Few things about myself

Hi! My name is Dean Wong. Welcome to my homepage. In the past, I can remember writing up biographies of famous deceased people from the past. Now, I get the chance to write my own Biography. First of all, thanks for coming.

Because the HTML editor that I'm using has pretty bad formatting, I'll have to resort to writing without proper paragraph editing. Sorry. Oh, and in case you are wondering, the song's Metallica's "Fade to Black". It just kinda fits the events in my life.

My name is Dean Wong. I live in Northern California. That's all I'm going to say about where I live. I'm currently 15 years old and will turn 16 on October 30. (Don't forget birthday presents!!! Or a simple email will do). While I enjoy working on the computer; creating webpages, updating them, chatting with friends online, writing emails, etc., I refused to believe that I am what one person I know thinks I am, a computer nerd. I AM NOT a computer nerd.Anyways, I enjoy lots of things. I'm not exactly an extreme athlete, playing baseball or football but oh well. Anyways, to find out more about the things I like, click to "Personal Interests" on the main page.

I was born in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, in Hawaii State. Yes, like most people would say, I'm lucky to be born here. I only lived there until I was about 6 years old though.

For the past month or two I've been slowly making progress on my first woodworking project - a small end table. The goal of the project was to start with something small that I could complete all the way, including "furniture" grade finish. We started with the best intentions... We dismissed ideas like a computer desk or built-in bookshelves as far to grandious for a first project. The end table for my theater room would make a great small project that would require too much materials, time, or skill.

Until we started feature creep... first, we decided the table should be round. Then, of course, the stretchers should also be round. Finally, the legs should taper in three directions and the finish should be a high gloss stain and laquer... Oh, and we decided to make the entire table out of Honduran Mahogany, a somewhat pricey (but not ridiculous) wood that is fairly soft and easy to work with...

During this project I had messed up practically every step.

First step was to make the top. milled some stock into three 6" strips which we glued together to form the round top. After waiting for a couple days we determined the top was slightly cupped, but OK. So I went to work on the top using a jig that I used to make the forms for the stretchers (more later). Of course it wasn't until after I cut the top that I realized I didn't take into account the thickness of the router bit, making the top 3/4" short on the radius - given that I only wanted about a 1" overhang, it destroyed the top.

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To build the round stretchers we needed to create glue laminates, which involved cutting a good amount of wood into 3/32" strips that we could glue together. After ripping about 20+ strips we reached the conclusion that they were too thin and inconsistent. Toss that wood.

So here I am, having burnt through about $50 worth of wood. But, I've learned some good lessons. Off to the wood store to get more mahogany.

Measuring more carefully this time. New blade in the band saw. Stretchers come out much nicer, only a few mess ups. Top is looking good - this time we thought aheard and book matched the wood for great symetry of the grain.

We decide to do a three way taper on the legs, leaving the front face nice and flat. Looks nice, but involved some trickiness to get the table saw and chop saw to cooperate.