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Side Table / Woodworking — 4 Comments
11
Nov 17

Guides and tests

Well, made a dog’s breakfast of the bandsaw boxes I was playing at. Couldn’t make the turn needed and the blade came out the side of the blank. Oh well. Now I have two paperweights (and one successful box, out of four blanks). I’ve ordered a one-eighth inch blade off Tuffsaws, that should get here next week and I can try again. I’ll prep new blanks tomorrow for that.

Bit of a waste, those šŸ™

Meanwhile the older replacement y-lever for the #5Ā½ arrived and I replaced the existing y-lever with it and it’s been a lot nicer to work with since. And no surprise. This is what the more modern y-lever looks like, two pressed steel parts riveted together:

Unfortunately, the rivet on mine isn’t as tight as it should be and even glue didn’t stop the inevitable end result (and if you’re thinking this would interfere with setting the plane you’d be right):

Meanwhile, back on the main project…

The bridle joints involved are a bit of an oddity; nobody really cuts them often enough to get good at them, at least not off the saw, so these are Richard McGuire’s basic jigs for helping to cut them (and the test sticks in the backgrounds, just a spare bit of poplar that I’m using up).

Four cuts, four jigs and the japanese saw reappears.

Okay, doesn’t look too awful…

Ah. Right. Hm. Odd. No gaps but also torqued right the way over. So check the guides again and yup, the shoulder of the cut was just not tidy enough so out with the chisel and a bit of tweaking and another test joint gets cut…

Ah. Bother. Okay, one guide still needs a wee bit of tweaking and we cut another test joint…

and…

Right. That’ll do I think.

Next step, a 12 degree guide and then on to cut the actual leg&apron joints.

 

Bandsaw Boxes / Side Table / Woodworking — No Comments
03
Nov 17

Flattening and boxes

So, started off flattening the apron. This went pretty well after I switched over to the #5 and sharpened it up a bit. The narrower blade means less pushing effort and that seemed to help a lot. And then it was time to thickness down from an inch to 3/4 of an inch.

This is not my favourite activity. And honestly, if they made an induction motor benchtop thicknesser I’d have bought one already, but unfortunately they’re all universal motor things — and lunchbox thicknessers, even if you fit them with helical blades and all the fancy doo-dads, are just too damn noisy to run in a housing estate. You’ll wind up triggering a torch-and-pitchfork party of your very own if you do that round here once too often. So until I have a larger shed and room for a larger, possibly older, floorstanding planer/thicknesser, I have to do this part by hand. At least Sid makes the task easier with his ridiculous level of camber…

Anyway, the board was a manageable size, so push hard and on we go. And switching over to the #5 for the last mm or so to arrive in a controlled manner and…

Flat and at thickness. I gauged out for the two aprons and set it aside and ripped down the middle a little later on with the bandsaw (using the new tuffsaws blade – makes a rather surprising difference, those things, much cleaner cut and less drift).

Then on to mucking about…

So the glue-up was messy and there are steps all over, but apparently that’s to be expected. Next step, sand the badgers off everything with my handy dandy disk sander. Which I don’t have one of. Bugger. Well…

Sod it, I started this thing on a bandsaw, might as well keep up the machine operator vibe…

Didn’t want to keepĀ all of your fingers, did you?

Hm. NotĀ terrible for a first try. Slap some shellac on it…

And some felt for the inside lining and call it done:

Well, not absolutely awful. Okay, so it is if you look close – there’s no room in there, the edges aren’t parallel, the drawer’s a bit gappy, and so on. But it was fun to try it and I have some ideas for a nicer one. Need more practice though, I keep getting lost in the sequence of cuts on these things. Well, in that vein…

This one might be interesting, I used the new tuffsaws fine-tooth blade. Much smoother cut, but I don’t think the bandsaw will ever be a precision tool. Hell of a lot friendlier to the nose when you plug it into the dust collection though…

General / Side Table / Tools / Woodworking — No Comments
02
Nov 17

Progress and mucking about

So I figured I’d start by playing with the new toy and taking some test cuts.

The blade runs sort-of true. Well, I wasn’t expecting laser levels of perfection here, but the guides really are letting things down. The lower thrust bearing can’t be backed off readily to adjust it so it’s not poking the blade out of true, which is disappointing. And I really can’t run this thing without dust extraction or the whole lower case clogs up and the bearing itself locks up. Well, I knew machinery would counter its speed by increasing the amount of faffing about needed to support it. This is why you usually mount this stuff permanently where you have room to manoeuvre around it. But again, 8’x6′ shed, no room to think, let alone manoeuvre, so we need to make do.

It can’t cutĀ very tight corners, a 2cm radius seems about the most it’s comfortable with. But that could still work. I was playing about making a bandsaw box. They’re not too terrible to do.

Gluing up for these boxes is a bit of a faff mind you.

Well, quite a lot of a faff depending on how badly you design the sodding things. Oh well.

And the three blades I ordered from tuffsaws arrived.

One for very rough work or even small resawing work (but really, you’re talking about resawing stuff that’s at most 70-80mm wide so I’m guessing that’s going to be underused). One slightly more sturdy blade than the one that came with the bandsaw to use for general-purpose stuff, and a very fine-toothed narrow blade to do curving work.

Tuffsaws do have a one-eighth inch blade as well, might try that if the quarter-inch one doesn’t do the job.

Then I carried on with the new project, laying out the rough rips for legs and aprons:

Finally getting to use my new panel gauge in anger. Works quite well for rough layout, but I need to sharpen that pin, it’s not the finest gauge line in the world.

Then I used the new toy to make the rough cuts.

Definitely not up to finished work levels of cleanness, but it cut through inch-thick oak like it was foam, so it saves a bit of work (though the faffing about setting up and cleaning down after using the bandsaw is just a pain in the fundament so handsaws definitely aren’t out of a job yet). I’ll flatten these tomorrow and thickness them, then rip out the individual legs and aprons (there’s two in each board).

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