Baby blanket chest / New Toys! / Tools / Woodcarving / Woodworking — 6 comments
04
May 19

Lid and base

May day bank holiday weekend. Going to try to finish up the box. First up, the lid, which I already have a piece prepped for:

Also, bought two new tools, this time off aliexpress.com rather than ebay.co.uk. You wouldn’t think of aliexpress for hand woodworking tools, but there are a few…

A clone of the shinwa saddle mitre square, and…

A marking gauge. Works like a normal marking gauge on the right hand side there; on the left hand side, you have two contact points that rotate, so you can mark a line “parallel” to a curved edge. Neat.

Oh, and I want to try that resin experiment again, but this time seal the oak grain so the resin can’t wick into it.

The lid’s been sitting around for a while. It had twisted very slightly. Fixed that with a few #04 swipes and then took the #80 to the surface to clean it up nicely, with a few focussed bits from the cabinet scraper. With that done…

Just a little decoration on the top.

Some straight-chisel work, and then I want to treat the long lines like a knife wall, so there’ll be a little low relief to it.

That’ll do. Next, gouges…

A bit of experimentation and picked out two.

Right, so chopping with the larger chisel to set up the pattern:

And now use the smaller gouge to take out some scallops so the endgrain edge has some decoration.

Okay, now some punchwork to add a few decorative points.

I’m happy with that.

Okay, now just some breaking of edges and shaping of the front edge:

Gooseneck scrapers are great for this.

Okay, that’s the lid done.

Add some linseed oil and that’ll fit in nicely.

Now the base. I don’t have enough ash offcuts to make a shiplap base, annoyingly, but I have a small offcut of an ash board that I can use if I hack it in half and make it into a panel.

Flattened it with a #05, but I’m not thicknessing this by hand.

I hate the noise, the PPE, the mess and the fuss, but the speed is nice.

Done in about 15 minutes. That would have been a few days before now.
Okay, so #05 to clean the edges, then do an edge joint with the #05 and #08 and glue up with liquid hide glue.

That’ll be ready come tomorrow and I’ll just attach the board to the base and fit the hinges, douse it in a few coats of BLO and that’ll be that.

Baby blanket chest / Woodcarving / Woodworking — Leave a comment
22
Apr 19

All sides now…

So, four day weekend so almost six hours in the shed 😀
Got the last of the background removal done…

Mix of hand pressure on the gouges and whacking the everloving stuffing out of them with a mallet, and trying to get the background down about 4-5mm or so relatively uniformly across the background. Then to eliminate the unevenness, stippling!

Basically, lots of spikes on the end of a punch, and thwack it with a lump hammer lots and lots of times until…

And then just douse it in boiled linseed oil to show it all up. There are some decorative punches as well, just five or six on the panel.

BTW, Peter Follansbee makes all this look easy. This is a LIE. HE LIES. The git 😀

Front, back, and both sides now carved and all bar the front wiped down with BLO. Next up, cutting off the excess length on the boards that I was using for workholding; and then scalloping out the edges of the front and back boards and drilling pilot holes for nails.

That done, marked out the front and back boards for a shallow rebate to locate the side boards (the joinery on these boxes is not normally very complex). Saw the shoulder, then stand the boards on end in the vice, hold your breath, stick the chisel in the line and split off the cheeks. A heart attack or two later and a bit of paring and fettling, then drive some cut nails home and…

It’s not bad, it’s a little out of square:

It’s only out of square by about 3mm overall though (corner-to-corner). That’s not too bad and the base will pull it into square (you can readily rack it to square with very light finger pressure right now).

And I did manage to get the flow of the carving to look continuous, which was nice.

So not too bad overall (I might wind up disassembling it and reassembling it with a touch of glue and the nails to close up the < 1mm gaps before final assembly).

Next up, either the lid or the base. I haven’t made up my mind yet. Mind you, the way work’s been going, I may not get back to the shed till next April…

Shed / Woodworking — Leave a comment
22
Apr 19

Spring cleaning time…

So, after the whole resin-casting-a-mug thing, it’s fair to say that the shed was in need of a cleanup…

Turns out, sanding resin will actually leave a bit of residue. Also, the shavings are starting to pile up again…

And the bandsaw is getting buried…

And the shop vac wasn’t actually vac-ing much either. So I started there, and checked the drum for the vortex separator, but it wasn’t even a tenth full, so I took out the filter from the shop vac…

And sure enough, there’s the problem:

Totally clogged with fines. So out with a stanley knife, and scrape all the dust off because I don’t have a spare filter right now. Took about five minutes, and it’s definitely not perfect but it’ll hold till I get a new one:

Then dustpan and brush to fix the floor:

And then wipe down the planes, and dip the handles of all the chisels in a jar of BLO and wipe down the handle and blade (after getting rid of all the surface rust with a scotchbrite pad), and all the marking gauges and so on:

And clean up the bandsaw and restack everything and wax the table…

Yeah, it’s not exactly tidy, but you try putting a litre in a pint pot sometime.

I mean, this is the After photo:

Well, now you know why I don’t have a lathe…

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