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New Toys! / Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — No Comments
05
Oct 16

In camera

So I was trying to get a nice photo of a piece of the grain on one of the spars last night that had slightly hinky grain and which had torn out even on the smoothing plane, but which the card scraper had done a lovely number on. The camera on the samsung S4 phone I use was just not picking out the detail very well. Then today a workmate (thanks Gary!) loaned me his Canon 450D to try out. Holy crap. I used a Pentax SLR a few decades ago, and one of the Fuji not-quite-a-DSLR camera a decade ago for photos of target shooting stuff, so I knew the DSLR was going to be good, but seriously, holy crap it’s just in a whole other category.

Here’s the un-post-processed images of that tear-out patch of grain (I’ve just resized the image to the same 1200×800 size in both).
Cameraphone:
2016-10-05-20-50-10aCanon:

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Normally I have to play with the cameraphone images quite a bit to sort out white balance and colours and so on (and it’s not always possible to get it right), but the canon gets it right off the bat. And the detail is so much better.

Anyway…

Spent the shed time this evening taking the 72″ ash board I had, and rough-cutting 30″ out of it…

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…marking that out with the slat template…

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…and ripping it down to make four slat blanks…

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img_9350aThe ripping did not go so well this time. I’m pretty unhappy with it in fact, and I’ll only just be within tolerances when the slats are resawn and prepped. Finished up by planing the blanks around to make the marking up easier tomorrow.

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You can see why I’m unhappy with that ripping!

I did notice some very nice grain in one of them though, I must remember to keep it on the top side of the slat in the assembly:

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Pretty!

Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — No Comments
04
Oct 16

8 out of 1

So I was wondering if ripping the 8x1x30″ board down to four 2x1x30″ laths and then resawing those was the better way to go. And now I know.

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Yes indeed. Much more accurate resawing, the worst variance was yesterday’s 2mm deviation, and much less sweat involved either (I’m not saying it’s easy you understand, just easier…)

So that’s twelve slats down, eight to go, and now I have to ponder whether I break down the 60″ board I have into two 30″ boards and use one of those and have the other in reserve and save the 34″ for something else; or if I use the 34″ board for the last eight slats and keep the 60″ in reserve. I’m leaning heavily to the former on the grounds that I’m going to do another timberyard run later this month.

I also got to try out some new tools. So I used slat #1 in that pile as a test run earlier, but even with my smoother on the wispy setting, I couldn’t get rid of all the tearout on the slat, there was one portion that had awkward grain. I did have a plan for this, but first I needed to make a jig for a file.

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I don’t care that it’s not vital and I don’t care what Paul Sellars says about dogs and end vices, I think that thing is great 🙂 It would have been a right pain in the fundament to do that routing job against a planing stop and the face vice was warping the wood slightly (this is yet another on the list of JigsIWillHaveToMakeABetterOneOfLaterWhenIHaveTime 😀 ).

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I haven’t had a task for this little guy either, I knew I’d be using it on this project so I bought it earlier off ebay, but it’s been languishing in a box ever since. Perfect for this though.

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Few minutes with a smoother and a pair of thin wedges because it’s not perfect but who cares, it’s a pine jig, and I had a fence for my file and I could get on with sharpening my card scrapers. I do have a #80, but I cleverly took out its card and put it somewhere safe, so I’ll have to go digging to find it again. Till then, we do it by hand.

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And wow, does that work. Almost exactly as advertised, and I think the slightly-more-fiddly-than-I-was-expecting bit was down to a poor sharpening job rather than the tool (the cheap chinese burnishing tool I have is, I think, not a burnisher as the card scarper was grinding small gouges into it…). I am going to need a better burnisher, but this puppy’s getting used on the project for certain and definitely earns itself a place on the wall.

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You can just about see in that awful photo the part where the grain gets squirrelly, and that was tearing out in both directions with the smoother – with the card, it’s now glass-smooth to the touch even though it still looks squirrelly.

Tomorrow: on to the last eight slats…

Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — No Comments
03
Oct 16

Smaller steps worked

So, after taking the three new bevel-edged chisels and my new ⅜” mortice chisel (needed for the mortices for the slats’ tenons) to the 80-grit paper (I’ll do the stones and stropping tomorrow), it was on to taking the four ripped down 2x1x30″ ash boards and getting going on the resawing. I ran over each on four sides with the jack and the smoother to get a more square board, then gauged a midline down the edges of the board and penciled the gauge line for visibility, cut a starting notch with the chisel on the end grain and started in with the ryoba at a slow and steady pace. Leave dido singing away into one ear, and flip the board every other chorus line, and the saw just followed the line itself most of the time.

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In fact the only times it drifted, the saw went from this nice sweet noise:

… to a horrid vibrating, shuddering noise and was a pain to hold onto. Which is a nice sort of warning mechanism I guess. Also, the shiny saw blade is damn useful – you can check the reflected edge in it, and so long as it looks like the edge behind it (as in, so long as the two edges seem parallel), you’re tracking fairly straight.

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It’s an old trick, but it’s a useful one. The first of the four slats deviated by less than a millimetre at the worst point and the cut was nice and clean:

2016-10-03-21-20-19aAnd the second cut did wander by nearly two millimeters at the worst point, but that’s still well within the tolerance for this job, so that’s four slats from two boards.

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I did find it was really necessary to wedge the board as I resawed, to stop it clamping up on the blade – the moment it did that, the saw wanted to wander off and follow the grain line and not the gauge line. So I wound up using a long splinter of plywood from the floor, but in the opposite sense to how you’d normally wedge these things:

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But it worked, it kept the saw moving freely and now I have four more slats done. Twelve more to go and I’ll get to the other two 2x1x30 blanks tomorrow. If all goes well, that’ll give me four more slats and I’ll just need eight more (but I’ll have two 8x1x30 boards out of the ash I have to give me those and with plenty spare as margin).

A bunch of bits for the shed arrived today as well, but I probably won’t get to add them in until the weekend (it’s the sockets and things to tidy up the electrics in there – it’s never going to run more than a few lights and a radio and an oil-filled radiator to keep the shed above freezing during the worst of winter, but I’d rather have actual sockets on the walls even if they’re only a fancy extension cord instead of an actual ring on the mains, just to keep it tidy and protect the wires in case I’m moving stuff in there and I wallop the wire with a board or something).

Also, this arrived today:

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One wallpaper stripper, plus hose, plus a ten metre length of six-inch diameter thick polythene tube. Some of you have guessed what this is for already 🙂 The rest will have to wait – I have a fair bit of work to do with forms and prep before I can play with this…

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