Stochastic Geometry Random tangents

Bit fiddly in one place this evening where the groove was slightly thinner than the stringing. A bit of work on the stringing with a scraper sorted that out. I’ll leave this dry overnight and clean it up tomorrow, and then add the remaining pieces. I still have other elements beyond the border stringing that I want to add though, but my plug cutters haven’t arrived yet…

The feet are a different wood to the shelf, so I wanted some contrasting stringing there; the “variety pack” of veneers I bought an age back had some possibilities, but again, 0.6mm so I’ve laminated two sheets together and they’re gluing up between two sheets of MDF there. Not sure about my cauls mind you. But it shouldn’t require *that* much pressure… we’ll see how it turns out tomorrow.

I do need a better way to stash the syringe when there’s still glue in it. It’s a pain if it hardens into the needle itself. I’ve buried it in a small puddle here to try to keep the air from it, but there has to be a better way. I’ve seen how Steve Latta does it, but I don’t have the same glue bottle design he has, I’ve got the normal titebond ones while his is more of a traditional nozzle design and he just sticks the syringe into the nozzle like it was the cork:

More thought required…

Trimmed off the excess from the weekend’s work, and it doesn’t look too terrible:

There’s some more outline left to do (for which I will need to bring the heatgun out to the shed from the electronics bench) and there are some more decorative elements I want to add, but not bad so far.

I also need to think about decoration for the rest of the piece:

I have some ideas, but they’re not settled yet…

First day in a few weeks where it’s not been I-don’t-wanna-go-out-there weather and my teeth haven’t been broken, so I wandered out to the shed to continue the current stringing project and try to make some progress on it. I got the joinery for the desk shelf mostly finished yesterday evening, though I borked the dovetails and I’ll have to do something decorative to cover that up (one of these days I’ll learn you can’t do fine dovetails as an end-grain-to-edge joint) but other than that it’s not terrible. So I skimmed it up to get ready for stringing and started cutting a nice basic outline with the shed-made cutter and occasional use of the lie-neilsen radius cutter.

The card’s not an advertisement btw, it’s just that you need somewhere for the pivot point of the radius cutter and if you don’t want to dig a hole in the middle of your project, double-sided tape holding down a plastic card like that makes a good surface to anchor to. In other cases though, you can put the pivot point in a groove and so it gets hidden when you put the stringing in:

Those pivot points will just go away when I put in the bottom line’s stringing. So, time to cut some:

I still haven’t found a good supplier of thick (~1mm) veneer so this is the lamination of two 0.6mm thick sheets of horse chestnut. And the glorified pizza cutter makes short work of it with no tracking off the line following the grain, it’s neat that way. Just don’t leave your finger hang over the edge of the ruler because it’ll take that off too. Tungsten carbide blade. Next, put glue in the slot…

Handy things these, but you don’t half get a few odd looks when a box of them arrives for you at the office…

And the pivot points are hidden. I was able to coax the stringing round those corners by rubbing it a few times to heat it through friction but I really must get a bending iron off ebay.

Now let the glue set a while and then trim back with a chisel (I’ll take a smoothing plane or a scraper to the whole surface when it’s all done, but cutting off the excess now makes it a bit easier to work with).

Not a fantastic job on the endpoints, but okay for a first try I guess. Now to cut the line that cuts through that curve (funny thing, I’d have thought you’d cut all the lines first then glue in all the stringing, but no, if they overlap like this you cut through the stringing as well for a cleaner result).

And now glue in the other curve and the other straight line, covering that pivot point again…

And leave that set a bit, trim back the excess and then glue up the last long straight-ish bit:

I knocked off there, I’ll come back to it tomorrow evening for a while and clean it up, but for now that’ll do. I really want to find a way to heat the stringing for that last remaining segment and I need a plug cutter set (which is on its way) for the last decorative bit I had planned for that corner.

Not too bad so far I think. Mind you, so far this has been rather simple…