 2 Jarrah boards but that was all. Dressed 4/4 about 8" wide and 4' long for $C160 per board!! Not bloody likely! I have four or five other lumber yards around here but most don't stock Aussie woods. There's a fair bit of South and Central American and some European woods available as well as the usual local species but I'd like a bit of home grown stuff every now and again!
Anyway, I'm looking forward to doing some reading and some posting here.