Tools

General / Side Table / Tools / Woodworking — No Comments
02
Nov 17

Progress and mucking about

So I figured I’d start by playing with the new toy and taking some test cuts.

The blade runs sort-of true. Well, I wasn’t expecting laser levels of perfection here, but the guides really are letting things down. The lower thrust bearing can’t be backed off readily to adjust it so it’s not poking the blade out of true, which is disappointing. And I really can’t run this thing without dust extraction or the whole lower case clogs up and the bearing itself locks up. Well, I knew machinery would counter its speed by increasing the amount of faffing about needed to support it. This is why you usually mount this stuff permanently where you have room to manoeuvre around it. But again, 8’x6′ shed, no room to think, let alone manoeuvre, so we need to make do.

It can’t cut very tight corners, a 2cm radius seems about the most it’s comfortable with. But that could still work. I was playing about making a bandsaw box. They’re not too terrible to do.

Gluing up for these boxes is a bit of a faff mind you.

Well, quite a lot of a faff depending on how badly you design the sodding things. Oh well.

And the three blades I ordered from tuffsaws arrived.

One for very rough work or even small resawing work (but really, you’re talking about resawing stuff that’s at most 70-80mm wide so I’m guessing that’s going to be underused). One slightly more sturdy blade than the one that came with the bandsaw to use for general-purpose stuff, and a very fine-toothed narrow blade to do curving work.

Tuffsaws do have a one-eighth inch blade as well, might try that if the quarter-inch one doesn’t do the job.

Then I carried on with the new project, laying out the rough rips for legs and aprons:

Finally getting to use my new panel gauge in anger. Works quite well for rough layout, but I need to sharpen that pin, it’s not the finest gauge line in the world.

Then I used the new toy to make the rough cuts.

Definitely not up to finished work levels of cleanness, but it cut through inch-thick oak like it was foam, so it saves a bit of work (though the faffing about setting up and cleaning down after using the bandsaw is just a pain in the fundament so handsaws definitely aren’t out of a job yet). I’ll flatten these tomorrow and thickness them, then rip out the individual legs and aprons (there’s two in each board).

New Toys! / Shed / Tools / Woodworking — 1 Comment
01
Nov 17

Interloper

So it’s pretty obvious that all my woodworking stuff is done with hand tools, right?

It’s not because of an ideology, it’s because 8’x6′ sheds don’t give you a lot of room for power tools or machinery. I do find the power tools really obnoxiously loud, but that’s a secondary point and it’s mainly because the cheap modern power tools tend to use lightweight construction and universal motors in order to hit a price point and so make a lot of high-pitched noise — older stuff with induction motors and a lot of cast iron are a lot less screechy (you definitely do need hearing protection anyway, but for the neighbours it’s a significant qualitative difference).

And for some things – joinery, shaping, finishing and so on – it’s more of a challenge to use hand tools and so more satisfying to do. But there are some tasks that just don’t have that challenge. I should say for the non-woodworkers here that the whole “what really counts as hand tool woodworking?” question is a long-running one. My answer is that if it’s a task that in the 18th century was handed off to apprentices to go do unsupervised, well, handing it off to a machine isn’t really showing a lack of ability, just a lack of time.

All of which prevarication is a run-up to saying I’ve bought a new power tool for the first time in a long while.

Well, what else is a husband supposed to do on a day off while the wife is off visiting her sister? Exactly, bandsaws.

This is one of those rebadged clones of the Record Power BS9, there are a few dozen manufacturers selling them – Craftsman have the BAS230, Ryobi have the BS903, Scheppach the HBS20, Einhell the TC-SB200, Charnwood the W711, Titan does the TTB705BDS and Aldi sell a WorkZone variant as well. The Aldi one was the one that caught my eye initially as it seemed it would fit in the shed based on Peter Millard’s video about using it in the shop; and he also pointed out that for the money and the size (and within its design parameter), it was a nice little design that was worth having around:

So I was waiting for the Aldi version to show up again, but that didn’t look like it was happening this year so I trotted off to Screwfix to order the Titan (ordering or buying off the shelf in any Dublin shop would have doubled the pricetag).

The nice delivery man showed up this morning with the box so off I trotted to the shed with and unpacked it.

Then, a quick check of the alignment of the blade — see the quick setup guide by Alex Snodgrass here:

I was pleasantly surprised by the guides in the Titan; rather than the thrust bearing’s face being the point of contact with the blade, it’s the bearing’s edge that makes contact. That’s a better solution but slightly more expensive to make. One of the myriad small differences between the variants of this design I suppose, along with nice touches like the little window to check blade tracking without opening the case:

There are less fun bits – the screw latches of the case aren’t captive nuts opened by a single half-twist, but full-on ten-turns-to-latch bolts. And the bottom door isn’t fully closed at the top when the bolt is fully seated. But the blade seems to run quite true and the supplied blade is quite clean-cutting. I do have three others coming from Tuffsaws – a fine quarter-inch blade for curves, a three-eights inch blade for general work and a half-inch blade for heavier work, though “heavier work” here is quite relative – this is never going to resaw anything wider than 70mm.

I didn’t abandon the hand tools when building the base at least 😀 The base gets holdfast-ed down to the bench for work.

Of course, it can’t live on the bench, the only place for it is down on the floor (with the blade guide dropped right down to protect the blade of course). Just … right… down… there.

Ah. Right. I have been putting off the tidy up and clamp storage job for a while, haven’t I? Oh well.

One afternoon later…

Clear floor space and as to the clamps…

Much tidier. So from now on, the bandsaw lives here:

So this should help with some rough work, and I wouldn’t mind trying to make a bandsaw box or two. I have a bunch of tiny scraps of walnut left over from the cot that I have been trying to find a use for.

The glue should be dry by tomorrow, and then I can give it a go…

Shed / Tools / Woodworking / Workbench — No Comments
22
Oct 17

One slot left…

Honestly, the plan was not to collect planes.

But through random chance the first few I bought (I bought a retiree’s toolkit off ebay as a starting point) were all Record planes. And over the course of a few months I learned, as everyone does, that hand tool woodworking was effectively killed off during the second world war, though it had been in decline for a while before then. Machines and power tools took over for wood fabrication; and after that point, tool companies could no longer compete by producing the best tools because workers were no longer competing on how fast they could do the job to a set standard. Nobody needs to spend a weeks wages to buy a saw that can be sharpened more so you can cut 5% faster, when they can spend that much and get a saw that cuts 500% faster. The demographics of buyers changed markedly and suddenly a tool that would stand up to occasional weekend use and not cost a week’s wages was the thing that was in demand (and thus was born things like Black and Decker). Older tool companies either changed (like Stanley) or went bust or were bought up in mergers (like Woden) and so there’s this quality curve that takes a slow or a fast decline at some point after the end of WW2 for every hand tool manufacturer. Older tools are substantially better than modern ones from companies like this; you have to go to the modern artisan makers like Veritas or Lie Nielson to beat the vintage stuff. And that’s seriously expensive by comparison so most people go vintage, at least in the beginning where I am.

Now Stanley were the main brand for almost a century (and are still around) so if you go to ebay and try to buy an old hand plane, they tend to pop up first. But there were so many, identifying them is an expert’s task – is this one a bargain that’ll work like a charm for decades or is it only fit to be melted down for scrap, not even worth the postage? So instead, I just kept looking for Record because they didn’t dive down the curve for a few years later than Stanley and they’re relatively easy to date even from ebay photos.

So my #4, my #4½ and my #5½ got joined by a #7 and a spokeshave and a shoulder plane and a rabbetting plane and so on, all from Record’s catalogues as I thought I’d need them. And then one day I turned around and aw, crap, I have a collection of the sodding things.

Well, now look where I’m stuck.

Every slot filled, with planes for getting things straight, getting things curved, carving slots or rebates into things, and so on. But two empty slots got build in there, for the last two obvious things I’d “use” – a large Record #8 jointer plane and a small Record #2 smoothing plane.

Well….

Came up on ebay and I couldn’t resist. Old too, this is from somewhere in the 1945-1950 range based on its design, frog, blade and handles.

Just that bit larger than the #7, so handier for some things. A tad rusty though and the paint had worn through in places. Well, sod collecting, I want a usable tool so…

Then out with the newly mounted wire wheel on the bench grinder and off with all the accumulated rust (and I tidied up the #6 while I was at it, as someone had painted that thing almost purple in the last while and it annoys me).

A bit hard to read but “Best Crucible Cast” there indicates that this is one of the better blades Record ever made. And the sharp corners suggest this is laminated but I’d have to grind the bevel off to find out and I’m not that curious.
Then out with the heresy Hammerite paint and sprayed both the #8 and the #6 (I may redo this if I ever find a decent source of the original Record colour, but I seem to recall it was oven enamel and that’s a bit of a faff).

Then we had a hurricane and work had a Thing and so it was left drying for several weeks all told. Yikes. So this weekend, back out to the shed, tidied up a lot, reassembled both planes, spent a while taking rust off damn near every tool (the shed’s damper than I thought and the felt in the tool racks now counts as a Bad Idea) and oiling them (WD40 at least) and finally…

Almost done.

Yeah, “almost”.

See that little spot? There? That one?

Yeah, that’s kindof my little joke. It’s for a Record #2 plane.

They never made a #1, Stanley did that and these days those go for five-figure sums to collectors. But Record’s #2 still goes for stupid money, when you can find them at all. They didn’t make as many as they did of the workhorse #4s and #5s or even of the fancy #7s and #8s and when the second world war happened they went out of production in a hurry – and when there’s a war on, lots of metal gets melted down to make gun barrels and the #2 was a small smoothing plane for fine work; nobody really had a use for them that a #3 couldn’t fulfill so off to the crucible a lot of them went (same happened to the Stanley #1s). Oh well. They’re not as crazy as the Stanley #1s, but the last time I saw one on ebay, it sold at the asking price of almost €400 within 12 hours of being posted.

Yeah, that slot’s staying empty for a while longer I think 😀

But at least the shed’s been tidied up a tad so I can start doing things again…

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