Home / Tag "shed jobs"

Sharpening station

So ages ago I made one of Paul Sellers’ kind of sharpening stations – effectively just a plank with carved recesses for diamond plates (in a small shed, the diamond plates work best for me because they’re less muss and fuss than everything else would be in that space). It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece or anything (though I still think waney edge plywood will come into fashion), but it worked quite well for years.

It has gotten slightly grubbier with use (that’s the steel dust and the lapping fluids and so forth) and I added a handle because I started keeping it under the bench and the handle made extraction easier. But you still have to pull it out from under the bench and have room free on the bench to put it on before you can sharpen and that’s… uncommon in the shed.… Read the rest

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The great Shed Tidy-Up 2020

It happens to us all, or so I’m telling myself – you start one project, it gets interrupted by another two which are a little more urgent, you’re playing with something on the side on the lathe because that doesn’t interfere with the bench, and suddenly you’re ankle-deep in shavings and can’t see the bench because it’s covered by six boxes and you can’t reach the tools anymore.

Thought I was exaggerating, didn’t you? So. Where to start. Well, hoovering up and putting things like the grinder back on the wall was the obvious bit, but I was still left with a literal shed-load of clutter on the bench. I tried organising stuff into boxes so that projects-in-motion like the new lathe tooling and such were at least corralled, but it became obvious that, well, this just isn’t very good as workspaces go.… Read the rest

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Well-timed…

So this showed up at work today, making excellent time from Rutlands in the UK:

New dust collector! 100mm dust port, 1100W motor. Should do grand with the thicknesser and I’ll use the adapter that’s currently going from the existing dust deputy to let me hook the extractor up to the cyclone (100mm cyclones, it turns out, are spectacularly expensive, but I might just build a cyclone lid following this page’s instructions, which would also reduce the overall height of the stack.

Yes, I need to unscrew the joint, break the glue joint with a lump hammer and then the frame can flex the 10mm it has to so the extractor can squeeze in. It’s not great, but this wasn’t supposed to be an heirloom piece 😀 It’ll do for now.… Read the rest

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