Shed / Woodworking — Leave a comment
29
Oct 16

Shop till you drop

It’s been one of those consumer weekends so far. Friday was the trip to the timber yard (and would have been another trip to go buy a plastic drum for dust collection, but they weren’t open); and today was a trip to B&Q to buy one of these:

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Yeah, I know, it’s plastic, but it’s cheaper than you could build one for. Tomorrow the lawnmower and garden tools and a lot of this muck are going in there:

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After that, I might be able to actually stand in front of the vice for rip cuts…

And then there was the testing of the mattress for the cot, for which we roped in a volunteer…

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It was deemed to have passed inspection.

And lastly, I solved yesterday’s storage problem with the vigorous application of a circular saw (yeah, yeah, power tools, I’m unclean), and now I have a stack of rough-cut parts for two or three projects.

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There are still a few 5′ and 6′ boards to stack, but I can manage those, just about.

And with any luck, I might get back to project work tomorrow sometime, and get the steaming jig rebuilt, a drying jig built, and if I’m fast, get one of the walnut frame pieces steamed and bent.

Woodworking — 2 comments
28
Oct 16

Back to the yard…

So I have a few other projects I wanted to try on this year, and I needed the material for them and I figured it’d be no harm to have some extra on hand in case I make a total dog’s breakfast of the cot’s steambending, so it was back to Quinns today…

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So much fun stuff in this place 😀 And apparently they’d seen the photos from the last day and liked them, so Hi John and Paul if you’re reading.

Paul did his usual grand job of making everything very easy on me, and I wandered away with almost too much wood for the car this time. Oak, ash, poplar and walnut, almost eight cubic feet of the stuff in total (which is a lot more than it sounds when it’s in the form of 16′ long 1″ thick boards).

Transport was a bit of fun 😀 I am slowly learning the limits of what the car can hold…

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And storage is also posing challenges. I think I’m going to have to break a lot of this stuff down today for the rough cuts (handily, I know what it’s all for so I have cutlists).

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Got talking to John while I was there, and apparently they’re putting in for FSC recognition at the moment (basically, think fair trade but for timber) and we were talking away for a bit about the trade which was educational. And John also mentioned that they’d had some sapele come back in which the customer had had a problem with, but which they were now treating as offcuts and selling at €10 per cubic foot.

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It’s all 2″ thick stock or more though so I didn’t take his hand off at the wrist. If I had a bandsaw, that would all have landed in my car boot though. As it was, I took the only bit of 1″ stock that was left, and it has some really nice grain in it.

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I can see why people like this stuff. I’ve not had a chance to play with some before, so this should be interesting…

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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