Tools

Desk Shelf / Shed / Tools / Woodworking — 1 Comment
08
Jul 18

Those five minute jobs…

You know the five minute jobs I mean, the ones that take three hours and nearly set things on fire, like your hair, a pile of sawdust, solvent-based finishes, that sort of thing. Today was their day!

Started off with a quick job I’d been meaning to do for a while.

That panel saw is junk. Uncomfortable handle, not sharp, can’t be resharpened thanks to induction-hardened teeth…

Basically, a waste of shed space. Blade was kinked as well. One of Spear&Jackson’s lesser models, that. So, out with the angle grinder, hack through the rivets (because who uses screws when attaching plates to handles, that’s so passe and repairable…) and after a few minutes of standing in an actual light show and setting fire to the handle twice and almost catching my hair, a pile of sawdust and the box of finishes beside it….

You can’t really see it there, but there’s a fair amount of smoke and crap in the air there. And I’ve had to beat the everloving crap out of the pins holding the handle in place with a punch pin and a lump hammer. I am so not a fan of this saw.

So why not just dump it? Because it’s now raw material…

Out with the angle grinder, cut along some of those lines, nearly set fire to a few more things, and …

That’s a new card scraper and a chunk of stock for scratch stocks, which up to now I didn’t really have (there’s a blank or two in the lee valley scratch stock kit but that’s it and I’d rather be able to make some up as I need them).

The card scraper is the reason for doing this today. Chris Schwarz was talking about a different shape for a card scraper that he came across and it actually didn’t sound too weird so I thought I’d try it. Here’s the shape, nicked from Chris Williams:
Rather than print it out and trace it onto the stock though, I figured I’d just be a smartarse and draw it from the likely origin.

Now Chris (Schwartz) suggests you just grind away the excess metal, but we don’t all have 2×72 grinders and the like, so we make do…

Think of it as very fast artisanal filing.

Also you want a backing bit of scrap unless you’re better at this stuff than me, or have actual metalworking tools, or skills or whatever.

Because, you know, you don’t want to do that to your bench – whatever about the gouging, the spray of metal bits will ruin your next attempt at finishing…

Some deburring, some filing square, some time on the diamond plates and the strop and then the arno burnisher (which is kindof a cheat code to turning a hook on these things – I cannot get that to work with the usual screwdriver shaft/hardened steel anything/other metal burnishers, but the tungsten carbide on the arno does it every time). And then a quick test.

Control group’s fine as always…

New one acts like a plane with a nice camber – a lot more steerable, the steel in the saw blade was pretty good, and it might actually be a better scraper for scraping small areas in a targeted sort of way.

Then on to the next quick five minute job. The last one only took two hours…

Yeah, I’ve been meaning to try to sharpen these for a while now. I’m not entirely sure why exactly, I mean I get on really well with the japanese saws and the bow saw is fine too, but I got these as part of a job lot on ebay a while back and they’re good examples so I figure I should at least try, y’know? I gave sharpening one of the hand saws a try earlier but you kindof need your saw file to not snap half-way through the process in order to sharpen properly. This time that didn’t happen (sharpening is still a monumental pain in the spine without a higher vice mind you – those saw vices are definitely worth a look if you do this often). Wasn’t hugely impressed with the end results. The tooth geometry still seems off and I think there’s a lot more work to do on those teeth.

The cut is nothing to write home about either.

So, only an hour or so into that five-minute job. On to the next one…

Actually, moving the bandsaw and sander off the “cart” and screwing on the castors only took six or seven minutes. The problem was, with that out of the way…

Well, now I have to tidy up, don’t I? Feck…

Well, granted that took longer than I thought it’d take but okay, I did find a walnut board I’d lost that I wanted to use for the desk shelves project so that was good.

And then I put the bandsaw and sander back, and finally started work on the desk shelves project…

Woodwork al fresco. Just cutting the walnut section for the front of the desk here. Quick rough-cut only, hence the speedsquare and chalk line. You can’t see the tie-dyed trousers in the shot, but it’s 28C in the garden and 36C in the shed after the day of working hard and setting things on fire, so if you think I’m wearing jeans when I don’t have to, well, consider yourself lucky I’m wearing trousers at all.

Right, that will be the desk. It’s a bit smaller than I was thinking originally – 24″ across the back rather than 30″ and 32″ rather than 36″ at the front. That 36″ wouldn’t be seen though because there’s going to be a curve there. But it’s a desk for a six-to-nine-year-old, so it’s big enough I think. Also, this way I don’t have to cut into the good 60″ walnut board and can save that for something else 😀 The angle from front to back, by the way, is the same angle as the sides will be raked at with respect to the ground.

Same angle from the bevel for the desk as for the base and top of the sides.

Then I thought that those boards are relatively flat, fairly well matched in thickness, and maybe I could get away with edge jointing them without further prep…

I mean, that should work, right?

Between the #05 and #08, I got the joint to a reasonable fit, and thought it looked okay…

So I went for the glue-up and nope, not a hope, went from fitting to spinning on the midpoint like a top. Tried for a few minutes to get the boards to align, but nope, there was going to be a gap at one side or the other, so I broke it down before it seized up and wiped off the bulk of the glue.

I’ll try again tomorrow. And maybe skim those boards faces first just to be clean about it.

 

Meanwhile, in the middle of planing the joint, my 4″ square jumped off its perch…

…and did a header into the darkest corner of the shed in an obvious attempt to have nothing further to do with this project.

Can’t say I blame it, but nobody gets out that easily. Extendable lidl magnet light thingy to the rescue…

Seriously, that thing is bloody useful sometimes….

 

So, tomorrow, a swipe or two to clean the glue off the edges, skim the faces a bit with the #05 to clean them up, and retry that edge joint.

Shed / Shelves / Tools / Woodworking — No Comments
30
Jun 18

Shed jobs

Still working on sketches for the next project, and it’s too hot to do very much (we’re Irish, we melt somewhere between 24C and 26C and we’re topping out at 30C now so of course we’re all draped over a couch, only moving if we hear the ice cream van…)

Sketchup and me and curved surfaces is an unfamiliar territory, but the way you draw it is fairly close to building it that you make a rectangle, match it against other shapes, cut off the excess and shape any curves and so on, so the actual process is like a long-winded finicky walkthrough with your brain on how you’re going to build the thing. So, helpful, sort of.
Meanwhile, pottering about doing shed jobs, popping glue off the silicone glue brushes and trays, tidying up a bit, that sort of thing.

Like taking five minutes to add that third rail for clamps that I’ve needed for the last few months…

And breaking the edges on my new chunk of aluminium box section that’s going to be the new bandsaw fence…

And making up a base for the bending rib.

That’ll do for now I think. I mean, it’s ugly as sin, those are the waste blocks from bandsaw boxes I’m using as wrist rests/handles there, but sod it, shed jig.

And the poplar is mellowing nicely.

I am so not looking forward to flattening and thickness planing these down by a quarter inch by hand…

Design / Shelves / Stringing / Tools / Woodworking — 2 Comments
29
Jun 18

Sunbathing poplar

So asking on UKworkshop about that clamping problem I was thinking about with the shelf/desk project led to the conclusion that housing joints won’t work and tapered sliding dovetail joints are the better choice. That will probably mean some router work because of the precision needed – I could probably make a tapered dovetail joint that wouldn’t pull out, but one that would be precise enough to maintain the shelves against racking would be beyond me. So a new router bit, get that router table out of storage and actually assemble it (I basically picked it up in Lidl intending to use parts of it in a proper router table at some point and then just developed a dislike for routers in general 😀 ), and that sorts two of the shelves out; the third gets dovetailed into the top shelf which will also help with racking.

And I keep sketching the idea in my head to try to nail down the bits of it.

It does feel like I’m trying to squeeze the shape I want out of almost not enough wood; the 8″ wide poplar planks I have might not be wide enough and I might need to do a run to the timber yard for some 12″ wide boards. Which would mean a half-day off work and I’d wind up buying a lot more than one board because if you’re giving up vacation time, you buy in batches. So I’d rather get the pieces out of what I have, but if I can’t, there will be more walnut and poplar and maybe some utile to see what that’s like to work with… see, this is the problem with going to the timber yard 😀

Meanwhile, we’re in a heat wave here and the poplar I have has these green streaks, so I figure I’d let it sunbathe for a few days to get rid of them and get that lovely honey colour poplar gets…

Better than a shop dog 😀

The colour of the wood is easing but it’s not a one-day thing…

Before on the left, after on the right in both cases there (the badge is to get a white balance reference but even that didn’t help much, the direct sunlight just blows the camera away).

I’ll keep doing that for a few days, see if it helps.

I also took the opportunity to see what the side would look like with a 1:1 sketch.

(Yes, we’re reseeding that bit of the lawn, we’re just waiting for the weather to break next week or the seeds wouldn’t have a chance).

That bottom desk shelf really looks too low, I know, but I measured Junior’s knees when he was sitting down and nope, that’s the right height. Kids are just small and the scale looks all wrong 😀

And today, since it was the middle of a heatwave, I had some hardware, tools and a chunk of a tree shipped to the office so I could carry them home…

These quadrant hinges are very definitely *not* brusso hinges 😀 But they will suffice to learn and experiment with. Plus, no damned nails, so hopefully less fiddly.

Nobody in the office could identify this 😀
It’s an electric heated bending iron, normally used for making violins. This one’s not temperature controlled, it’s just a PTC resistor in a metal housing that you plug into the mains. The fin bit heats up and then I can use that to bend stringing around sharper corners. Yeah, I could have used a hot air gun, but here’s the thing – in an 8×6 shed, any hot air (at 100C or so) that leaves the gun tends to hit something while still hot enough to damage stuff, especially with foam on the roof for soundproofing, so I decided to go buy this thing (hey, it cost a total of €37 delivered from China via the customs department) instead.

But.

There’s a rule I have for electric stuff you buy off aliexpress (or ebay). If it’s on batteries, it’s probably okay. But if it plugs into the mains, you take the thing apart and check it before it ever goes into a socket, so this got disassembled in the electronics lab and tested for shorts, for the case being connected to the live wire, all that sort of stuff. But no, it seems grand, so out to the shed…

I said it looked grand, not that I trusted it yet 😀 More testing for voltages, waiting to see if the temperature stabilised properly and so forth (that bit of sapele there is to become the base it gets fastened to so I can holdfast it to the bench). All the electrical tests seem okay so far…

The temperature seems a little high mind you, but I think it was made for 110V rather than our 240V. More monitoring needed really and I might want to put some handles on that bit of wood because the fin is not very well isolated thermally from the base…

I worry about the temperature running away too far – if it melted insulation then the case might wind up live and that could be fun. I mean, there’s no ground in the shed really, it’s a wooden floor, but still. Not exactly ideal. Hence, add some handles to the base to pick the thing up and move it about. And maybe some wooden rails along side it to act as hand rests for when I need to steady my hands for particularly delicate bending work.

And what will it be bending? Well, I finally found a commercial source for thick veneers (in this case, 1.4mm thick which is perfect for what I want it for – it’ll get a bit of handplane work to trim it to the thickness of the groove, but with one side of the strip being thinner so it wedges in there).

Some sycamore…

and to compare it against, some maple…

and just for fun, some cedar of lebanon…

That last one is seriously aromatic. I have got to find a source for actual boards of this to use as drawer bottoms, I now know exactly why they used to use this for that purpose. It’s a nice smell, but you know you’re not getting mothholes in your shirts if the drawer is made of this stuff.

Even the bit of hardboard they used to ship this stuff will be of use, if only for drawer bottom material and the like. Happy with that find, now I just have to wait for brexit to screw up the trade rules between here and the UK and for all this wood to become unavailable again. Hell, it might be an idea to stockpile, the way things look to be going…

(You laugh, but you know how house prices in Ireland are rising faster than a SpaceX launch? And you know how we use timber for building houses in everything from making doors and stairs to roof eaves, scaffolding and so on? That timber all comes from the UK because Irish timber yards are too small to buy on the continent because we’re just not that big a country – we have 4 million people, they have 50, and they build more so they buy wood by the hundreds of tons and we buy off their yards and ship it to here. Brexit is going to throw a huge spanner in that, stuff will either have to come from the continent meaning higher purchase prices, higher logistics cost and so on; or yards here will have to buy stuff from UK yards at enormously higher prices. And all that gets passed on to the final house price here. Stockpiling doesn’t seem so ridiculous now, does it, eh?)

 

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →