Single thread to handle queue based logging

[impacted]

Usually I can figure problems I run into on my own with a little reading and experimenting, but this one has me stuck. All I am doing is creating a thread subclass that loops, pulling items off queue and writing to file. The problem I run into is that absolutely nothing is being written to disk. I came up with this design from a link in this thread: Writing into a File in a Multi Threaded app., using BlockingQueue. Here is the thread subclass which handles the queue and writing the items to disk:

public class server_log extends Thread {
	static final String newline = System.getProperty("line.seperator");
	final private String LOG_FILENAME = "searchserver.log";
	private BlockingQueue<String> log_queue = new ArrayBlockingQueue<String>(50);
	private PrintWriter log_file = null;
	
	public server_log() throws IOException {
			log_file = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(LOG_FILENAME, true), true);
			start();
	}
	
	public void add_log(String log_data) {
		try {
			log_queue.put(log_data);
		} catch (InterruptedException e) {
			System.out.format("Problem adding to log queue\n");
		}
	}

	public void shutdown() throws IOException, InterruptedException {
		log_queue.put("SHUTDOWN");
		log_file.close();
	}

	// ***Thread - Pulls items off queue and writes to disk
	
	@Override
	public void run() {
		String log_data;
		Date present;
		DateFormat dateFormatter = DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, DateFormat.SHORT, new Locale("en","US"));
		do {
			try {
				log_data = log_queue.take();
				System.out.format("'" + log_data + "' taken from queue\n");
			} catch (InterruptedException e) {
				log_data = "SHUTDOWN";
			}
			if(log_data.equals("SHUTDOWN"))
				return;
			else {
				present = new Date();
				log_file.print("[" + dateFormatter.format(present) + "]: " + log_data + newline);
				System.out.format("'" + log_data + "' written to log\n");
			}
		} while(! log_data.equals("SHUTDOWN"));
	}
}

In my main thread, I wrote:

public class searchserver implements Runnable {
	static server_log log;

And when I wanted to start the logging thread, in main() method:

log = new server_log();

I added a few lines to print output to console for debugging purposes, and this is the output I'm receiving:

'Index file loaded successfully.' taken from queue
'Index file loaded successfully.' written to log
'Server bound on port: 31337' taken from queue
'Server bound on port: 31337' written to log
'Server started successfully!' taken from queue
'Server started successfully!' written to log

I'm guessing it is something elementary, but I have read up on multithreading from numerous resources, from books to the Oracle.com site, and spent some time brushing up on the file i/o operations as well, and cannot seem to figure out what is causing nothing to be written to the log file. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[impacted]

Due to lack of any responses I am re-posting this in the Threads and Synch forum. Here is a link to this post on that forum: Single thread to handle queue based logging

[impacted]

Solved in the other post!

[Fubarable]

Please don't double post

[impacted]

Shall I request it be moved to another forum instead? My apologies, maybe was a bit impatient after working on this for a couple days and getting nothing :p