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Stringing / Tools / Woodworking — 2 Comments
26
Mar 18

Groovin’ tools

So the last try to make a straight line cutter for stringing didn’t work so well, the fence mortice was too sloppy. So today I cut a new one. Simple process; pick a scrap of wood from the bin (in this case a piece of walnut because I’m not averse to cheating when it comes to mortices 😀 ). I’ll reuse the beam so I mark off a line on the fence with a square, drop one edge of the beam into it and then mark the width off on the fence and carry the line around with a square; mark top and bottom of the beam with a wheel gauge using the same reference face you used for the square, and that gives you the outline of the beam on the front and back of the fence and aligned. Then drill out the middle to get rid of most of the waste:

I know it looks off-vertical, that’s because I let go to take the photo 😀
Once the hole is drilled (and from both sides, no blowout involved), it’s chopping time.

Quick touch-up on the strop first, that little dog being useful to keep the strop from dancing much, and I use the japanese chisel to chop out the mortice from both sides roughly, leaving just a small half-millimeter or so of material between the lines and the mortice. Then pare the last bit using the narex butt chisel. But I wanted a guide so the paring chisel was done at right angles and it just so happens I bought some 1-2-3 blocks recently, so…

Make sure the back of the chisel runs flat on the 1-2-3 block. You could just use a wooden block for this if you have one that’s square, but I had the 1-2-3 blocks so why not.

And when you’ve trimmed to the line, it’s time to start test fitting and fettling. The beam doesn’t initially fit; once I’m satisfied (using a square) that the inside of the mortice is square and the corners are clean, I’ll take a fine-set #4 and take a swipe off the beam, test fit it again, and then another swipe and so on. It takes a while because you’re sneaking up on a snug fit, but eventually…

It’s not bad. It’s not perfect – the beam still has more play than I’d like when it’s out at full extension, but since this cutter won’t really be asked to reach more than an inch or two in from an edge, that’s no major worry. At some point I expect it’ll loosen up due to wear and tear, and when/if that happens, I’ll cut a slot in there for a wedge like in a traditional english marking gauge and fit it with a wedge.

Not too shabby. Time for some testing.

Just cutting a groove here in a scrap piece of pine. The pizza-cutter thing and the dental pick are for cutting a slice off the veneer to test with and to clean out the groove, respectively.

Groove looks clean and parallel to the edge, feeler gauge says the width is 0.8mm as expected, and it’s not too ragged. I think that’s good.

And looking at the professionally-made radius cutter, the groove appears to be solidly comparable. I’m happy with that for now.

I’m not happy with the veneer I have though – it’s 0.6mm, or at least it claims it is (the calipers says it’s closer to 0.5), so if I test on a small scrap of walnut…

The groove is too large for one thickness of veneer and even if I put in two layers of veneer, you can still make out the hairline (and ragged) line caused by the gap between them.

I need to find a source of constructional veneer that doesn’t expect me to buy an entire tree’s worth…

Shed / Stringing / Woodcarving / Woodworking — No Comments
18
Mar 18

Ah for feck’s sakes…

I only just finished digging that sodding thing out!

*sigh*

And I’ve not been getting much done in there thanks to subzero temperatures and public transport making the work commute into anything up to a six-hour-a-day nightmare (yes, a foot of snow won’t slow down Canada, but Canada spends more on their snow clearing hardware and people than we spend on Varadkar’s Strategic Communications Spin Unit…). Mostly I’ve been putting together new tools for some things I’d like to try, namely stringing and carved arcading. So for the stringing, I already have the dead fancy radius cutter from lie nielson (probably the most bling tool I own), and a small perspex scrap to give it a pivot point when working on some of the usual designs:

But I haven’t got a straight line cutter because I figured I should be able to make one, they’re basically a marking gauge, see the lie nielson one:

Fancy, but basically just a marking gauge. So I ordered a spare blade from the lie nielson cutter to skip the whole metalworking bit because hell, learn one thing at a time. Then I laminated two scraps of white oak, cut and squared a stem from another scrap and chopped a mortice (and a rabbit on the base). Some test fitting, adding the blade in a little recess and…

Mind you, it doesn’t work. The mortice isn’t good enough so the beam isn’t at right angles to the fence, so the blade gets dragged along while skewed so you don’t get a nice thin cut line, you get a wider scratched mess. I think I’ll take out the beam, add a brass strip inlaid on it for a bearing surface and use the brass thumbscrews I have here as a lock. And I’ll remake the fence from a single thickness scrap piece of something; it’s too thick to cut a mortice accurately through (at least for me). Some guide blocks when morticing will probably help too. It’s not hard, but it does take a mite more care than I used on the first try.

Also, I’ll need to cut strips off the veneer to make the stringing, and I was finding my marking knife wasn’t up to it and neither was my heavier stanley boxcutter, both would be fine for a few inches and then wander off the line following the grain. So I got this:

Think pizza cutter. But with a tungsten carbide blade. It’s normally used for cutting cloth for quilting. Doesn’t get dragged off to either side by the grain as much as a normal knife that’s embedded in the grain would because with the wheel, the cutting surface is constantly coming out of the wood so the material hasn’t as solid a grip on the blade (which is precisely why we use these for pizzas and the like). Tested it already and it works like a charm. My veneer on the other hand, is too thin; I need to source better material, which I’ve had some pointers on from the UK forum.

And for cleaning out the stringing lines before gluing in the stringing, a dental pick is a pretty decent tool and dirt cheap on ebay. You get the oddest looks in the office when it’s delivered, mind you…

….but the looks you get when you order the syringes for putting glue in the stringing grooves surpass anything I’ve seen so far 😀

I also had to restock on glue and got a bunch of liquid hide glue in a sale on ebay so that should be all the glue I need for the next year or three (it’ll go off before I get through all of it I’m guessing). So I think I’m set right now for everything but the veneer for stringing; I’ll sort that out while I fix the straight line cutter and then start experimenting.

Meanwhile, Peter Follansbee did a nice blog writing up how he does carved arcading; I’d like to give this a go myself, it looks like fun:

It’s just damn pretty in walnut. And it looks terribly complex when finished, but like a lot of this period’s carving, it’s all geometric and done by leveraging the characteristics of tools rather than being some kind of sculpture that relies on twenty years of experience (which would be harder to try).

I do need to get one or two gouges that are larger than what I currently have so I got a nice three-quarter-inch one for a few euro off ebay again:

And between that and one that was a present from an old friend, had a go at the basic core elements to see if it was even possible (here in an oak scrap rather than walnut):

It’s somewhat easier than the v-tool work that I’ve been practicing (and not getting hugely better at, though having better sharpening kit is making a difference):

Something else to get back to, when I dig the shed out again…. this whole thing of letting the north pole melt and turning off the north atlantic current and ruining the climate is playing absolute hell with my shed time…

It’s not even for the birds!

Baby blanket chest / New Toys! / Tools / Woodcarving / Woodworking — 1 Comment
15
Jan 18

Setbacks…

So I get the ‘flu shot every year, but apparently the strain picked for the shot this year did not tally with the strain that showed up in Ireland (apparently from Australia of all places) and it’s been rather rampant of late…

Also, in an unrelated topic, meet the longest muscle in the human body, the sartorious muscle:

So, can you guess what happens if you catch the first and pull the second? Did you guess four days flat on your back in bed doing nothing shed-related past reading Alan Peters’ book on cabinetmaking (interesting read btw, as it’s less “here’s how to cut a dovetail” and more “this is how you run a successful woodworking business”, which is a nice look into a different world) and watching an endless train of Japanese cabinetmaking and Roy Moore videos? So the project I was working on has stalled until this evening bar an hour on Sunday. Yay.

There are however, some new toys. So here’s my current dust collection rig:

Yes, I collapsed it, but it still works. I need to build a safety valve. However, it’s also a 60L drum because when I ordered it I didn’t quite know what I’d need and I was overly cautious. And now it’s eating space so I wanted to downsize – so I ordered a 30L drum and it arrived right after christmas, just when I couldn’t do anything with it.

So I’ll try fitting that as soon as I get a chance (it’ll have to be a weekend I think). That should get me a chunk of space back.

Also, I was watching Peter Follansbee again and he was making pegs for drawbore joints and he has this lovely mini meat cleaver thing for the job:

All I have to use is an inch-and-a-half chisel which is not the most stable of arrangements because you’re trying to hit a point a foot in the air above a peg-sized piece of wood balanced on end and held in place only by the chisel edge which is neither easy nor terribly safe. However, in the video Peter mentioned that a glazier’s hacking knife was a good modern substitute, so I looked them up and they’re dirt cheap and I need pegs for the current build so…

One cheap hacking knife. Should be far more controllable and safe for the splitting, but we’ll see. I kinda want to take the grinder or a file to the point of that thing and get rid of it though, just have a flat blunt end at the front of the knife.

And the pin chuck I ordered last year arrived…

along with the 12″ speed square I’d ordered (mostly because this is the tool I keep wanting in the timber yard rather than the framing square I have at the moment):

More tidying may be needed at some point 😀

Oh, and a few places on ebay were doing sales on brass hardware so I picked up a box of the things because after the wall cupboard build I didn’t want to get caught without a handle at short notice again. And some hinges because I looked at the shiny brass against the oak for the current build and it’s not quite right. But we’ll see. Mostly this is just stuff bought because it was going for less than half price.

And these were a few design punches bought for very few peanuts as part of the whole “learn 17th century carving” idea. They work great on something like walnut:

(That’s my reference stick for my gouges in case you’re wondering)
But in oak, which the carving is done in:

Just too faint to be made out. Too much detail in the punch for the grain of the oak to take on. Oh well. Into the toolbox for later they go. I have a few more that were ordered off ebay that are on their way, I’ll give those a try when they get here. At least two or three of those are re-workable with a file but seem to be the stippling pattern Follansbee was using in his work. They won’t be needed for a little while though, thanks to the flu delaying everything.

So I got back to grooving the rails tonight – or at least tried to. I’ve been having some issues with the grooving using my Record 044. Ralph over at Accidental Woodworker has been having some issues with his as well, and I thought it might be a common problem but it turns out my fence is aligned okay. My skate’s bottom isn’t perfectly at 90 degrees to the skate sides – you might just be able to make that out in the photo – but it’s only out by a few degrees and it’s so narrow that can’t be the problem either. The grain on the oak is squirrelly and reversing half-way along the rail, but I’m getting horrible tear-out before I even get to that point:

That’s with a freshly sharpened and stropped iron (even worked the back of it just in case I’d missed that iron somehow when rehabbing the 044). I spelched out through the rail completely on the first try on this one and had to plane back to the reference edge and start over, so when it started tearing out here, I got out the cutting gauges instead of just the mortice gauge and sliced the nearest edge very deeply.

Then I got out another cutting gauge (which happens to be about seventy years older or so and actually cuts better) and sliced the far edge the same way.

Then with the 044 set for a very fine cut I got a okay-ish groove cut down to depth; but it wasn’t even. I used the new Japanese chisel to chop the far edge to properly vertical rather than the gentle curve it had become, but then I noticed that the 044’s fence wasn’t even in contact all the way along to the same degree. I must have been tired – it took another five minutes of staring at it before I realised that the rail was twisted.

I planed and prepped it to flat in early December; sitting in the shed through a few cold snaps and 60-70% humidity with the squirrelly grain in the wood must just have been too much for it and it pretzeled itself by a good few degrees. So did two of the other long rails. The last long rail was only slightly twisted, but it’s one of the uglier pieces because of a knot. The short rails were still fine and are still perfectly flat, as are the stiles, so they can still be used.

Luckily I have a rough-cut chunk of an oak board in the timber store that’s only a few mm shorter than the long rails (literally a few, three to four in total) so I’ll plane that flat and rip out new long rails from it. I’ll probably cheat and get most of the way to thickness by resawing with the bandsaw and take them the last mm or two of the way by handplane (I’m now quite short on time for this build and I’ve already been dropping elements from it to try to get this done by the end of the month). The grain’s less squirrelly in this piece as well so I might even be able to do some decorative elements on it if I’m lucky. Silver lining and all that. Oh well. I had to prep more pieces for the lid anyway (which I finally got a design for in my head that should be stable and relatively straightforward to do). Still a bit annoying mind you.

It’s not as annoying, however, as walking to and from work today (and standing on the Luas both ways) and then finding when I got home this evening that I’ve buggered up the leg muscle again, it’s all sore and swollen. Standing, no problem. A step forward or back if I don’t bend the knee too much, that’s more or less okay. Walking from the kitchen to the shed? Sortof like having someone stick in a hypodermic needle into the muscle and then breaking it off so it pokes you at random moments. I think I’m stuck working from home for a few days, this thing is not going to heal if I keep walking a few kilometres a day on it.

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