New tools

New Toys!Woodworking

You know how aliexpress isn’t so much shopping as it is buying surprise presents for your future self?
Well, a while back I saw this neat tool being used for layout in a Korean woodworking video:

It was basically a cross between a marking gauge and a vernier calipers and I thought “wow” and looked for one and found it was over a hundred quid and thought “nope”. But aliexpress did knockoff aluminium ones for about twenty quid and I figured why not, so I ordered one.

In January. I mean, covid was in the promed email lists by then but it wasn’t on the radar over here very much and we thought it’d be a bit less of a thing than it became. But anyway, point is, I forgot about it completely and then the other day it turned up out of the blue:

It is very nifty 😀 Looking forward to giving it a workout.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 6 Comments

Only 63 days to go…

WoodturningWoodworking

…to the winter solstice!
And obviously, we need decorations, so…

Time for a little spindle turning. This is the quick centerfinder I got off aliexpress a while back – it’s a nifty little thing. For any spindle blank I could get on my minilathe, it’s just much faster than any other centerfinder I have. Though if it’s not a blank, if it’s a branch or whatever, it’s not so good. But for prepped blanks it’s nifty.

Also, because this is spindle turning, it’s less likely to grab a tool and shove it through your faceplate, so small people can help…

At first, it was just help to stain the wood and sand it at the end, but on the second tree, we progressed to learning about the spindle roughing gouge…

I think that might be far enough to go for a while yet, but we have more snowmen and trees to make before December gets here.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 1 Comment

Milliput inlay bowl

WoodturningWoodworking

Second bowl finished this week (and by that I mean it was hanging around for weeks and I finally got to it) was a nice sycamore bowl. I saw a photo of a nice bowl a while back with irridescent metallic paints in the rim:

I like the angled rim shape there and wanted to replicate it, but I don’t have the irridescent paints so I wanted to go for a simple inlay instead. Resin would be awkward to pour into an inlay on such a rim because of the whole “liquids flow downhill” thing, but milliput might work so I thought I’d try that.

First use of the new centerfinder toy.

Mounted with a faceplate ring which I’m starting to really like over other mounting methods because I can take the blank off the lathe and forget it for three weeks while being lazy and then remount it and it’ll run true.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 1 Comment