That whooshing noise…

FinishingSidecar CotWoodworking

…is a rapidly approaching deadline 😀 So there’s been a lot of work and not a lot of photos and typing.

I’ve been testing some finishes…

So there’s shellac on the walnut, I’m testing both shellac and osmo wax on the ash, and milk paint on the poplar. The latter is very vibrant going on…

…but after it’s dried the next day, it’s faded a bit…

…which is disappointing, because I’m not a fan of this modern shabby chic chalk paint nonsense. But if you put a layer or two of osmo over the top of it, it picks back up somewhat. Well, it’ll have to do.

Meanwhile, all the panels are now planed (holy carp but kiln-dried ash is god-awful stuff to work with even if it does look nice, especially long heavy pieces), all the frame pieces are cut to length and we’re into the joinery and fitting stage.… Read the rest

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Tool night

ShedSidecar CotWoodworking

Holidays started, and a couple of new tools showed up in the post (well, rutlands was having a black friday sale and some nice things popped up on ebay for decent prices).

A few fairly cheap rasps. Machine-made, no hand-stitched french rasps in my budget for a while (these cost about twenty euro for the set, a single hand-stitched one would cost a little over a hundred euro more than that). Might be useful for the curved parts of the crib when I’m finishing them.

One of these dividers is new; one of these is older than the modern state of Ireland. And they both work pretty damn well. (They’re for laying out the dovetails in the drawer of the crib).

I kept having to set and reset my existing veritas gauge using scraps of wood with the gauge lines in them (which works great until you drop the scrap down behind the workbench where it’s bloody awkward to get to), then I noticed that other people got round this by having a small army of the things and using different ones for different measurements during a project (no you can’t set them off a ruler, you’ll inevitably get parallax error setting it and make a mistake that shows up glaringly later on).… Read the rest

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Depressing weekend results…

Sidecar CotWoodworking

So the weekend started off well. Popped the steambent upright from last weekend out of the drying form:

And the results were very good, the only crack I could find is barely there at all:

And there’s some marks from the compression strap:

And a small defect in one spot on one edge: But those are a swipe from the spokeshave to remove and apart from them it was nearly a perfect bend.
The problem is that the first upright isn’t a perfect match…

The twist I could take care of with planing, I don’t need the full thickness on those sections, but the difference in curvature could introduce stresses I don’t need in the piece, so the idea was to steambend another upright this weekend using the last of the plastic tubing I had and pick the best two of the three.… Read the rest

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