Sidecar Cot

Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — 1 Comment
02
Nov 16

Six weeks and counting…

Realised in the last few days that the delivery date for the cot (hehe, see what I did there?) is six weeks away. Yikes. Need to finish off the stock prepping more quickly. So tonight I got the last three laths and resawed them down to slats using the Tyzack saw to start the cut and taking over with the ryoba after the first six inches or so. This seemed to work quite well and a lot faster than the last few resawing jobs.

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I am wondering how I’m going to do the panels in the drawer box at the bottom though. I don’t mind thicknessing them down by a quarter-inch or so (with a scrub plane that’s about three minutes of work), and I suppose the weight at the base will add to stability which is a plus. Some thought required. Meanwhile, on with prepping the slat blanks. Out with the thicknessing jig and got one down to thickness after a quick stropping of the jack and smoother plane blades (the new higher angle on the smoother plane works brilliantly on the ash, I’m seriously thinking about adding a back bevel to it just to increase the angle even more now).

img_9797aOnly got through one slat though, and had to plane a good three mm off the edge so there’s ample room on all of these to get them down to size. I think I’ll get all 8 readily from these (I’m counting that as improving 😀 ). That gives me a total of 27 slats, so I’ll do 13 to a side and have one spare. I should have these all finished by Friday, and I plan to get the steaming jig built over the weekend as well as run the power cable out to the shed, and then next week it’ll be prepping frame and panel pieces and the following weekend I can do some steambending. That gives me four more weeks and a few days to get the joinery, assembly, fitting and finishing all done. It’s doable, but I’m going to have to start mucking about with finish testing soon as well or I’ll wind up messing up at the far end.

Nothing like a nice relaxing hobby to take your mind off work deadlines 😀

Shed / Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — No Comments
31
Oct 16

One of those days

Feels like lots of work for not much progress really.

Started the day driving to woodies and buying a plank of pine to put a shelf in the new garden box to get the lawn seeds and chemicals and stuff off the floor so it’d be less cluttered, and buying a padlock so the newly organised chemicals were out of junior’s reach.

Then finished off the hammer holder.

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And then immediately remembered the other two hammers sitting in a box in the kitchen waiting to come out to the shed. Feck’s sakes…

Then took the frame and the door off the shed, and fitted better hinges than the ones that were on it, learning as I went just how much expense was spared when building this shed. Honestly, I’m rather surprised it’s still standing, it was so shoddily assembled. But I got it re-hung on the new hinges after a lot of faffing about to get it to swing cleanly, and then I moved on to changing the hasp from a simple bolt to a van lock type of thing.

Which wouldn’t fit. At all. I’d have to hack a four-inch section out of the door frame altogether and even then I’d have to take down the interior wall to fix it properly. By the time I found that out though, I had three new 8mm holes drilled in the door. Ugh.

So I reassembled the old crappy hasp, putting screws in all of the screwholes this time just to be wild and carefree about it, and I’ll have to go order another one off ebay tonight. There have been some burglaries around here over the last year or so, no point tempting fate.

So after having wasted half a day on that, we then had the trick-or-treaters round for a few hours, and took junior to see his first fireworks, which was fun.

By now I’m starting to realise I’ve spent a four-day weekend working on the shed and the crib hasn’t seen much progress. So feck, it’s dark and I can’t get the jig built. I can at least resaw a slat. My new Tyzack 1900s era saw arrived in the post on friday, with a set of teeth on it like it hadn’t been sharpened since it was made. But here’s my new Bahco saw file, one of the best saw files available today according to everyone from Paul Sellers to all the youtubers who copy his stuff ad nauseum (with their own added errors just for fun).

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If this is the best saw file available today, I think we’d better get used to disposable hardpoint saws.

Despite the thing snapping within the handle not just once, but twice, I eventually managed to get some sort of sharpened teeth on the saw (but honestly, I’m going to have to file them all off and recut them from scratch sooner or later, they were in brutal shape), and I resawed one slat with the new saw.

Or rather, I did half of the resawing with the new saw. It does cut, and it’s more steerable than the ryoba if it drifts, but it’s horribly slow by comparison to the ryoba so in the end I just gave up and used the ryoba on it. I don’t know if it’s the teeth on the tyzack or the kerf or what, but it was dog slow getting through that ash. And it splintered the corners on the exit quite a bit, it was not a clean cut. I should be able to use both slats but only because I already finished one face; there’s only enough margin to clean up one face from the cut, it was that bad.

And that’s it. Four days off, one lath resawn to give two unfinished slats. This was not the kind of day that leaves you feeling like you’re making progress…

Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — 2 Comments
26
Oct 16

More resawing prep…

Spent this evening’s hour in the shed getting the next four laths ready for the resawing by ripping them out of the prepped plank from yesterday.

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It’s a tad finicky making a long rip in a board with a ryoba saw, at least on the initial setup. I mean, once the saw is established in the groove and the board is upright, it can tend to track like a laser down the board (unless it hits a knot at a glancing angle); but if that initial inch or so is off-line, then the saw wants to keep going in that initial incorrect direction and it can be a pain to correct because the teeth at the other side of the ryoba will dig in if you turn the blade even a little and the lack of any set means the kerf is nice and thin but it also means you have no room to turn the blade. So that initial setup gets very finicky…

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Richard Maguire’s got a slightly different way of doing this, but if your shed is all of eight feet tall at the absolute highest point (and five feet at the lowest), his approach is not really all that possible…

Maybe if I ever get round to building a sawbench I could manage this, but that won’t be for a short while yet (I have the material and an idea for a design but I need to rework that if I’m going to allow for standing on the thing while ripping)

Mind you, when it tracks right, it leaves a lovely clean cut that needs at most three or four strokes with a plane to clean up. And now I have four clean laths ready to be resawn down to slats, which will give me a total of 27 to use in the crib (I’ll probably drop one for symmetry, which will leave me with six unused slats to test finishes on and practice joinery with, or to reuse in other small projects around the place).

Even the end grain is pretty

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Yeah, I know, an edge or two needs squaring up. I’ll do that before the marking up for the resawing. But you have to admit, that ash has some lovely grain to it.

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