Home / Tag "poplar" (Page 5)

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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Angled dovetails

Desk ShelfWoodworking

Some more – increasingly rare – time in the shed over the last week or so, and I started cutting the top shelf for the desk.

While I had the desk assembled to this stage the last day, I scribed the top shelf angles with pencil and set the board aside. Then this week, after thinking about it a bit, I double-checked the angles of the sides of the walnut board – because it’s the core around which all this is built – and then I used the angles of the walnut board, and the width from the scribe marks (and yes, I double-checked that the sides were plumb to the desk before scribing), and used those two to cut the top shelf.

I didn’t cut them according to the scribe marks’ angles because there’s a little bit of twist in the sides (not much, maybe 4-5mm over the full length of the sides, and the sides are poplar, not oak) so the top shelf should be pulling them back to the walnut board’s angles, not locking in their twist.… Read the rest

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