BobVila.com

Here are some tips for laying down a nice stone walkway outside your home. After making the walkway with string, the first step is to lay a foundation of stone dust. When it's level, begin laying in the stone pieces. It may take a bit of planning to get a perfect fit. Once they are in place, tap tham tight with a hammer and a piece of scrap wood. Finally, sweep the excess dust into the cracks to prevent shifting and insure a compact fit.

Here's how to streamline a job that requires a lot of hand-sawing. First cut a block of scrap wood to accommodate about a third of a sheet of sandpaper. Then recycle a supermarket plastic foam tray and cut a piece the size of the block. Glue these together and wrap the sandpaper around them. You'll get a smoother surface and your sandpaper will last longer.

Here's a tip to help you drill neater holes in plywood. A common complaint with plywood is that it can splinter on the bottom when you drill through it. To keep this from happening, just clamp a thin scrap of wood under the plywood. Then drill your hole through both layers. When you remove the scrap, you'll find a clean hole every time!

Bob meets Ryley outside the Victorian style house in Massachusetts to help him with the railing. Ryley starts with two by six vertical grain fir for the top railing and routes out a ridge for the balusters and applies standard moulding to the sides. Bob and Ryley head back to the workshop to create the balusters. Ryley traced the pattern from an antique baluster to create the design to create a form. They trace the pattern onto individual pieces of wood and cut out the pattern with a band saw and scroll saw. The meticulous hand cutting is what leads to the beautiful antique pattern. Back out at the site Ryley shows Bob a tip for dealing with the quirkiness of antique wood. He builds a template by scribing the angle on scrap wood then cuts the railing using this form. Bob uses sugar pine for the corner angles.

Bob meets with Dave Parker to tour the MacMillan-Bloedel parallam engineered wood beam factory. Outside is a car and beam supported by cardboard boxes demonstrating the strength of parallam beams. David explains they use both good and waste Douglas Fir veneer to create their beams. The veneer pieces initially have a high moisture content, so they are first passed through a dryer that blows three hundred degree air on the sheets of veneer. After they are dry, they are put into a shredder, which cuts the veneer sheets into large strips. A gap in the conveyer belt allows the small strips to fall through. These scrap pieces of veneer are used to fuel the dryer. Next resin is applied to glue the strips together. A belt moves around and from side to side so the strips drop into a trough parallel and overlapping, key factors in the strength of a parallam beam. The trough is thirty inches deep and, after it is filled, it is compacted to a depth of eleven inches. Next, the beam is cured in a microwave to ensure a secure bond. It is passed through a cooling station and then a saw cuts it to the desired length. After cutting, the beam is inspected for imperfections, and once approved, is then wrapped and shipped.