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New Toys! / Tools / Woodworking — No Comments
04
Jan 18

New toy…

So my old power drill died. Or more accurately, its batteries. Six hours charging, twenty minutes of charge held with no load, or one 3.5mm hole in inch-thick poplar. That’s NiCad for you, just not great for occasional use. And last time this happened, it worked out cheaper to buy a new drill and use its batteries, which was exceptionally irritating. So I figured enough; I’ll get a new drill and move up to the new lithium ion batteries and maybe down in size to the newer smaller drills. I don’t use my drill that often, and when I do it’s for quick small holes or driving screws faster than the cordless screwdriver does – which basically means jigs and mounting stuff on the shed walls. So for stuff like that, the new 10.8v and 12v sized drills seem way more suited:

That’s the Bosch PS32, their brushless 10.8/12v drill. Except they’re pricey, and just before I bit the bullet, I came across a sale in Woodies where the larger 18v Bosch was on sale for €100, which was half what most places charge and frankly so low that I delayed for ages trying to figure out what was wrong with it. But in the end, even though it’s not exactly what I wanted, the price was too good, so I gave up looking for a better PS32 price and bought the GSB today.

And it’s not bad. Solidly built, well balanced, and while it has a larger collet size than the old PSR, it’s physically smaller (and lighter, if only by 40g when the batteries are in):

Plus, moving up a grade (from green to blue 😀 ). Which is nice.

 

Now, to actually use the sodding thing…

General / Woodworking — No Comments
01
Jan 18

New Year’s goals

No, not resolutions, those are stupid.

But goals would be nice. So, here’s my goal for 2018:

Build and sell one piece from the shed. Maybe a small chest, maybe a small table, whatever.

The idea is to get to the point where I could buy some nice timber, make a few things for friends and sell one or two other pieces to defray the cost of the timber. It is not supposed to be an income stream (not least because I already have a day job and taxes are so much fun). It’s just that thanks to brexit and the US-Canada timber trade war, the price of timber is spiking; and if the hobby got to where it could see the break-even point, well that’d be helpful. Oh, and before someone asks, no, I don’t want to change my day job, I like it too much, and no, this wouldn’t make much money at all especially on a per-hour basis (hand tool woodwork as a career kindof died a death with the second world war), and that’s not the point anyway.

And yes, I do think that’s enough goals. It’s a hobby, not a job. On that point, a new shed rule for the new year:

  • Do Not do anything in the shed that has a deadline. Or, if there’s no way round that (like with solstice presents), have them done a month or more in advance, because seriously, fuck deadlines right in the ear. They turn a fun hobby into a second job.

And that’s that. Yeah, yeah, I have a list of things as long as my finger (small handwriting ftw) that I’d like to build and a bunch of tools I’d like to get and learn to use, and a few techniques I want to practice, and some things I’d like to do, but they’re all just part of the standard routine, they’re not really new years goals and the idea is to do them as time permits and the interest takes me. It’s that whole “this is a hobby” thing…

Finishing / Shed / Woodcarving / Woodworking — No Comments
28
Dec 17

Mucking out and mucking about

Couple of days out of the shed, mostly spent lying down and paying attention to all the little muscle cells as they turned to me and said “what the feck was all that then?”. Today though was bin day so back out to the shed and spent a half-hour cleaning up all the shavings and using the shop vac to tackle the sawdust.

Before:

After:And then, having made a clean spot, went and tidied the small section behind the tumbledrier there where I usually wind up standing wishing I’d cleaned that part of the shed.

And then, having cleaned everything up, time to play…

First off, I did want to see what the stains look like and to try to replicate this:

Granted, I don’t have resawn squares of flamed sycamore, I’m mucking about with bits of poplar, but still…

That was a bit of fun. I’ll take a peek tomorrow to see how it reacts to drying, and spray some poly on it to get a look at it under finish (it’s not actually for a project, I’m just experimenting).

Then on to the next thing; I got myself a solstice present of Peter Follansbee’s video on 17th century New England carving (I’m mad, me) and I wanted to try one of the basic v-tool exercise patterns:

Granted, I don’t have riven green oak or even quarter-sawn oak, I’m mucking about on an offcut from the table build – inch-thick kiln-dried flat-sawn oak. Grand for furniture, not so much for carving. Plus I need to sharpen my v-tool a bit more and I need some new slipstones because apparently you can shave the diamonds off diamond slipstones if you’re not careful when honing a gouge. Doh. And I don’t have all of Follansbee’s kit (which is worse than it sounds since he only uses six gouges and a v-tool…). But I have enough for one or two of the exercises (including this one) so on we go…

Natty little camping light spotted in a Big Clive video – handy since it has a magnet in one end and for throwing light across a surface with knifed marks it’s pretty useful.

The divider work is straightforward enough…

…but there’s a reason Follansbee makes it look easy and it’s twenty-five years of practise…

Still have all my fingers and no new leaks, so I’m calling that a win.

And a bit of BLO to show it better.

Well. First try. It’ll get better. Or it gets the shovel again.

And in the meantime I figured out what I wanted to do with those scraps I couldn’t throw away…

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