New carts

ShedToolsWoodworking

The machines in the shed take up too much room.

And even the support machines for the machines take up too much room.

But the bandsaw does earn its keep and you can’t do bandsaw boxes without the sander and the thicknesser just removes the worst of the donkey work (and face it, in the 17th and 18th centuries, you had thicknessers too, you just called them apprentices) and you can’t use any of them without dust collection (well, you can, but the cleanup takes longer than doing the job by hand would have most of the time). Hence the shop vac and the cyclone. But they’re all just piled on top of each other and the bandsaw and sander are in a huge clunky cart that I threw together as fast as possible rather than making properly.… Read the rest

Read More
Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments

Shed jobs

New Toys!ShedTools
More
Woodworking

Took a few days to get back into the shed after dousing the bench in BLO. I thought it’d be dry by now. Nope, still had a small film of oil on top. Not gummy, it’s just that it’s been so cold (-4C last night I think) that the BLO hadn’t started to cure yet. So I wiped off the excess again (whatever’s penetrated into the wood will cure in its own time, and that should be the majority of it) and got on with the small shop jobs that have been piling up.

First though, new toy…

I have no idea what I’ll use it for, but it’s a bottle jack. Thousand and one uses. €13 in lidl at the moment and 3000kg load and just over seven inches tall.… Read the rest

Read More
Mark Dennehy in 6 Comments

Small success

ShedToolsWoodworking

After a week, checked the carved, resawn, planed scraps of walnut.

No warping, no twisting, no cupping. I’m okay with calling that a success. The thing for me about making boxes is that without a large bandsaw to do proper resawing, the only way to thickness pieces involves planing away the excess and that excess wouldn’t be waste ideally, it’d be the other half of a new set of thinner boards. The bandsaw I do have can manage up to 75mm of material but beyond that doesn’t work because it can’t physically fit under the top bearing. I can resaw more than that by hand but it’s a pain in the fundament and you waste a lot more material – a 30mm board doesn’t resaw to 2x15mm boards anyway, you lose material to saw kerf to start with and if the cut wanders even a little, you lose more material planing to clean up afterwards.… Read the rest

Read More
Mark Dennehy in No Comments