Workbench

Side Table / Tools / Woodworking / Workbench — No Comments
10
Dec 17

Standing upright

Last few days have been the first really cold ones of the year. -2C to -3C in the shed. And work was… somewhat excessive in the last few days so tonight was the first time in the shed in a few days and a to-do list was waiting. So…

Ran a slightly larger drillbit through the aprons to give some flex room for the bolts, and flattened the top of the aprons (I also spent a half-hour before this with the scrub plane and #5 flattening the underneath of the tabletop and hand-cutting the panel to width to trim out the worst of the bandsaw wobble).

The stainless steel inserts arrived on Thursday in the post, thankfully. Seems everyone makes these in zinc-plated steel, but actual stainless is a bit hard to find.

Bit of faffing about getting the legs centered on the tabletop, then putting in the drill bit and thwacking it to mark the drilling point with the drill bit (it’s a brad boint bit).

And now it’s time to drill the holes for the inserts. Look closely enough and you can see the marked point.

El cheapo drill bit depth stop so I don’t drill through the table. I have a fancy one for auger bits, but for drill bits, it’s blue tape time. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh. Right. Well, at least I noticed the shavings were shoving the tape backwards before I chased it right through the table.

Who says calipers aren’t good for woodworking? Check length of insert with calipers, get automatic depth gauge setting on the other, stabby end of the calipers. So I drilled the rest of the insert holes, stopping to poke the stabby bit in the hole until I had my depth.

Then it was time to realise that Richard Maguire had gotten inserts that you put a hex key directly into in order to drive home, but these sodding things need a bolt put into them and you drive them home with that. And since they’re going into a blind hole, the bolt has to be shorter than the insert. I managed to find some short M6 bolts (they came with the Triton sander as the bolts to bolt it down to the table with but I had my own), but they were too long. So. Time to break out my metalworking setup 😀

This is my metalworking setup. It’s a Record Imp, which I got back in February. It’s a nice lightweight metalworking vice designed to be clamped to a bench by people who didn’t need a full-size machinist’s vice. And it has nice features – you can bend pipe with it, you have a small anvil at the back and a striking surface (that small round thing just behind the jaws) and so on. Plus, it’s old – it’s a later model so this wasn’t made in the 1930s but it would have been somewhere between the 1960s and early 1980s, before Record went downhill. This is a small vice, but it is not a toy vice. I’ve screwed and clamped it down to a scrap piece of inch-thick oak, which then gets holdfasted to the bench.

So I clamp the bolt in the vice, mark off the length I want, remove the insert from the bolt, then fire up the dremel with a cutting disk (it’s a 6mm bolt lads, if I fired up the angle grinder it’d be like firing a sandblaster at sponge cake) and nip it off.

And now, just because we can, out comes the file and the tap-and-die set…

File off the sharp bits left by the dremel, recut the start of the thread after the file’s mangled it. Then thread the bolt into the insert and get out the socket driver.

Now, pick up that 14mm long insert, in a shed where it’s around 6-7C, slip with your fingers and drop it down behind the bench into the sawdust and shavings.

Swear profusely.

Get out the magnetic-head telescopic torch thing…

Right. Enough faffing. Paste wax to the threads and drive it on home.

Nice. Now we just do that with the other three…

Why is it spinning so easily on insert #2?

Ah, shite.

Apparently my bolts are made of particularly firm cheddar.

Mole grips to unscrew the insert, pointy thing to screw the bit of the bolt still stuck in there out the back of the insert (glad I didn’t get the blind inserts now).

Okay. Prep another bolt. Repeat all the steps above. Keep going, but be more careful this time.

Shite! At least I felt it go this time and stopped fast enough to be able to unscrew it in one part. Prep another bolt…

Felt this one going before it snapped. Definitely cheddar.

At least all four are in now. I might come back if I can find a non-cheese bolt and drive them below the surface later. For tonight, that’ll do.

Bolts in, and they fit (they’re a bit less than drop-in, but wood moves, blah, blah, blah, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

That’s a pleasant sight 🙂

Out with the MDF board at this point for a flat surface and check the rock – the front left leg there is about a millimetre out. Plus the feet are all at 12 degrees to the ground because geometry, so I mark off a flat on each leg, disassemble the table and even the legs up. And I leave it there for the evening. I’ve been up since… well, I was in work till around 0400 this morning after getting called around 2330 on friday, and I was back at work just before 0900 until 1730. On-call sucks sometimes. Oh well. There are worse complaints.

I have to shape the feet and thin the table edge and do the final smoothing of the tabletop and legs (cabinet scraper time!), all of which are finesse tasks so I’ll leave them for tomorrow, and I can be starting the finishing by tomorrow evening which is a good timetable for this.

Oh, and I also have a custom scratch stock profile to file. I’d rather do this with a hollow plane, but I don’t have hollows and rounds and I know (a) how much a set costs and (b) how much space one takes up 😀 So that’s not happening for a while. Hell, that was why I got the #050C combo plane, but alas I didn’t get the special doo-dads to let it act as a hollow or round 🙁  I’ve got an eye open, but the problem with the combiplanes is that they came with a lot of bits and doodads, and that was in 1930. You can’t keep both socks together for more than six months before you’re suddenly looking at lefty pining for righty who is has returned to the fjords; what odds that someone will have all 53 pieces from the original combiplane box that they bought in 1933?

So obviously, I just need to get a set of hollows and rounds.

looks up prices

passes out

Holy crap. I could buy two cars (second-hand) for the price of a set. Sod that. I wouldn’t have the room to put them anywhere anyway and the larger ones are all for things I don’t have the physical space in the shed to build.

But on ebay, unmatched planes (“harlequins” apparently, in a rare example of nice naming) are way less expensive – you can pick them up for a pound apiece in some cases. So I’ll probably wind up buying one or six hollows/rounds/beading wooden planes over the next year. You don’t need all that many for the kind of stuff I do. I might start with one that matches the profile above, which is drawn to match one of my gouges to do some decorative carving work.

I guess I’ll just have to try my “build something and sell it to pay for the wood” plan this year to let me do that 😀

 

Baby blanket chest / Bandsaw Boxes / Shed / Side Table / Tools / Woodworking / Workbench — No Comments
03
Dec 17

Progress…

I actually managed to tick off almost every line on the to-do list for the week by Sunday night for a change. Before doing any “real” work though, I had to get the new interlopers off the bench. It’s been a while since I did framing-level work with 2x4s, but it’s like riding a bicycle…

…downhill on a wet slope towards a brick wall while blindfolded.

But since I didn’t care what the end product looked like, it was fast enough work…

Rough as 10-grit sandpaper, but it got them off the bench and me back to it. I might make something less… industrial at some point, but for now…

That’s the table legs profiled and rounded on the back (the front has to wait until the frames are glued up). Next to drill the holes for the tabletop attachment screws and that needed my big cordless drill…

I quite like that drill, it’s in magnificent condition for something that’s getting on for 70.

It is, by the way, a nice luxury to have a brace that’s dedicated to countersinking holes. You wouldn’t think it, but you tend to use it a lot…

And glueup. Hide glue again, hence the hot water bucket (hide glue and Irish winters don’t mix well). And that’s where I left it on Saturday evening.

On Sunday morning, I took off the clamps and things looked okay, so I got the tabletop up onto the bench and marked off the final sizes. Not much trimming needed in width, really just straightening up the edge there, but a good three inches came off the length because otherwise the table would be tippy.

I did try using the bandsaw to do the rough-cut there but it *really* didn’t like my new experimental bandsaw guides…

Teflon rod instead of the steel rod that had been there. Oh well. I might just have been overloading it with torque in the piece because it was so large it was almost unmanageable, so I’ll test it on some smaller pieces later and either leave or replace the teflon guides with the originals.

With it trimmed to size (at least roughly, the end grain is going to need a final session on the shooting board), it was on to smoothing the tabletop. Oddly the #4½ wasn’t getting it done even after touching up the blade on the diamond stones; I had it set to a really high cutting angle last time I was working with it, on some sapele; I guess it’s just not biting on the oak as a result, though I’m not sure why not. Oh well, out with the #4 instead and that got it done quite nicely. It’s not fully done; I want to use the #5 to smooth the underneath a bit, and attach the top and then I’ll come back and finish up the smoothing work on the top.

Then on to the next project and picking out the wood from the board to match the plans. This will be a blanket chest – if you know what that is, the scale might seem strange, but there’s a reason for it (just run with it being a very small chest for now). I had a 9×30″ oak board that I could get all the rails and stiles from, even if it has a nasty bow a few inches from one end; but I want a final thickness of three-quarters of an inch and it’s just over an inch now so I can get that bow out. The posts I already had gotten from some 8/4 oak at the end of last week.

The bandsaw might be fussy but it does let you get rips done fast… even if you then have to spend a while with the #5 to get the edges back to being clean again.

Just trying to get a feel for the overall size there (it will be smaller than this – the joints aren’t cut and the oak’s not thicknessed yet). There will also have to be panels, this is just the frame, but one thing at a time. And I have an idea for the floorboards as well.

Finally going to get to use the pigsticker on this one 🙂

All the grooves cut in the posts. I’m wondering whether to thickness the rails and stiles before or after grooving. I’m leaning towards after. I didn’t dive into the morticing either, it’s too late in the day at this point for that, I’d wind up morticing the wrong groove somehow.

So, last job of the day, glueing up a blank for another bandsaw box.

An offcut of walnut from a long rip that went badly (you can just see where the saw wandered there). It’s a bit small for anything else really, but for a bandsaw box it’s grand. Also, walnut. It’s basically cheating using this stuff (and at nearly €90 per cubic foot, it’s definitely pay-to-win cheating).

And I’ll leave things there for the evening. The last piece of hardware I need for the table should arrive on Monday, and I might be into the finishing before the end of the week if I’m lucky, as well as making progress on the chest and the bandsaw box.

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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