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Scraping by…

ShedWoodworking

Part of the tidy-up in the shed meant getting the scrapers off the little holder they were in and up on the wall…

And then the second thing was going through every single plane and chisel on the wall, going over all the unpainted parts with 600 grit wet&dry paper and WD40 to take off the surface rust, then rubbing briwax into the steel as a barrier against rust (renaissance wax would be better and some’s on the way). I’ll have to do this every weekend for a while to get the barrier layer set up properly.

I hate condensation. Gah.

There may be a dehumidifier in the shed’s future.… Read the rest

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One slot left…

ShedToolsWoodworking
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Workbench

Honestly, the plan was not to collect planes.

But through random chance the first few I bought (I bought a retiree’s toolkit off ebay as a starting point) were all Record planes. And over the course of a few months I learned, as everyone does, that hand tool woodworking was effectively killed off during the second world war, though it had been in decline for a while before then. Machines and power tools took over for wood fabrication; and after that point, tool companies could no longer compete by producing the best tools because workers were no longer competing on how fast they could do the job to a set standard. Nobody needs to spend a weeks wages to buy a saw that can be sharpened more so you can cut 5% faster, when they can spend that much and get a saw that cuts 500% faster.… Read the rest

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French cleats and bench grinders

ShedWoodworkingWorkbench

So I’ve said once or twelve times that I needed to do something about this stuff in the shed:

The little air compressor proved useless for shellac and stuff so it’s moved indoors to the lab for future mucking about with airfix models with junior and the like. The dremel, well, that’s handy for stuff so it still lives there, but the grinder was just a pain in the fundament. It’s on an MDF base with a small cleat on the bottom for the Black&Decker Workmate to grab onto (or the vice on the bench these days). So I finally got round to fixing that up and getting it out from underfoot.

Smaller base, cleat at the front end to act like a bench hook and a holdfast at the back keeps it nice and stable (the base tends to cup a bit, I don’t think it’ll last forever).… Read the rest

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