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Food / New Toys! / Shed / Tools / Wall Cupboard / Woodworking — 2 Comments
21
Dec 17

Happy Solstice!

Shortest day of the year so least work done. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Started off with presents – some arrived yesterday but I couldn’t get to them and some arrived this morning, so yay!

Not Moore&Wright, but cheap and cheerful. I’m trying to cure myself of my combi-phobia. Is Moore&Wright. Offset calipers for scribing lines parallel to an edge. Nice idea. 3″ Record clamp. I have 2″ and 4″ ones, figured it’d be useful to see if something in between was useful.And a 2″ clamp because it was going in the lot. Another 2″ one that was in the lot. At a fiver, cheap. Have a few of these already and they have a habit of being useful.And a pair of 4″ clamps (I have three, I’m always needing a fourth. There’s another still in the post because I know the minute I have five I’ll need a sixth). I don’t like painting wood with latex paint much, it’s a bit meh. But I saw a nice guitar or two being done by the Crimson Guitars mob with these water-based stains and there was a cool demo panel they did with them that I had an idea for:

Might be able to replicate that. We’ll see. On with the presents…

A six and seven hollow to try a decorative element I’ve been playing with…

Shows promise; needs more work though. Don’t need this till later so that’s fine.Nice V-tool. I bought a tiny little one from proops last week for two or three pounds and made a rudimentary handle for it, sharpened it up and it was useless. It must have been meant for a power carver tool or something. This one however, without any sharpening, was miles beyond that:

Proops on the inside, Mattheison (the new one) on the outside. Soooo much better. Still needs work, but that’s for another day.

And then the biggie…

Frame saw! 700mm blade filed rip, compared to the ryoba’s 300mm. so you can see why it would have an advantage. This is the English pattern frame saw, not the French one with the blade in the middle, but for resawing this shouldn’t make any real difference. The blade length obviously will (the French pattern ones can be four feet long or more); but shed has a problem with French pattern frame saws…

Specifically, there’s not enough room for a full throw on a 700mm blade (the handle is in contact with the wood store there); a 1200mm blade would require a small window be cut in the wall of the shed… but even I’m not ready to do that. As it is I’ve had to move a few pieces of wood around in the store.

So obviously, this needs testing in something other than pine (which was the first test cut).

Poplar, 9″ by 4″ thick. Took 12m 30 seconds including a bit of faffing about moving plywood out of the way and all that, but I figure that’s built in fudge factor. So how does that scale up? I have a few 5″x15″ pieces and 6″x17″ pieces along with the 7″x16″ top/bottom plates.

So I thought volume removed might be a good guide; that’s the saw kerf times the square area cut through, and the kerf won’t change so just look at the area. Should be 0.347 minutes per square inch, right? That means the 5″x15″ pieces should take about 26 minutes each. Yikes. Okay, let’s give that a go.

Holy crap. An hour. It took a sodding hour. I mean, it’s a lot less effort than the ryoba was and maybe I just need to get the swing of it, but a stinking hour…

Cut quality is okay. Ryoba’s better but then it’s a finer plate. Maybe I need to sharpen the saw? The teeth are sticky-sharp but maybe they just need a touch-up.

So how long does it take to thickness off that quarter-inch by scrub plane? 15 minutes. And that’s to thickness and flattened and with the twist taken out. I ditched the saw idea for the sides and thicknessed them by scrub plane as well. And I had to mill another piece because the side I had sawn went from three-quarters of an inch sawn to half-inch when smoothed out enough to use. Gah. So that’s the shelf 😀

That’s the downside of the thicknessing approach really. You convert material into waste at a fair clip. That floor was clean this morning, that’s all from today.

But we have all the parts milled and squared and I could get started in on joinery at last.

Enter the rebate plane again, and I took a quarter-inch by one inch rebate off the backs of the sides.

Then out with saw, chisel and router plane and I cut the housing joint for the shelf.

Even got to use my side rabbit plane to trim the joint a bit. Slightly fiddly but…

Sorted. Fairly late at this stage and I started on the top and bottom which will be dovetailed into the sides. They needed a bit of treatment on the shooting board and then I realised I hadn’t cut the bottom to width yet (doh) so I marked out for that and I’ll hit the bandsaw in the morning and do that and the box blanks I have lying around.

And then I’ll make up that Japanese saw hook and get to dovetailing.

That was it in the shed for the evening; had to hit the kitchen to make gravlax for the family xmas dinner. Pretty simple recipe.

Take your fresh salmon trimmed and de-pin-boned to your liking. Measure its weight. Now mix a quarter of that weight in salt in a bowl with an equal weight of castor sugar and an equal weight of grated beetroot. cut a lime into wedges and fillet out the pulp and discard it; cut up the rind to small pieces and throw that into the mix. Now throw a good sized bunch of dill (chopped) into the mix. Put the salmon into a sous vide bag or lay it on some clingfilm or use tupperware, just keep this contained because beetroot is a great dye. Douse the salmon in the mix, then wrap it in your chosen containment method and put it in a secondary containment tray, put another tray on top and weight that down and then put the whole assembly in the fridge for a few days. Turn the fish upside down daily. Three or four days should do it. Then you remove, rinse off the salt/sugar/beetroot/dill mix and pat dry; slice thinly and serve on blinis or however you like to eat smoked salmon because this is like that only tasty.

Also, whatever you do, don’t put it in the fridge and relax for an hour and then remember when writing up the recipe for the blog that you left the dill sitting on top of the counter and the mix was missing a key ingredient because then you have to reopen the bag and chuck everything into the bag and squish it around a bit and get covered in beet juice a second time and you’ll have an opening in the glove that lets the salt in to find the four or five small nicks you got from the chisel and cleaning the throat of the fillister plane earlier.

 

 

By the way. Meet our new breadbin, courtesy of TK Maxx. Made from bamboo.

Is it me? Am I the crazy one? Or does that crooked joint at the top of the tambour drive your fingernails into itchy mode as well? The whole top hasn’t even tried for a square joint with the sides. It’s a good ten degrees out.

 

 

There’s nothing for it, I’m going to have to make a better one, aren’t I?

Bandsaw Boxes / Finishing / Side Table / Tools / Woodworking — No Comments
12
Dec 17

A day in the shed

So because I spent 2300 to 0400 on Friday night and 0900 to 1830 on Saturday working, I get a TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) day. Which I took today for reasons like waiting on The Plumber Who Never Showed Up. The plan was to spend all day in the shed. But since it hit -3C overnight, first things first.

Earl Gray, hot. With milk just to tick off the purists. And aren’t cast iron Japanese teapots nice? It’s the little things…

So with the shed at a balmy 3.5C, time to get to work, First, put the last coat of osmo on the tabletop and now I have to make some room and get the tabletop off the bench so I can get to it.

It’s not ideal, but needs must. And yes, I do need to clear away that rubbish in the wood bin, but this isn’t the countryside and neighbours wouldn’t take well to a small bonfire. Or for that matter, any fire involving wet MDF. I can’t blame them for that, I’d be miffed at needing a respirator in my own back yard as well. But I digress.

So the legs have been sanded down, given a last coat of the oak tea, let dry for five minutes so that right now the surface is damp to the touch but not actually wet. Time to apply the vinegar&iron solution…

That never gets old. It’s so dark it’s messing a bit with the camera’s auto-white-balance thingy, but it does that to the Mk1 eyeball too.

It’s a little… grubby looking close up. No worries. This is just the first stage, and I’m a bit oddball in that I like that pin-stripe-trousers thing the grain’s doing there. Dunno why, it just looks nice to me. However; now we give it about ten minutes to keep reacting (those were taken about 4-5 minutes in).

And after that time, we paint it in more oak tea, let it dry for five minutes, then more vinegar and iron solution, dry for five minutes, and then a last coat of the oak tea. At this point, it’s about as dark as it’s going to get in the time I have available (it will continue to react for the next 10-12 hours anyway and get darker as it does).

Wake up, time to dry.

They’ll go a kind of dusty purple in the next hour or three; that’s expected.

And now I have some time and a shed with a free bench….

I have an idea here. Trust me.

…or maybe not. I gave up on this idea here; I’ll come back to it over the holidays, but I can’t get it done today and I’ll just mess up the other things I’m working on. I guess recognising this kind of thing and giving up early is a good skill, but it still irks me.

Anyway, I do have something else on my to-do list for today:

Ug. Machines. And they’re ganging up on me now. Yes, it’s bandsaw box time. First though, I have a plan for that bandsaw…

Remember these? Going to fit the smaller ones.

Remove the older, larger thrust bearing.

Gunky! Now replace with the new smaller bearing.

The washer makes it look off-center, but it’s fine. The whole lego-part thing is great with these. Now for the lower thrust bearing, which is more awkward because of course it is. It’s not like being underneath the table would make it awkward enough, you also have to remove the entire assembly to replace the bearing.

Why is the lower post adjustable when you can’t reach it but the upper one isn’t? Le sigh.

Well. That explains a few noises. So much for sealed bearings.

And done. Modified thrust bearings, replacement teflon blade guides. And why go to all this effort? Three-eighths inch blades. Stronger than the normal quarter-inch blade, so you get better straight cuts on long rips (the main reason for having this bandsaw in the first place). But you can’t install them on this bandsaw properly with the normal thrust bearing – the normal bearing shoves the blade forward if you put the teeth gullets in the middle of the bandsaw wheel like you’re supposed to:

Put the leading edge of the bandsaw on the crown of the wheel like that and it has the most tension and thus is the most resistant to buckling when you shove wood into it; but you don’t want the thrust bearing rubbing on the back of the blade when you’re set up like this or the blade will behave oddly. With the new bearings, there’s just enough clearance (maybe 0.2mm but that’s sufficient).

And yes indeed, it does now cut much better than before with this blade, tracking straight down the pencil line instead of doing a drunken walk from one side of the line to the other and leaving you jockeying around the piece to try to minimise the amount of planing you’ll need to get it set afterwards.

And so, on with installing my redneck fence and starting into the bandsaw box by cutting off the back.

BTW, sanding with the triton sander is waaaaay less scary than sanding with a belt sander under a holdfast on the bench, so +1 for that, but they are out and out liars of the most bare-arsed kind when it comes to noise level ratings. If I turn this thing on and shove my fingers into the spinning belt, sanding off all my fingernails, nobody outside the shed would know because they’d never hear me over the noise of the sander. Hrmph.

Still, works. Going for a vertical format box here.

Glue-up tonight, more sanding tomorrow, some oil and a coat of shellac and done.

One box, all the clamps. How many clamps should I bring to the glueup?

And I’ll leave it there. I’ll try to get another coat of osmo on the legs tomorrow morning before work and another in the evening and if I can, that should be the table complete. I’ll assemble it, take a few photos, and then pass it on to its intended recipient.

Honestly, I’m not screwing around with the photo here, it actually is black enough that it’s confusing the camera’s not-so-clever white-balancing.

Side Table / Tools / Woodworking / Workbench — No Comments
10
Dec 17

Standing upright

Last few days have been the first really cold ones of the year. -2C to -3C in the shed. And work was… somewhat excessive in the last few days so tonight was the first time in the shed in a few days and a to-do list was waiting. So…

Ran a slightly larger drillbit through the aprons to give some flex room for the bolts, and flattened the top of the aprons (I also spent a half-hour before this with the scrub plane and #5 flattening the underneath of the tabletop and hand-cutting the panel to width to trim out the worst of the bandsaw wobble).

The stainless steel inserts arrived on Thursday in the post, thankfully. Seems everyone makes these in zinc-plated steel, but actual stainless is a bit hard to find.

Bit of faffing about getting the legs centered on the tabletop, then putting in the drill bit and thwacking it to mark the drilling point with the drill bit (it’s a brad boint bit).

And now it’s time to drill the holes for the inserts. Look closely enough and you can see the marked point.

El cheapo drill bit depth stop so I don’t drill through the table. I have a fancy one for auger bits, but for drill bits, it’s blue tape time. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh. Right. Well, at least I noticed the shavings were shoving the tape backwards before I chased it right through the table.

Who says calipers aren’t good for woodworking? Check length of insert with calipers, get automatic depth gauge setting on the other, stabby end of the calipers. So I drilled the rest of the insert holes, stopping to poke the stabby bit in the hole until I had my depth.

Then it was time to realise that Richard Maguire had gotten inserts that you put a hex key directly into in order to drive home, but these sodding things need a bolt put into them and you drive them home with that. And since they’re going into a blind hole, the bolt has to be shorter than the insert. I managed to find some short M6 bolts (they came with the Triton sander as the bolts to bolt it down to the table with but I had my own), but they were too long. So. Time to break out my metalworking setup 😀

This is my metalworking setup. It’s a Record Imp, which I got back in February. It’s a nice lightweight metalworking vice designed to be clamped to a bench by people who didn’t need a full-size machinist’s vice. And it has nice features – you can bend pipe with it, you have a small anvil at the back and a striking surface (that small round thing just behind the jaws) and so on. Plus, it’s old – it’s a later model so this wasn’t made in the 1930s but it would have been somewhere between the 1960s and early 1980s, before Record went downhill. This is a small vice, but it is not a toy vice. I’ve screwed and clamped it down to a scrap piece of inch-thick oak, which then gets holdfasted to the bench.

So I clamp the bolt in the vice, mark off the length I want, remove the insert from the bolt, then fire up the dremel with a cutting disk (it’s a 6mm bolt lads, if I fired up the angle grinder it’d be like firing a sandblaster at sponge cake) and nip it off.

And now, just because we can, out comes the file and the tap-and-die set…

File off the sharp bits left by the dremel, recut the start of the thread after the file’s mangled it. Then thread the bolt into the insert and get out the socket driver.

Now, pick up that 14mm long insert, in a shed where it’s around 6-7C, slip with your fingers and drop it down behind the bench into the sawdust and shavings.

Swear profusely.

Get out the magnetic-head telescopic torch thing…

Right. Enough faffing. Paste wax to the threads and drive it on home.

Nice. Now we just do that with the other three…

Why is it spinning so easily on insert #2?

Ah, shite.

Apparently my bolts are made of particularly firm cheddar.

Mole grips to unscrew the insert, pointy thing to screw the bit of the bolt still stuck in there out the back of the insert (glad I didn’t get the blind inserts now).

Okay. Prep another bolt. Repeat all the steps above. Keep going, but be more careful this time.

Shite! At least I felt it go this time and stopped fast enough to be able to unscrew it in one part. Prep another bolt…

Felt this one going before it snapped. Definitely cheddar.

At least all four are in now. I might come back if I can find a non-cheese bolt and drive them below the surface later. For tonight, that’ll do.

Bolts in, and they fit (they’re a bit less than drop-in, but wood moves, blah, blah, blah, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

That’s a pleasant sight 🙂

Out with the MDF board at this point for a flat surface and check the rock – the front left leg there is about a millimetre out. Plus the feet are all at 12 degrees to the ground because geometry, so I mark off a flat on each leg, disassemble the table and even the legs up. And I leave it there for the evening. I’ve been up since… well, I was in work till around 0400 this morning after getting called around 2330 on friday, and I was back at work just before 0900 until 1730. On-call sucks sometimes. Oh well. There are worse complaints.

I have to shape the feet and thin the table edge and do the final smoothing of the tabletop and legs (cabinet scraper time!), all of which are finesse tasks so I’ll leave them for tomorrow, and I can be starting the finishing by tomorrow evening which is a good timetable for this.

Oh, and I also have a custom scratch stock profile to file. I’d rather do this with a hollow plane, but I don’t have hollows and rounds and I know (a) how much a set costs and (b) how much space one takes up 😀 So that’s not happening for a while. Hell, that was why I got the #050C combo plane, but alas I didn’t get the special doo-dads to let it act as a hollow or round 🙁  I’ve got an eye open, but the problem with the combiplanes is that they came with a lot of bits and doodads, and that was in 1930. You can’t keep both socks together for more than six months before you’re suddenly looking at lefty pining for righty who is has returned to the fjords; what odds that someone will have all 53 pieces from the original combiplane box that they bought in 1933?

So obviously, I just need to get a set of hollows and rounds.

looks up prices

passes out

Holy crap. I could buy two cars (second-hand) for the price of a set. Sod that. I wouldn’t have the room to put them anywhere anyway and the larger ones are all for things I don’t have the physical space in the shed to build.

But on ebay, unmatched planes (“harlequins” apparently, in a rare example of nice naming) are way less expensive – you can pick them up for a pound apiece in some cases. So I’ll probably wind up buying one or six hollows/rounds/beading wooden planes over the next year. You don’t need all that many for the kind of stuff I do. I might start with one that matches the profile above, which is drawn to match one of my gouges to do some decorative carving work.

I guess I’ll just have to try my “build something and sell it to pay for the wood” plan this year to let me do that 😀

 

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