toys | Stochastic Geometry

Gnome army

Saw Rebecca Degroot’s video on making a gnome:

Looked like fun, so I made one or two while messing about with decorations.

Then I thought they’d be nice presents for the other kids in Calum’s class, so batch work time. I didn’t have many blanks readymade for this though (I’ll have to remember to stock up in October for next year) so I took a standard CLS lumber 4×2 and cut it down the middle on the bandsaw into two 2×2 rectangles and used the roughing gouge to round them up.

Softwood in general isn’t generally recommended for turning but with sharp tools it’s fine for basic stuff like this. I had a very minimalist story stick with just two ticks on it to mark out the body and a length for the tenon, and marked off the blank with it.

Then stick the point of the skew into the lines to deepen them.

Then with the skew, turn the top and bottom corners of the body and smooth out the bit in between to a gentle barrel curve. Make sure to overexpose the camera if possible.

Then use the parting tool to turn what will be the tenon down past the shoulder at the top of the body, but not all the way as you need some strength left in it to sand the body.

Then swing in the dust collector and sand up to 240 grit. This is the secret to a beginner’s woodturning – buy 80grit sandpaper in bulk.

Dousing with sanding sealer before the last grit to stiffen the grain a bit.

Then hampshire sheen wax (because it’s now certified food-and-toy-safe) and buffing.

And now part the tenon down to 6mm (using the wrench-as-a-gauge trick which is complicated by me not having very many wrenches that small)

And part off and into the box it goes and we move on to the next section of the blank and repeat 19 more times…

Next, hats.

I didn’t have many blanks at all for this, so half were a glued-up blank made from walnut offcuts and half were stained CLS lumber. Again, very simple marking out, then use a spindle gouge to turn the rough shape, and put a tenon at the top using a skew.

This is why we prefer to use larger tenons by the way, a 3mm tenon with a skew is…. great practice for the skew 😀

Then sand, seal, sand again and wax…

Then part off, being careful to undercut as you part so the hat is concave underneath to match the convex top of the body. Then completely give up on turning and just cheat by buying several bags of wooden balls two years ago and forgetting what they were for and just using them here for noses and baubles and a 6mm dowel sanded down to 3mm to fit the noses. And drill holes in the body for the nose and under the hat for the body’s tenon and in the balls for the nose tenon and hat tenon, which is awkward till you realise you can hold the ball using mole grips rather than trying to clamp one in a vice or making a jig.

So 20 sets of these, and then a bag of faux fur…

And now under supervision from the 8 year old, who will manage the matching of bodies to hats to beards and specify beard length, assemble everything using a full bottle of CA glue…

And then packed up and sent off for delivery by Calum.

They were well received 🙂 We even got some photos of the gnomes in their new homes…

Overall, good skew practice and fun to make. Must do them again next year, but this time, get some blanks in around October and start making them in November 😀

TortoiseShack

So there’s a podcast I listen to here in Ireland called TortoiseShack (I guess they’re more a channel than a single podcast these days, they’ve spun up dedicated special-interest podcasts), which has a lot of voices we don’t get to hear on RTE much. Longer chats with data protection experts like Simon McGarr (which is how I got interested in them), talks on green politics with people who know why you can’t have a forest of walnut trees, discussions on the homeless crisis with Peter McVerry, that sort of thing.

I’ve been throwing the price of a cup of coffee at them for a while now on patreon, but I was reading how one of the two guys who does the podcast is running 2,020 miles this year for charity (he finishes next week) and I had the idea to make them a desk ornament because if you look at their logo, it’s almost like it was designed to be made as small bits on the lathe and joined together:

I figured, the head is just an egg, the legs and neck are just slightly curved cylinders, the tail is just a cone, and the top and bottom shells are just unhollowed bowls. Sure, there are tenons and mortices and the neck hole of the top shell might need a holesaw but I have those, and maybe that angle at the front would be a cut on the bandsaw with the table at an angle, but all that’s doable. So over the last week I did it.

First five minutes went well, I missed a flaw in a bowl blank because it was painted over (what idiot thought that was a good idea?) and it bounced off my faceplate (remember, Norm was right). But the rest of the turning was easy enough, and I put a small tenon on the back of the bowl where the woodscrew was holding it (and a little undercut) for reasons that show up later.

Nice grain pattern really. Wish I had brown stain to match the logo better but oh well. You can see the lower shell on the lathe there in the top left as well, the yellow stain isn’t very evident there though. I think I’d have needed to go full-on Furini with an airbrush to get colours that matched the logo though, so I’m settling for just evoking it rather than replicating it 😀 I’m also skipping the plates for the same reason – I could dremel them out but the design on the 2D logo doesn’t actually translate to 3D well when you try to figure out what the shell would look like from the top, so I’ll leave that bit out so long as it’s still recognisable at the end.

There’s a tenon on each piece here which is why the gap between shells is so large. Next up, the head, neck, legs and tail…

The green stain looks a lot nicer here, but it doesn’t stay that pronounced through sanding alas – here I’d stopped sanding at 120 hoping to get deep penetration of the stain, leave it overnight then hit it with sanding sealer when the stain was fully dry and sand to 320. This didn’t work – the sanding acted like the stain was still fresh and a lot of it came off. But that aside, this part went quickly – I did the head and legs over one lunch hour and the tail and neck in an hour that evening (the legs all came from one blank I’d made to make a toolhandle from but I wasn’t using it, so they were very fast to get to this stage).

Yes, I know. Go on, laugh away, get it out of your system…

That’s everything drying at the end of the first day. Everything from here is just fiddling and fettling really.

Right so we need tenons and mortices. The legs, neck and tail have tenons already, and to drill the mortices I have this new famag 1″ forstner bit and a drill 😀

The neck and head were easy enough, and the mortices for the legs go in the underneath of the shell. At which point I discovered one of the tenons was not like the others…

Whoops. Much smaller, way too loose. No way glue’s going to cover over that much of a gap, there’s a good 1-2mm on either side between tenon and mortice. So…. grab one of the other bits of spindle blank I’d made up and the #04…

Make a few shavings, moderately thick…

…wrap the tenon and glue the shaving in place…

Not perfect, and if I was less lazy I’d remake the part, but it’ll fit and hold now.

There was also a lot of fiddling with scribing the shoulders of the tenon to the surface of the shell, which was curved and of course the mortices are angled as well so that was fun. Hold a pencil flat on the surface, scribe against the leg, trim to that line with a chisel and undercut as well, then check the fit and fettle as needed. Fiddly, but not complicated.

And with that done, it was time to cut the neck hole in the top shell. Pillar drill, hole saw from lidl, janky-as-anything workholding setup with the shell propped up on a block at an angle and away I went, expecting it to all go horribly wrong at any moment. And it kinda did, I had to stop half-way through and use a chisel to knock off some waste because the saw was bottoming out on the top of the shell. And the second time I just took it out of the pillar drill and tried to finish the cut with the fretsaw by hand but couldn’t, so I put the holesaw in the handdrill and used the kerf of the cut so far to guide the last inch of the cut, knocking out more waste with a chisel as I went. Messy and janky and there’s about six better ways to do it that I don’t know of, but it worked and a quick cut on the bandsaw with a tilted table later and the top shell was done.

The mortice for the tail was cut by hand with a smaller holesaw (as the tail’s tenon was also too small and I figured I’d save myself another shaving trick).

Right, now I just need to turn that tenon off and make it a shallow mortice to match the lower shell’s tenon and….

oh. Shite. What do I hold the sodding thing by? There’s no tenon on the back. Well. Feck. Off I ran to youtube looking for a thing I’d seen last month that I thought couldn’t possibly work, and figured I’d take a chance.

Took a small scrap block, pinned it up against the closed chuck with the tailstock, turned it roundish, put a tenon on it, reversed it and grabbed the tenon in the chuck, faced it off, made the face concave and chamfered the face’s edge, and viola:

Glue block. You think you’re nervous now, just you wait. Put the shell into the concavity, and line it up by eye and pin it with the tailstock…

That looks very janky, how are we gluing that asymmetric unbalanced load… why are you reaching for the hot-melt glue gun?

You’re shitting me.

Oh, seriously, there is no way this works. I’m going to lose teeth doing this.

gonnadiegonnadiegonnahaveastupidcoronersreportgonnadiegonnadie…

Wtf? It worked? I lived? A thing on youtube worked? What the hell…

And painting the glue line with isopropanol (or meths if you have none) gets the glue to let go a minute or three later with no surface damage. This is witchcraft.

But now I can glue up, and here you see why the wormscrews were good – the hole left behind fits a small dowel for alignment. Had to trim the tail to get a good fit but…

And now we let the glue dry. Shims are in place to keep the gap on the shell even, and the shim under the leg is because one of the legs in the logo is in the air as the tortoise is trotting. Yes, it’s a back leg in the logo. Glue-ups are hectic, okay, mixing up front and back is just a thing that can happen…

And there we go. I’ve done some pre-finishing here. The various parts have all been sanded to 320 by this point, and treated with yorkshire grit, yorkshire grit microfine and a bit of hampshire sheen, but I then put the buffing wheels on the lathe and ran up through the wheels with them to get to this level. I branded my mark into the bottom shell and sprayed with melamine lacquer and gave that overnight to cure, then cut back with 0000 steel wool the next lunchtime. For eyes, I took some googley eyes from the case of them I have here (what? don’t you have a box of googley eyes? why on earth not?) and just used the pupils. Attached with superglue, then point the heatgun at them for a minute until they soften and then mould them to the curved surface of the face. Let it all cool, give it another coat of melamine, let that cure off and then give the shell a final coat of microcrystalline wax and hand buff to a shine.

It’s not too bad I think.

I can even see it helping out with fundraising for the podcast…

“The tortoiseshack lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not subscribing on patreon. Why is that Leon?”

‘course, now I have to make a second one for Calum. At least now I know one or two things to not do for the next one…

Finishing / Locker / Woodworking — No Comments
24
Jun 18

Done

Time to complete the locker. The door got resawn down from 1″ to about 3/8″ thick using the bowsaw and the large ryoba when I got too annoyed at banging the bowsaw off the wall on every stroke, and resawing remains the most boring annoying thing ever, but you while you can thickness plane 3/4″ off a 1″ board with a scrub plane, it’s a pain in the fundament to do so. Roll on bigger bandsaw.

Once the door was then planed down and fitted, which was mainly just faffing about planing until the edges of the doors matched the doorframe, it was time for the worst part of every project.

I hate hinges. They’re a pain in the backside to get aligned and fitted. Maybe I’m just fitting them at the wrong time, maybe I’m doing something wrong, maybe there’s a trick to it, I don’t know. I’ve read and watched everything on them that I can find and still they’re a pain. And the ones where you have to hammer in tacks instead of using screws are the worst because everything’s tiny and fiddly and you never have the access you need.

So, we cut the mortices. Very shallow ones at least, so much so that the cuts can get done using the marking knife this time. And the #722 router helps to actually cut out the waste.

Really thin material…

It barely looks like anything’s been taken off, but no, that’s cut…

It’s even flush properly.

Making sure the barrels of the hinges are aligned with a straight-edge is fiddly unless you have six hands.

And then cut out the mortices for the door hinge mounts.

Okay, that’s fine. And that’s the last of the work, I don’t want to do the finishing when the door’s attached.

So next…

The lady wants purple, so out with the crimson guitar’s stains, a cloth and some water in a spritz bottle…

Not bad. Trick seems to be to ignore being economical with the stuff, put a drop or two on the cloth directly from the dropper, spritz that a few times with the water, then spritz the wood once, rub it in, then spritz the cloth again and rub again and repeat until the colour is reasonably even.

And maybe I should have sanded the surface back instead of the usual planed finish I have.

It dries much, much lighter than you’d think, but even a spriz with water darkens it back up again. So a top coat is needed (is it really a top coat?) and it’s a toy so it’ll take a few knocks. But I’m out of wipe-on poly, so out with the high gloss lacquer and I happen to have a half-can of this stuff left…

Mind you, the shed is little. Which means not much air. Ever inhaled spray-on lacquer in a confined space? Don’t.

So outdoors we go, and on goes the first coat while I’m wearing a respirator. I wonder what the neighbours think sometimes, but if the choice is looking funny in my back yard or looking funny while being treated for lung cancer or respiratory distress in A&E…

First coat is a bit subtle but I put on three coats (ten minutes drying between each) and brought it back into the shed to dry so leaves wouldn’t fall on it or something…

It’s not too bad with the lacquer on, it darkens the purple nicely.

Next morning, time for hinges to get attached. Been dreading this. That photo took a half hour of fiddling about with hammers, needlenose pliers, nailsets and best yet, cutting nails down in size – the nails that came with the hinges were a good mm or so longer than the wood was thick, and since the spikey look isn’t on for toys, I cut 3mm off the overall length with a snips and then filed a new point on the nail with a diamond file (because the normal files were waaay too big to bite in properly)

And then, after getting them all fitted, the door wouldn’t close. Couldn’t close. The hinges were too deep-set and the door didn’t have clearance on the shelf. So either I carved off a few mm from the shelf edge, exposing the end of the housing joint they were in and then trying to restain the edge to match the rest and re-lacquering it but I’m out of lacquer now so it’d be matt instead of gloss… or I redo the hinges.

I hate hinges.

Take two. Now uncomfortably close to the front edge of the carcass. Note the alignment scratch on the hinge – something I forgot to do during take one. And the vice marred the door’s finish slightly. But…