Woodworking

New Toys! / Tools / Woodworking — 1 Comment
14
Jul 19

DIY intermission

Funny thing about DIY, it gets all the Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor jokes and all the Daddy-Pig jokes, but at the core it’s a repeat of the Arts-and-Crafts movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s which led to things like this:

From the Met Museum : https://www.metmuseum.org/

I mean, it’s not to everyone’s tastes (I don’t like it much personally) but you can’t really argue it’s incompetent or that it’s inferior because it wasn’t just an aesthetic, it was a philosophy – one of using more traditional craftsmanship rather than industrial processes and moving away from the previous mass produced furniture (sorry Henry, but Ford didn’t invent mass production, High Wycombe got there at least six decades earlier and they might not have been the first) which people felt wasn’t as good as human-made furniture (as in, wasn’t as nice to look at, wasn’t built well, and so on). 
If that sounds a bit familiar, well, have a sip of your artisanal coffee and suspend laughing at hipsters for long enough to admit that actually, compared to the burned toast flavoured sludge we used to have for coffee in the 90s and the starbucks of today, coffee made by someone who knows what they’re doing is actually a lot better – and there in a nutshell is the core of the arts and crafts movement (and the DIY movement and the hipsters and probably a few other movements over the centuries since industrialisation). 

Anyway. DIY in this case is a lot less airy and a bit more safety-oriented; the mass-produced MDF kitchen our fridge is in is quite old and after the first decade or so MDF doesn’t really hold up so well it turns out. Or at least old MDF doesn’t, the process may have changed since then so the material is now more robust, but this stuff  is tearing apart and right now there’s a six-foot tall fridge freezer sitting on a shelf where one corner has torn out of its fastening and the whole arrangement has taken on a distinct tilt that I’m not at all in favour of. So an emergency support is getting shoved in until it can be fixed properly.

This is when it’s handy to have some CLS 2x4s around. A bit of planing, some measuring and cutting and a pair of edge joints later…

BTW, you’ll notice one F-clamp has a black and red plastic handle and the other has a purple one – that’s a Rob Cosman trick, it’s hockey stick tape to give more purchase on the handle. Gotta say, it works a treat and I’ll be getting more and doing it to all of the clamp handles. 

Glue will be cured by tomorrow and then I’ll scribe the sides of those uprights against the faces of the feet and then I’ll route out a cavity to set the overall height. Might have to trim or plane the edges of the uprights slightly for that, not sure. We’ll see. 

Really don’t like that tool, but it’s the best fit for this job. Have a new cutter in it as well, the one I intended for the sea in Calum’s desk, a Radian Tools three-flute cutter. Either it’ll be brilliant or it’ll shatter when it hits a knot, but either way I’d rather find out here than on the walnut desk…

Once I’ve routed the cavity to the right depth, I’ll glue and screw the feet to the uprights. Might shape them a little first just so it’s not completely ugly. Then drive them in below the shelf to support it and the fridge until we can get a more permanent fix. 

Also, new toys!

Lidl were selling radio clocks (as in, synced to the german VLF atomic clock transmitter so you never have to adjust the time even if the batteries run out and you don’t replace them for a while) so out with the older larger clock and in with the newer quieter one with the built-in temperature and humidity sensor. Atomic-level accurate clocks with digital thermometers and humidity sensors sold for a tenner as a loss leader to sell you vegetables and own-brand staples. Mass production does have some advantages…

And a new vice. I keep putting off sharpening my saws because they’re a pain to clamp in that small pine stick with the saw kerf that gets clamped into the bench’s face vice, and then when it is clamped properly the teeth are down at bench level and it hurts my back to be bent over the work like that but I need to see what I’m doing to do it and it’s fiddly. So I’ve left the western saws I have on the wall for over a year now and they’re not bad tools and I keep wanting to learn to use them right but I keep coming back to the japanese saws because the western ones aren’t sharp. So, a dedicated saw sharpening vice, found on ebay for €25 including P&P:

It’ll get bolted to a small plank, then the plank goes in the face vice on the bench, so the top of the vice will be much closer to my face and I can see what I’m doing. Fingers crossed it’ll work.

That’s it fully open btw; just enough for a saw plate and then you clamp it shut with a sprung cam. Has a lot more in common with a luthier clamp than it does with a screw vice. 

Not a lot other than that little bit done today. Today was too sunny and it was a weekend so we took the little BBQ on a field trip to Powerscourt waterfall…

Not allowed chop ’em down and make furniture from them though, oh well 😀

Desk Shelf / Stringing / Woodworking — 1 Comment
07
Jul 19

Stringing along…

Finally back in the shed after a few weeks of long work days, and it’s time to try to get the stringing finished. 

First up, prepping some material, cutting the strings and planing the edges reasonably straight, then thicknessing them with the scraper tool which I’ve tweaked slightly. 

Still needs a lot more tweaking though, it’s still rather rough. 

Straight lines first, then on to heat-bending the stringing for the curves…

And after letting the glue set a bit, out with the chisel and lop off the excess and take the stringing down to a few thou over the surface (the final smoothing pass will take everything to the same plane, but I’ll hold off on that until the epoxy and everything else is done). 

There’s a bit of inlay banding for the start/finish line on the racetrack, and then there’s a large blue epoxy sea for the Titanic to sink on, and maybe some other bits and pieces if I can think of any. 
Then time to smooth the surface, and then on to do decoration on the sides and other shelves, run the LED lighting and then I can do final assembly and installation.

Desk Shelf / Stringing / Tools / Woodworking — 2 Comments
12
May 19

Desk inlay

So the box is now done (bar a branding that I somehow forgot and will be trying to do on the roof of the office tomorrow), there was a surprisingly short clean-down and then back to the desk. 

That’s the actual desk itself and my box of education to the left (as in, “why would anyone want furniture built in cherry, it’s so awful and orange” followed by opening the box and seeing what nice cherry looks like and then going “why do we use any other kind of wood?” 😀 Thanks again custard! 😀 )

I have a very basic idea in my head for what the desk surface will be – a racetrack surrounding an ocean complete with iceberg (the Titanic has to be able to hit something after all). There’ll be an outline of stringing for most of that, and an outline around the margin of the desk and probably something on the edges too, just because. And there will have to be something in that back left corner, probably Calum’s name. But first, (well, after a small tidy-up of a corner or two with the spokeshave), the margin. So out with my inlay tools.

New additions to the homemade line cutter and the lie nielsen radius cutter are the veritas inlay chisel (still in the box) and the veritas groove cutter (think of the line cutter, but now in freehand pen form). There’s also a bending form I got for the curved bits because last time I did stringing around curves, the need for one of them became obvious.

And of course the trusty pizza cutter with the tungsten carbide blade…

So I cut the margin stringing groove first.

And then laid out the overall design in pencil with compass and straight edge. It’s not going to be a very classical design (this is a desk for a seven-year-old) so I can be a bit… straightforward with the design, mostly. The “road” will follow the front margin, have a straight run from left front to right back, then an s-curvy bit back to the front right corner. The inside will have a half-inch or so of space and then all the internal area will be routed out, probably with my hated trim router – I need to buy a decent bit for that work – and then I’ll lay down a reflector sheet and pour blue resin into the cavity (there’ll be an LED light overhead in the final desk, so the reflector will make the “water” look less dark). Ironically, that straight run from left to back right is probably the bit I’m most worried about – I am *not* cutting that with a router, so I’ll clamp a straightedge and try to cut it with the freehand groove cutter. That’s the most risky bit. 

I then tried test fitting some of my veneer into the slots, and of course it’s a little thick, but I knew that ahead of time. 

First thought was to just use the anvil on the back of the imp vise and hammer the veneer to compress fibres in the wood, which would then relax and expand back once in the slot (this is an old japanese technique with a name I can’t pronounce). But either I’m not hitting hard enough, or the wood hasn’t much room for compression. So, plan B, we need one of these:

Except they cost 70-80 euro and ffs, they’re a bit of wood and a bit of metal, so…

Yes, I know, it’s rough. It was half ten at night, I can’t use the angle grinder that late 😀 I’ll trim it to size and do some filing and polishing later. This is a proof-of-concept 😀

Set thickness with feeler gauge, clamp plate to wood…

Then draw the veneer strip through multiple times. The idea is sound; I need to trim the ex-saw-blade stock to a saner size, then form an edge for scraping over on the end. Shouldn’t take too long. How to clamp it so I can still vary the thickness is a more involved question – just drilling bolt holes and making them slots in the saw plate should do it, but for now I’ll just trim the plate to size, form the edge, and clamp it with some c-clamps. I can polish it more later on. 

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