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New Toys! / Tools / Woodworking — No Comments
25
Mar 17

Hey Presto-n…

Another new toy today. While building the crib, my favorite tool very quickly became my Record 151 spokeshave.

It’s a really simple little tool and works brilliantly one you follow Richard Maguire’s tip and take off the adjustment knobs because you can’t ever get them both to agree well enough to keep the blade properly adjusted, so instead you just clamp the blade with the cap and set it with a hammer (which is a much finer adjustment than it sounds). It’s brilliant for anything with curves, or for rounding over sharp corners quickly for that matter.

But.

While it’s a lovely tool to work with, and far beyond cheapo Drapers and the like (I don’t care what Paul Sellars says on that one, I’ve seen the Draper spokeshave and it’s just manky), it does have faults. The casting of the body does not match the cap perfectly, for example – there are lugs on the sides of the lever cap that should fit into the body, but there’s a good 3-4mm of a gap because the tolerances weren’t finer. And you can set the blade further forward very readily and surprisingly delicately with a hammer, but you can’t retract it with the hammer, you have to undo the cap and reseat the blade back at the start and advance it again with the hammer, which can be annoying at times. It does the job, but I keep thinking there are things that can do the job better.

Well, probably the best out there right now according to everyone with a few hundred euro to drop on a spokeshave, is this:
That’s a Lee Nielson Boggs Spokeshave (Boggs being the rather accomplished chairmaker who designed it). And if you have approximately twenty times the price I paid for my 151, you can test it to find out 😀

Me, I went a different way and chased after a Preston. Edward Preston & Sons were the Lee Nielson of their day, arguably at the very top of the toolmaking world from around 1825 to somewhere between 1911 (when Edward Preston died) and 1932 (when the company was bought by Rabone). Unlike most of the other manufacturers who seem to have mostly copied stanley designs, the preston tools were markedly different. And their spokeshaves were neat, elegant, and clever. They had a well-known design (the 1391) that had very decorative casting:

But as good as it’s supposed to have been, I just didn’t like the look of it, so I went after their plainer version and finally managed to get a good example of one for, okay, just shy of forty euro including postage, but that’s still a third the price of the Lee Nielson. And just look at how pretty it is!

It’s been restored and it looks absolutely magnificent. And note that there’s only one adjustment knob so you don’t have to worry about misaligning the blade by not being in sync with both knobs, so you don’t need to adjust it with a hammer.

And the blade looks almost unused:

I’ll have to make a new sharpening holder for it, but it’s got enough steel there for a while longer yet, and Ray Iles makes replacement blades today for about 15 euro-ish.

Now, I just need to think of a new project to use it on 😀

Woodworking — No Comments
09
Mar 17

Wristrest

So I’m still cleaning down the shed from the cot (finally got all the shavings under control…) but yesterday an officemate (hi Gary!) was looking at MassDrop (think “what to get for the rich geek who has everything” with a pricetag to match) and specifically at a wrist rest. For those who don’t type all day, it’s something to rest the wrist on while typing:

If you type all day every day like a lot of software engineers do, this is a pretty necessary thing or you wind up with carpal tunnel syndrome. I’ve had that, it’s not fun (it’s why I’ve used kinesis ergonomic keyboards for twenty years).

So the specific one Gary was looking at was wooden, and nice enough if a bit simple:

I mean, it’s not some gel-filled cushion, it’s not articulated, it’s just a shaped plank of wood. Walnut maybe? Fourteen inches wide (the width of a MacBook Pro) and about three inches deep.

They’re charging $95 for it (or they were, it’s not for sale any longer). I nearly choked on my coffee. I told him that was insane, that it was a lump of wood and not worth it and that I could knock that up in my shed in twenty minutes from an offcut. So he said “prove it”.

That’s how I keep getting myself into these things. You’d think I’d have learned by now.

So I go home, I find a piece of walnut offcut (in this case it was a length intended to be part of the cot frame but a bad rip cut and a waney edge made it unusable for that), I cut out a 14″x3″ piece from it (I don’t even take the time to lay it out) and skim plane it to clean off the rough-cut furriness. Then I plane one face and edge to square, and shoot the ends square from that. I don’t bother with the other edge or face because they’re going to get shaped anyway. And I cut the corners curved on the front using my new toy that just arrived from Dictum today:

Well, I have a project or ten in mind that will involve dovetails and I want to try sawing out the waste on the pinboard instead of chopping it out because that took a bit longer than I thought it would on the cot drawer. I need a better place for it to live though…

I also need to finish tidying up, and one of the next shed projects is tool storage. But for now…

And from there, I get out the spokeshave and round over edges and I use the jack plane to cut a quick chamfer on the front edge and then go over everything with the spokeshave again to get it all nice and smooth, and I hit the ends with some sandpaper for a few seconds to get the last little bits around that knot on the left front side.

Total time from start to here was about 25 minutes or so (I was faffing about a bit with the new fretsaw). With machines, that’s two tablesaw cuts, two mitre saw cuts and a run-around on a router table, so maybe three minutes?

It needed a little finish and I had the dregs at the bottom of the shellac jar to hand so…

One coat on by brush, then in for a cup of tea and a bit of Richard Maguire’s latest sharpening video while it dried. Then out to the shed again, some steel wool to knock back the first coat of shellac and rag on a second. Back to the house for more tea and Maguire, and half an hour later I take the offcut piece of felt I had from lining the cot drawer and cut a small piece out of that and spread it and the underside of the rest with contact cement from the end of a tube left over from putting leather on the bench vice jaws.

Let that get tacky for ten minutes, then press the two together and trim the excess. And then a final coat of briwax on top for the shiny.

By this point I realise I’m foostering so I draw a line under it and wander back in from the shed. Total work time is about 30-35 minutes (with something like 90 minutes of waiting on finishes while watching videos and drinking tea in there too). And the test fit worked:

And it doesn’t just work on my laptop, it works in production*:

So $95 versus €2. Hell of an exchange rate, even when you count the three minutes it’d take to make with machines, labour, marketing and so on.

 

*That’s a joke for the other IT people btw. 

Finishing / Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — No Comments
26
Feb 17

Foostering

Right, I just need one or two hours of calm dry weather and…

*sigh* Feck’s sakes. Fine.

But at least I can put in the glue blocks to support the top panel. Yesterday I trued up a corner of a stick of walnut I had as an offcut from the drawer front and then cut it into four ~10cm lengths. Granted, this isn’t traditional, glue blocks are traditionally whatever cheap softwood was lying around, but I had this as an offcut so why not.

Then today I had a few minutes of trying to figure out how to clamp them in place because I didn’t know how this was done traditionally. One quick internet search later and yup, you just paint the glue face with glue (hide glue is traditional but apparently any wood glue works), rub it on the spot where you want the glue block to stick to ensure both sides have glue and there’s no air in the glue joint, then hold it in place for a few seconds and there it sticks.

Don’t give it a knock until the glue cures, and there you go, glue blocks.

But eventually there were two or three dry hours in the late afternoon, so I moved the cot outside for the last time and started fettling the drawer. Which it turns out was necessary – when I was assembling it yesterday I had to stop half-way through glue-up to shave down the width of the plywood base, but obviously I didn’t shave enough and it had pushed out the sides of the drawer at the base by a few mm, so now I had to shave back the outside with planes in order to fettle it.

But eventually I got it to fit smoothly, and I’d cleaned up the glue and joints as well. Then it was a case of pushing it in flush, finding it was hanging up on the drawer rails, trimming them to give a rounded ramp type profile at the start so the drawer would go flush, then marking off its position on the rails with a pencil, and gluing a stop block in place on the rails with a cushioning pad. I clamped those in place for a half-hour or so just to be sure, then took off the clamps and glued the rails in place. That was the last bit of construction on the crib.

Yay!

Well, okay, I have to screw on the drawer pull, but I’m not counting that because.

I SAID BECAUSE.

And then it was time to finish the drawer, and I’m just going to go with shellac. I had thought of using milk paint and osmo over the top of that, but the more I thought of it, the less I liked the idea of a red drawer, even though it would have been funny. So just shellac.

And that’s the last of my shellac as well, so the whole drawer got three coats (sanding back after coat #2), and the front gets a final fourth coat.

Dovetail money shot, right there.

And in the meantime the cot got moved into the kitchen.

…and the thing rocks. The torsion the mis-bent steambent upright put on the frame torqued it out of square by about 3mm over the length of the piece, but the MDF assembly platform had gotten wet and had smushed enough to hide that. Sod. So tomorrow (I have a day off), I’ll take the drawer, put the pull in place, maybe line it because the plywood’s a bit unpleasant looking, put that into the frame and mount the mattress platform and basically put it all together, see how bad the rocking is and trim the feet to stabilise it.

And that’ll be it. It’ll finally be done.

 

 

Shit, this thing won’t fit in the car, how the hell do I deliver it?

To-Do List:

  • Make a drawer
    • Maybe add runners underneath the drawer?
    • Finish drawer with shellac.
  • Glue the drawer supports into the frame.
  • Even more last minute fettling and foostering (panel support blocks, drawer stop blocks)
  • EVEN MORE last minute fettling (levelling the legs, screwing on the drawer pull, lining the drawer)
  • Close door of shed, lock it, walk away and never do another project with a deadline ever again.
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