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Finishing / General / Jewellery Boxes / Resin / Woodcarving / Woodworking — 8 Comments
29
Jul 20

Ten Years

So ten years ago today…

Claire and me just after getting married!

The traditional gift guide says ten years is… tin. Hm. Really? Was tin some seriously sought-after material at some point in the last few centuries? Weird. But okay, tradition is tradition…

We can at least make a nice box though. I have some walnut and I still have some of that lovely rippled sycamore Custard gave me when I was searching for thick veneers…

Simple design from a joinery point of view, so just mill the components and cut to size to match the tin…

Grooves in the base of the front and back panels and in the sides will hold the base, which is 3mm boxwood (lovely material, it’s a shame it’s so hard to find).

It’s almost a single-use plane but it’s the best tool for this task really. The depth of the groove and the distance from the bottom of the panels is set using the boxwood base directly.

Then just groove away.

For the sides, because you don’t want to run off the ends with the groove, a different approach is needed; and at this point I discovered the narrowest of my usual chisels was 5mm wide and the groove is 3mm. A 1mm gap on either side would be a bit unsightly, so I was about to get out the grinder wheel and convert one of the older chisels to life as a narrower chisel when I checked the less-used ones and bingo…

3mm almost on the nose (actually a tad under). Hilariously, this wasn’t some engraving tool or fine work chisel, this is a morticing pigsticker designed to go through several inches of oak…

This gave me a giggle or two, but then on with chopping out the mortices for the base in the sides.

Tappy-tap-tap, as they say. Very shallow mortice, only one pass with light taps required, then a bit of scraping with the tip of the chisel to clean up and then check for fit.

The cross-grain mortices are less straightforward because they’re cross-grain and very narrow. You can’t really chop along the mortice for these. I tried cutting them like a housing dado but that wasn’t really getting it done, so I resorted in the end to knifing in the edges of the mortice rather deeply, chopping a little with the morticing chisel to a mm or so down to define the mortice, then drilling out the rest and cleaning up with the bevel-edged chisel.

Worked pretty well.

Then just repeat on the other side.

There’s a fair bit of fettling with all this as well but it got there in the end. I also drilled holes in the back panel and lid for the barrel hinges (butt hinges on this scale are something I still can’t get right). Then it’s time to knock it all back apart and sand the panels and the inside of the sides and the base and prefinish the insides because it’d be much harder later on, and then I gave everything a coat or two of poppyseed oil (it’s very light so it doesn’t darken the sycamore much).

And then glue-up. Just titebond here, no need for the hide glue and it was cold so it wouldn’t flow well without faffing about with hot water.

Along the way to here, the lid changed from rippled sycamore to more walnut because of a realisation about the size of the box and the lid (ie. that the lid was too narrow to cover from front to back unless it was sitting inside the box and I didn’t have the hinges for that). But the walnut had a knot so it was resin time again (I mean, it’s me, of course it’s resin time).

And that came out nicely after scraping and sanding down the lid. It’s a little beauty spot. But the box is a bit… chunky at this point. Not to worry, that’s part of the plan. And now I get to try to be delicate with industrial tools…

Angle grinder and a flap disk in 40 grit and one in 120 grit. It’s like using a power router only without the convenient handholds or the reference surfaces or the safety features. Exciting times…

Worked though. And now a lot of handsanding with every grit from 80 to 240. The cloth-backed sandpaper from the lathe was very useful here especially with the parts in the carved grooves.

Okay, now for finishing. First off, wipe off all the sanding dust with a dry rag, then with kitchen paper soaked in isopropanol. Then two coats of poppy seed oil.

Makes a difference!

Next up, a new lathe toy, the burnishing wheel. It’s not a fancy one, it’s just the chestnut products basic one. Works well. I will say that I didn’t expect it to be quite so grabby though, and it did bounce my hand off the chuck which wasn’t fun. Be careful out there folks…

And yes, I mixed carnuba and beeswax at the final stage. Also, I was unprepared for the sheer amount of cotton fibres this thing throws everywhere. It looks like the spiders were working overtime in the shed.

Worth it though.

And after that, two coats of blonde shellac with another buff on the final wheel after each coat, and finishing was done. Final job was to epoxy in the barrel hinges (finishing was easier with the lid separate) which was a tad fiddly because of course it was, hinges are my nemesis. But it worked…

The resin dot glows in the dark!

Also, yes, that’s a tin of spam.

And also, no, I’m not that bad.

Tin is the traditional gift, but tradition can go jump in a lake.

Woodturning / Woodworking — No Comments
09
Apr 20

First bowl!

So the woodturning course I was taking was cancelled because of Covid19 before we got to the bowl turning part of the course. But I had a large variety sack of bowl blanks arrive from homeofwood.co.uk at the start of lockdown, and I’ve been wanting to try bowl turning for a while, so I read about a dozen books on bowlturning (like The Practical Woodturner and others), bingewatched about thirty hours of youtube intruction from a dozen different turners, set the pucker factor to maximum and picked out the smallest minature blank I had…

That’s a three-inch blank on a three-inch faceplate 😀 But we can still do more overkill…

Tailstock support on a three inch blank 😀 Well, first bowl, might as well do belt and braces. So I turned the tenon (and it didn’t look too bad I thought), then I took off the faceplate, chucked the blank up, realised I’d skipped a step, put the faceplate back on and turned the outside of the bowl.

I didn’t have any plan for the shape by the way, that was just something that felt right as I was doing it. Then I took off the faceplate and chucked it up and immediately found that the chuck itself was vibrating because the tenon wasn’t exactly central. A quick pass or two with the spindle gouge cured that, and then I started hollowing out the bowl with the bowl gouge and quickly discovered a few things:

  • I need a lamp in the corner of the shed pointed at the headstock. I had to jury-rig a torch to be able to see inside the bowl to see what I was doing. Daylight might help, but this was after dark here.
  • I really need to remove the tailstock to do this, it’s way too scary having your hands near a live center when worrying about catches in a bowl.
  • Being able to rotate the lathe stand in the shed would be a major bonus on any larger bowls. Happily it’s not bolted to the floor; less happily, the compressor and pillar drill would have to be moved which is awkward. Maybe I could put a shelf down at the feet of the lathe stand when I can get more plywood after the lockdown ends.
  • Bowl turning is a bit scary.

But after a while of taking small bites with the bowl gouge and then a final scraper pass, I was able to move on to sanding. Up from 120 to 400 grit, and then burnishing with a handfull of shavings – and doing that inside a bowl with just two fingers at high rpms is hilariously scary. I wanted to keep the colour light so I gave the bowl a coat of poppy seed oil (also food-safe, which is nice because I think this would make a good salt bowl).

And then a single coat of blonde shellac and I called it finished.

I’m rather pleased with that 🙂
I mean, the walls are too thick to be elegant and too uneven in thickness to be able to call the thickness a design choice, and I didn’t even get the bottom of the screw holes from the faceplate out of the rim, but for a first bowl, I’m happy with that 🙂

Now for that 11 inch by 4 inch blank in the timber storage box…

Baby blanket chest / Bandsaw Boxes / Finishing / Shed / Side Table / Woodworking — No Comments
16
Dec 17

Post partum prepping

So, table delivered (yes, the recipient liked it). BTW, if you were wondering, it was a build-along to Richard Maguire’s video series:
In case you were thinking of buying that series, it’s well worth the money.

Today though (and yesterday) was all about cleaning down from the build (and carting away two rubbish bags full of shavings – not being able to burn wood here is a pain) and doing the dozen little jobs that needed doing like sharpening the wooden skew rebate plane I have here; going to use that in a build soon. And every plane had to get a light sanding with fine paper on the tops of the cheeks of their sides for surface rust (the -3C nights came with water vapour condensing on the cast iron) and then a fresh coat of wax. And other small jobs like that which had been backing up. I still have one more of those – building a japanese saw bench hook. I’m using a normal bench hook at the moment but for pull work, it can be a tad awkward because you have to hold the work to the fence. You can use a normal european bench hook if you hook it to the far side of the bench; but I think it’s a bit nicer if you attach the fence to the baseboard and drill through both and glue a dowel through both and down a few inches below the baseboard. The dowels then go in the bench dog holes and that’s your bench hook. Parts are set for that (I’m not sure I have enough dowel stock though) and I’ll get to it probably tomorrow.

The rest of my time has been spent on stock prep. Bit of resawing and flattening and ripping yesterday and prepping some blanks for bandsaw boxes. So walking into the shed today it all looks fine…

…and then you turn to the right to look at the staging area…

Ah. Right. So that’s four more side tables (or at least the raw material rough-cut for them) and then on top of that all the finishing jars and glues and screws and my plastic box of off-cuts. Those are only the bits I could use for things by the way (I’m resisting the packrat urge to keep every scrap of wood I cut off a larger piece on the grounds that There. Is. No. Room. In. Here), so resawn pieces that could be used to make small boxes or chunks that could become bandsaw blanks (not many of those left, I picked through the box on Friday to make up some blanks), or the cores from bandsaw boxes (which can get used for things like feet or drawer pulls or whatever).

Tucked behind the plastic box are the panel gauge and the dovetail alignment board, and on top of the box is where I stash all the component parts of builds in progress (and a lot of sandpaper at the moment because I haven’t found a place for it). So there’s five glued-up blanks, and the component parts for six other projects in the pre-joinery stage.

Blanks drying outside along with a bandsaw box that’s almost ready.

Two coats of danish oil in; going to do a coat or two of shellac yet and attach the hardware (it stands vertically and you use it to hang necklaces) and some felt in various spots. First box made using the new sander. It’s not that it makes it better so much as it makes it easier to do some things because you’re not worried that trying them will immediately remove a finger. More photos later.

And this is a quick test of a Paul Sellers idea for a project to do with the kids:

He made his using a razor-sharp chisel; I won’t be doing that with Calum 😀 The project works just fine with saw and bench plane 😀 With a bit of luck, that’ll keep him occupied for the guts of an hour and he can make one for his teacher.

And then I have two more projects to prep for, one in beech and one in poplar. This phase always seems to make me long for a powered planer thicknesser, can’t think why…

Can you tell what it is yet?

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