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Baby blanket chest / New Toys! / Tools / Woodworking — No Comments
08
Jan 18

Back to work…

So back to work today. Checked the thermometer in the shed before leaving the house around 0715 or so…

And given the ice on the decking outside the shed, I doubt that was the low point either. Must remember to put another layer of paste wax on the planes this week to prevent surface blooms of rust.

I figured it’d be warmer by the time I got home but by 2000h…

Hmmm. Uninsulated shed in the middle of winter. Such fun. Oh well, new toys!

Some trammel points and a new 3″ square from Proops (turns out, if you have a 4″ square, you shouldn’t drop it or you’ll have a 4″ not-square…).

And I wanted to see what all the fuss over Japanese chisels was about so I bought a fairly cheap second-hand one (came to about €15 delivered). 8mm, just over the quarter-inch size, nice balance to it, lots of surface rust though. Some sandpaper and some time on the diamond stones later…

It’s a nice little chisel, takes a nice edge (eventually, it does seem to be much harder steel). I don’t see much of a hollow on the back but I guess that’s fixable somehow. Really does feel well balanced in the hand, they always looked a bit awkward to me but when you’re using them it’s a whole other deal. Won’t know how good it is for a while, obviously, but so far so good.

Then some mucking about with the #080 scraper plane on the chest rails (it works!) and I started in on the grooving of the rails…

That oak has pretty grain, but it’s a pain to work with. Scrapers, scraper plane, tight-set #04 skewed with the cap iron clamped down a gnat’s whisker from the cutting edge, all the tricks needed here. Should have the rails done in a day or three, depending on work schedules, get some more practice in on the carving for the panels, and start cutting the mortices and tenons this weekend. Need to prep some more material as well for the lid. Going to do that in a frame-and-raised-panel style, but I’m not sure if the center panel should be oak or something else for contrast.

Woodcarving / Woodworking / Workbench — No Comments
05
Jan 18

More small jobs and practice…

All small jobs today in the shed. Well. Was a bit chilly.

And it was colder before I turned on the heater. Not going to get much better before the end of next week either 🙁 Onwards…

Got my new japanese saw bench hook finished:

Spare offcuts of walnut and plywood, with 19mm dowels from woodies (if you’re in the US, woodies is what Lowe’s would be if they dropped their timber standards significantly and jacked up their prices by 50%). The dowels drop into the bench dog holes:

In theory this would work on any set of two holes, but it turns out there’s just enough variation in spacing that it only works for this pair 🙁 Next time I build a workbench, I’ll be a lot more precise with a few things and dog hole placement is one of them. Still, this is the best placed pair for sawing for me, so it could have been much worse. Tried it out in anger making some small parts and it works nicely. Not sure how much abuse it’ll stand but it doesn’t feel too precious. About those small parts:

Honestly, this one will be funny, bear with me…

Then some more practice with the v-tool:

The results weren’t terrible but lots more time needed I think. The practice pattern from Peter Follansbee’s video is a lot easier to carve if you make it simpler when you work on a piece of wood half the size he’s using – there’s a minimum resolution limit, so to speak, in oak and challenging it is not conducive to decent results. Still though, a ways to go to get from this:

To this:

But I think it’s a small improvement on this:

And then I got out the old oilstone and a 10mm dowel and some sandpaper and took twenty minutes to sharpen up the #7 hollow and the reeding plane I got before xmas and gave them a try. I still need to work on the hollow, but the reeding didn’t go too badly.

It’s a bit hard to see here, but the two beads were nicely formed for most of the length of the run. It’s a bit of a faff setting up the plane, but when it’s set, it’s sweet.

A bit of practice with the gouge later and I got to see what I bought it for:

A lot easier to make those two beads with the reeding plane than with a scratch stock. A little more practice and I might actually be ready to use this on a piece.

About that oilstone. I’ve had it for ages, it was one of the first things I ever bought for woodworking, but I’ve never really used it much – never liked oilstones, they’re mucky things really compared to diamond plates – but it does seem to be a higher grit than my 1200 diamond plate. I was planning on getting a D8EE plate later this month (DMT, 8000 grit) because I thought I was about ready to add another step up in grit to the sharpening process now that I’ve got the hang of the basics; I might just try using the oilstone in the interim. It probably needs to be flattened though, and I don’t really know what grit it actually is; must find a way to test that, even if it’s just “polish something on the 1200 grit plate and then on the stone and see which one left the larger scratches”.

And there was a bit of fiddling about with parts for various other builds that are in progress right now, like this one:

And this didn’t work too badly either, but I can’t pein over the end of the nail so I’ll order some brass rod stock to use as the hinge instead.

Finishing / Shed / Woodcarving / Woodworking — No Comments
28
Dec 17

Mucking out and mucking about

Couple of days out of the shed, mostly spent lying down and paying attention to all the little muscle cells as they turned to me and said “what the feck was all that then?”. Today though was bin day so back out to the shed and spent a half-hour cleaning up all the shavings and using the shop vac to tackle the sawdust.

Before:

After:And then, having made a clean spot, went and tidied the small section behind the tumbledrier there where I usually wind up standing wishing I’d cleaned that part of the shed.

And then, having cleaned everything up, time to play…

First off, I did want to see what the stains look like and to try to replicate this:

Granted, I don’t have resawn squares of flamed sycamore, I’m mucking about with bits of poplar, but still…

That was a bit of fun. I’ll take a peek tomorrow to see how it reacts to drying, and spray some poly on it to get a look at it under finish (it’s not actually for a project, I’m just experimenting).

Then on to the next thing; I got myself a solstice present of Peter Follansbee’s video on 17th century New England carving (I’m mad, me) and I wanted to try one of the basic v-tool exercise patterns:

Granted, I don’t have riven green oak or even quarter-sawn oak, I’m mucking about on an offcut from the table build – inch-thick kiln-dried flat-sawn oak. Grand for furniture, not so much for carving. Plus I need to sharpen my v-tool a bit more and I need some new slipstones because apparently you can shave the diamonds off diamond slipstones if you’re not careful when honing a gouge. Doh. And I don’t have all of Follansbee’s kit (which is worse than it sounds since he only uses six gouges and a v-tool…). But I have enough for one or two of the exercises (including this one) so on we go…

Natty little camping light spotted in a Big Clive video – handy since it has a magnet in one end and for throwing light across a surface with knifed marks it’s pretty useful.

The divider work is straightforward enough…

…but there’s a reason Follansbee makes it look easy and it’s twenty-five years of practise…

Still have all my fingers and no new leaks, so I’m calling that a win.

And a bit of BLO to show it better.

Well. First try. It’ll get better. Or it gets the shovel again.

And in the meantime I figured out what I wanted to do with those scraps I couldn’t throw away…

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