Finish line

Desk ShelfStringingWoodworking

Big parcel arrived in the post…

Mind you, it felt light, but still, I think this might be overpacking 😀

Inlay binding. Interesting to watch it being made if you ever get the chance. It’s supposed to be a purely decorative element, and it costs so much less than the shipping that I got a few different bands, but I’m only interested in one…

And the point of this pattern isn’t normal decoration…

Cut to width, knife in lines, chisel and #722 router plane down to depth (the depth being the thickness of the binding), and chisel it just a hair too wide, so add a piece of stringing to close the gap…

Let the glue set and trim to the surface…

And there’s the finish line for the racetrack 😀

I think that’s the last of the stringing for this shelf as well.… Read the rest

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DIY intermission

New Toys!ToolsWoodworking

Funny thing about DIY, it gets all the Tim-the-Toolman-Taylor jokes and all the Daddy-Pig jokes, but at the core it’s a repeat of the Arts-and-Crafts movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s which led to things like this:

From the Met Museum : https://www.metmuseum.org/

I mean, it’s not to everyone’s tastes (I don’t like it much personally) but you can’t really argue it’s incompetent or that it’s inferior because it wasn’t just an aesthetic, it was a philosophy – one of using more traditional craftsmanship rather than industrial processes and moving away from the previous mass produced furniture (sorry Henry, but Ford didn’t invent mass production, High Wycombe got there at least six decades earlier and they might not have been the first) which people felt wasn’t as good as human-made furniture (as in, wasn’t as nice to look at, wasn’t built well, and so on). … Read the rest

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Stringing along…

Desk ShelfStringingWoodworking

Finally back in the shed after a few weeks of long work days, and it’s time to try to get the stringing finished. 

First up, prepping some material, cutting the strings and planing the edges reasonably straight, then thicknessing them with the scraper tool which I’ve tweaked slightly. 

Still needs a lot more tweaking though, it’s still rather rough. 

Straight lines first, then on to heat-bending the stringing for the curves…

And after letting the glue set a bit, out with the chisel and lop off the excess and take the stringing down to a few thou over the surface (the final smoothing pass will take everything to the same plane, but I’ll hold off on that until the epoxy and everything else is done). 

There’s a bit of inlay banding for the start/finish line on the racetrack, and then there’s a large blue epoxy sea for the Titanic to sink on, and maybe some other bits and pieces if I can think of any. … Read the rest

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