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Gnome army

WoodturningWoodworking

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.… Read the rest

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TortoiseShack

WoodturningWoodworking

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.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments

Done

FinishingLockerWoodworking

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.… Read the rest

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