06
Oct 16

Pressing diversions

Someone at work asked me today if I could make a cheese press (perfectly ordinary question). At first I thought they meant something a bit fancy like one of these:
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Which is doable, but a little time-consuming and I have about six other things on the go at the moment, but then they explained no, they meant like this one:

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Now that’s all pretty and stuff, but basically it’s two planks, three bits of threaded rod, a few nuts and a handle. How hard could that be? So I said I’d have a go. I had some offcuts of 2x4s from the bench that were around a foot long and the cheese jar thingy they had wasn’t that big, so I figured this could be reasonably easy…

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Few small offcuts – I figure resaw the 2x4s to 4x1s, glue up two for a panel for the base, use one for the crossbar at the top and take that 2×2 and get a handle out of it. If nothing else, it’ll be some practice with chisel and spokeshave that’ll be handy for the crib later. So I clean them up on a face and edge with the jack and mark off a mid-line for the saw and get going.

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I’ll say this much for pine – it’s a pain for knots or fancy joints, but it really does saw easy.

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Mind you, helps to have a good saw. Today, this thing was a line-following machine…

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Did I mention how critical that wedge was though?

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Okay, nice clean resawn boards. With a pretty knot-pattern too.

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Must try to keep that in as a feature, it’s too nifty not to. Resawed the other board as well, then took the first two and bookmatch planed the edges for a butt joint and gave them another swipe with the smoother to spring the joint, and glued up.

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Look, I know the glue brush is a fancy gadget, but screw it, it works better than looking for scraps of timber all the time and the glue peels right off when it’s dry. I like the thing. I’m a little worried that the bristles won’t last and they’ll come off as I pull dried glue out of them, but meh, I can live with it. The other end, the glue paddle thing, is the normal primary school glue spreader design and you can get packs of 50 of them for pennies on ebay if it comes to it.

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Hmm. I think the alignment drifted by a mm or so during the clamping. Or the kerf was wider than I thought. Oh well, still not too shabby.

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And some very rudimentary roughing out for the handle. More work there yet, but I want to get the nuts and threaded rod and stuff before doing too much, so I know what size the holes will be and where they’ll go exactly. So I set it all aside there for the moment and went back to the slats for the crib and marked up the blanks for resawing.

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At that point I drew a line under it. Only an hour in the shed (late start), but I might get that press done over the weekend. Have the electrics to do as well though, and the weather is finally forecast to be dry enough to paint the shed. Might have to make that the priority, there won’t be many opportunities between now and winter to get that bit done.


05
Oct 16

In camera

So I was trying to get a nice photo of a piece of the grain on one of the spars last night that had slightly hinky grain and which had torn out even on the smoothing plane, but which the card scraper had done a lovely number on. The camera on the samsung S4 phone I use was just not picking out the detail very well. Then today a workmate (thanks Gary!) loaned me his Canon 450D to try out. Holy crap. I used a Pentax SLR a few decades ago, and one of the Fuji not-quite-a-DSLR camera a decade ago for photos of target shooting stuff, so I knew the DSLR was going to be good, but seriously, holy crap it’s just in a whole other category.

Here’s the un-post-processed images of that tear-out patch of grain (I’ve just resized the image to the same 1200×800 size in both).
Cameraphone:
2016-10-05-20-50-10aCanon:

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Normally I have to play with the cameraphone images quite a bit to sort out white balance and colours and so on (and it’s not always possible to get it right), but the canon gets it right off the bat. And the detail is so much better.

Anyway…

Spent the shed time this evening taking the 72″ ash board I had, and rough-cutting 30″ out of it…

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…marking that out with the slat template…

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…and ripping it down to make four slat blanks…

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img_9350aThe ripping did not go so well this time. I’m pretty unhappy with it in fact, and I’ll only just be within tolerances when the slats are resawn and prepped. Finished up by planing the blanks around to make the marking up easier tomorrow.

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You can see why I’m unhappy with that ripping!

I did notice some very nice grain in one of them though, I must remember to keep it on the top side of the slat in the assembly:

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Pretty!


04
Oct 16

8 out of 1

So I was wondering if ripping the 8x1x30″ board down to four 2x1x30″ laths and then resawing those was the better way to go. And now I know.

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Yes indeed. Much more accurate resawing, the worst variance was yesterday’s 2mm deviation, and much less sweat involved either (I’m not saying it’s easy you understand, just easier…)

So that’s twelve slats down, eight to go, and now I have to ponder whether I break down the 60″ board I have into two 30″ boards and use one of those and have the other in reserve and save the 34″ for something else; or if I use the 34″ board for the last eight slats and keep the 60″ in reserve. I’m leaning heavily to the former on the grounds that I’m going to do another timberyard run later this month.

I also got to try out some new tools. So I used slat #1 in that pile as a test run earlier, but even with my smoother on the wispy setting, I couldn’t get rid of all the tearout on the slat, there was one portion that had awkward grain. I did have a plan for this, but first I needed to make a jig for a file.

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I don’t care that it’s not vital and I don’t care what Paul Sellars says about dogs and end vices, I think that thing is great 🙂 It would have been a right pain in the fundament to do that routing job against a planing stop and the face vice was warping the wood slightly (this is yet another on the list of JigsIWillHaveToMakeABetterOneOfLaterWhenIHaveTime 😀 ).

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I haven’t had a task for this little guy either, I knew I’d be using it on this project so I bought it earlier off ebay, but it’s been languishing in a box ever since. Perfect for this though.

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Few minutes with a smoother and a pair of thin wedges because it’s not perfect but who cares, it’s a pine jig, and I had a fence for my file and I could get on with sharpening my card scrapers. I do have a #80, but I cleverly took out its card and put it somewhere safe, so I’ll have to go digging to find it again. Till then, we do it by hand.

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And wow, does that work. Almost exactly as advertised, and I think the slightly-more-fiddly-than-I-was-expecting bit was down to a poor sharpening job rather than the tool (the cheap chinese burnishing tool I have is, I think, not a burnisher as the card scarper was grinding small gouges into it…). I am going to need a better burnisher, but this puppy’s getting used on the project for certain and definitely earns itself a place on the wall.

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You can just about see in that awful photo the part where the grain gets squirrelly, and that was tearing out in both directions with the smoother – with the card, it’s now glass-smooth to the touch even though it still looks squirrelly.

Tomorrow: on to the last eight slats…