Resin results and carving again

Baby blanket chestDesk ShelfWoodcarving
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Woodworking

So the resin tests came out pretty damn good. The idea of putting the reflector under the resin worked quite well, and most of the colours came out well (the crimson guitars stains didn’t really pop but that was more down to the dark background – the way the red especially looked over the reflector suggests it’d be lovely over poplar).

Crimson guitars stains in walnut

Calum picked out a few he liked as well (the ones with crosses beside them in pen). So now I’m just picking out designs to do for the various parts of the desk, shelves and sides. I need to print a few out and find some transfer paper, then some will be done by inlay and some with resin and some with a mix.… Read the rest

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Testing resin pigments

Desk ShelfWoodworking

So, like I said last time, there’s going to be some resin in the desk shelves for Calum. Because, you know seven year old clients, they’re all about the bright colours. And the North Atlantic. So, onto ebay and ordered 3kg of clear resin (I won’t need that much, but I want to do other stuff too…) and then pigments… well, Peter Brown had a “using household things for resin pigments” so I thought I’d try lidl acrylic and tempura paints and some other stuff…

And I also was thinking walnut is dark so any resin is going to look like it’s in a hole in the ground, but there’ll be an LED light above the walnut shelf, so what if I had a reflector under the resin? So I got some of the one-way reflective window film as well…

So I had some offcuts and scraps of walnut and poplar from the sides and desk and I routed out a few pockets in it, put that window film into half of them…

…and then just started making up small batches of acrylic (around 100-150g per batch) and mixing in pigments and then pouring into four pockets so I could see each pigment in both woods, with and without the reflector.… Read the rest

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Fettling

Baby blanket chestDesk ShelfTools
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WoodcarvingWoodworking

More shed time today, and I spent the first half of it fettling the middle shelf in the desk. Straightforward, if repetitive process – assemble, check what’s too tight and what’s too loose, cut or pare the shelf a little narrower with saw and chisel, reassemble, recheck, repeat until the dovetail joint that was horribly stressed by the shelf being too wide:

…is no longer stressed, but just snug:

And doublecheck all the other joints to be sure nothing else is opening up.

Okay, I’m happy with that.

I’m also happy because before assembling this, I marked out the back of the top of the sides to show which bits had to be cut off to give a straight line across the back (because the top goes up against the wall for support), and when I assembled it:

Nice straight line.… Read the rest

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