Sharpening station

ShedShelvesTools
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WoodturningWoodworking

So ages ago I made one of Paul Sellers’ kind of sharpening stations – effectively just a plank with carved recesses for diamond plates (in a small shed, the diamond plates work best for me because they’re less muss and fuss than everything else would be in that space). It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece or anything (though I still think waney edge plywood will come into fashion), but it worked quite well for years.

It has gotten slightly grubbier with use (that’s the steel dust and the lapping fluids and so forth) and I added a handle because I started keeping it under the bench and the handle made extraction easier. But you still have to pull it out from under the bench and have room free on the bench to put it on before you can sharpen and that’s… uncommon in the shed.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 3 Comments

The great Shed Tidy-Up 2020

ShedWoodworking

It happens to us all, or so I’m telling myself – you start one project, it gets interrupted by another two which are a little more urgent, you’re playing with something on the side on the lathe because that doesn’t interfere with the bench, and suddenly you’re ankle-deep in shavings and can’t see the bench because it’s covered by six boxes and you can’t reach the tools anymore.

Thought I was exaggerating, didn’t you? So. Where to start. Well, hoovering up and putting things like the grinder back on the wall was the obvious bit, but I was still left with a literal shed-load of clutter on the bench. I tried organising stuff into boxes so that projects-in-motion like the new lathe tooling and such were at least corralled, but it became obvious that, well, this just isn’t very good as workspaces go.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 4 Comments

Colour and shape

FinishingWoodturningWoodworking

Was mucking about with the lathe last month. I was wondering if buying a thick plank and cutting my own blanks was a possibility a while back and while I’ve managed to find a solid source for them since (Home of Wood in the UK in case you’re in Ireland and looking for a source, but what effect Brexit will have is something we’ll have to see next year – I already can’t get replacement bandsaw blades from TuffSaws because of that), I still wanted to try a square bowl so I took an offcut of poplar that I had and chucked it up with a dovetail faceplate, which are really nifty little things – I have two so I can have two blanks on the go and if I take one off the lathe, I won’t have concentricity errors when I put it back on, at least none that matter for woodturning levels of precision:

Loving that natural light from the window.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in No Comments