Stochastic Geometry

No rain today, but lots of errands in the morning and afternoon, so only got to work on the bench around five pm. Oh well. At least one of the errands was picking up a new mallet from the post office. Hand-turned lignum vitae from an old lawn bowling ball and a nice oak handle (this seller in case anyone’s interested).

Isn’t it pretty? 🙂 And it works nicely too (“works nicely? It’s a mallet, not a fire control computer, it’s a lump of wood wot you ‘it things wit’, wot’s e on about?” and so on, but it’s lovely and well-balanced and solid and the weight’s just grand). Anyway…

I did manage to get the legs squared up during the week, and cleaned up the stretchers though I didn’t get a chance to square them up (but they weren’t far off from it) so I started off by cutting the remaining two legs to length.… Read the rest

A nice dry-ish day for most of today (for which I know karma is going to exact vengeance) so after breakfast, out to check on the apron glue-up.

Not bad. No daylight between the boards. A bit of bowing and twist though, so out with sid…

Did I say a bit of twist? I’m sorry, I meant an entire 40-foot container full of pineapple worth of twist. The front apron wasn’t too bad, it only took the one pass with sid on either side – about 20-odd minutes in total – but the back apron’s middle board was a few mm higher than the other two boards and it ate the rest of an hour getting that down to even reasonably flat. But I got it done and then got out the faithful #4½ to do the smoothing away of sid’s furrows.… Read the rest

Well, the vice leg glue-up seems to have been unaffected by its shower, and it’s now a suitably beefy leg (by which I mean, it’s now large enough to look comically too large for the benchtop. Oh well, it won’t be the only thing that’ll look funny about this by the time I’m done I suspect). There wasn’t much time for the rest of the week to do much work (so I occupied myself by buying more tools. Why did nobody tell me this was a sickness you could catch? What the hell did I need a #6 for? Well, other than for preparing smaller boards that didn’t really need the #7, and for filling the space in the tool cabinet between the #5½ and the #7…. though maybe a T5 would help with the symmetry… Oh, for pete’s sakes!).… Read the rest