Workshop | Stochastic Geometry

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So the weekend weather is forecast to be dry, and since I was stuck working from home because of the luas breaking down this morning:

I thought I might as well get a head-start on the shedwork by painting it. We’ve been planning to do that for a while and painted some parts to test what we thought of the colours and decided on a colourscheme, so I took out the sander, removed enough of the test swatches to get a good key for the paint and got out the masking tape.

It’s not a bad little shed, but it’s a bit dingy. After a decade, the wood preservative stuff is just not really going to cut it for much longer, so a decent coat of paint should give it an extra year or two. So on with the first coat for the trim parts (trim’s really the wrong word I think, there’s such a small wall to trim ratio).

Looks better already. Pain in the fundament keeping those bushes on the left wall off the left wall while painting, mind you. Not looking forward to that bit.

Then after dinner, went out to look at the new toys that arrived in the post.

The chisel was an accidental win on ebay, I already had a set of three that would do, but had forgotten a bid on this and it won. Hey, for a fiver, I’ll take that.

Bevel’s clean, no nicks on the edge, back could stand five minutes of lapping on the stones, but I don’t think I’ll even need the 80-grit paper for this one. Nice.
The saw file is equally nice, and needed if I’m going to sharpen these saws properly. Thing about a saw file is, it isn’t a triangular file, it only looks like one. Look closely at those “corners” and you discover they’re just very narrow flat edges with teeth:

Apparently it’s become quite hard to get really good saw files anymore, on a worldwide basis, which is a bit worrying as it’s not a tool to use itself, but as a support tool for a pretty basic tool – the saw. If you can’t sharpen a saw anymore and you’ve lost the industry for making the tooling you need to do that, then you’ve lost the ability to make a decent saw, and that’s a pretty basic tool for a civilisation to lose…

And then there’s these guys. See, I already have a countersink bit set, they’re the ones that look like this guy:

So if you’re buying a countersink bit, don’t buy one of these, they’re awful. They vibrate all over the place when you’re using them – power drill, eggbeater, brace, makes no odds – and they make a horrible mess of the wood. I suspect mine are cheap and unsharpened, but still, I paid about as much for them as I did for the new ones, and the new ones don’t vibrate at all. And as to the finish… well, here’s the old one:

And here’s the new one:

Same hole, different sides of the same scrap, in the same drill chuck at the same speed and pressure. Utterly night and day. The newer ones cut clean and burnish at the same time, smoothly without fuss. The older ones, it was like I had a hammer action on the drill and it was turned on, and it didn’t so much deburr as burr. Those bits are for the bin, and the new ones are very recommended in their place.

Then on to the cheese press. I took the base out of the clamps and had a look at it.

And then noticed I’d let one end get misaligned by a mm or so during clamp-up. Bother.

So, out with sid, and after a moment of pondering, got one of the slats from the cot that I rejected and used it as a thin batten for a planing stop.

I gave the board a few swipes with sid and that mm was gone in less than twenty seconds. I then switched to the jack and got that top face with the figure flat, squared an edge and got the other face flat and parallel, and then rounded over the edges. Then I did the same for one of the other resawn boards that will form the top clamp. And found I had some nice grain pieces to show off.

Then I considered the handle for the screw.

Workholding was nice and easy, and then it was a lot of paring with chisel and gouge (Hey Daniel! I made something with that birthday present! 🙂 ). It’s not overly complex – and it’s not done yet either – but it looks like it’ll do the job.

I left it there for the press for now, I need some metal bits from woodies or chadwicks tomorrow to finish it off and then there’s the actual finish to do (I have some shellac I’ve been looking to experiment with, or I could try using the soap finish I’ve been reading about. Choices, choices…)

I did get some crib work done tonight as well – I now have 14 slats down, six to go – but the resaw was a pain and nothing seemed to go easy, so I knocked off at that point rather than make a mess out of a nice piece of ash because I was tired.

Cheese Press / Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — No Comments
06
Oct 16

Pressing diversions

Someone at work asked me today if I could make a cheese press (perfectly ordinary question). At first I thought they meant something a bit fancy like one of these:

Which is doable, but a little time-consuming and I have about six other things on the go at the moment, but then they explained no, they meant like this one:

Now that’s all pretty and stuff, but basically it’s two planks, three bits of threaded rod, a few nuts and a handle. How hard could that be? So I said I’d have a go. I had some offcuts of 2x4s from the bench that were around a foot long and the cheese jar thingy they had wasn’t that big, so I figured this could be reasonably easy…

Few small offcuts – I figure resaw the 2x4s to 4x1s, glue up two for a panel for the base, use one for the crossbar at the top and take that 2×2 and get a handle out of it. If nothing else, it’ll be some practice with chisel and spokeshave that’ll be handy for the crib later. So I clean them up on a face and edge with the jack and mark off a mid-line for the saw and get going.

I’ll say this much for pine – it’s a pain for knots or fancy joints, but it really does saw easy.

Mind you, helps to have a good saw. Today, this thing was a line-following machine…

Did I mention how critical that wedge was though?

Okay, nice clean resawn boards. With a pretty knot-pattern too.

Must try to keep that in as a feature, it’s too nifty not to. Resawed the other board as well, then took the first two and bookmatch planed the edges for a butt joint and gave them another swipe with the smoother to spring the joint, and glued up.

Look, I know the glue brush is a fancy gadget, but screw it, it works better than looking for scraps of timber all the time and the glue peels right off when it’s dry. I like the thing. I’m a little worried that the bristles won’t last and they’ll come off as I pull dried glue out of them, but meh, I can live with it. The other end, the glue paddle thing, is the normal primary school glue spreader design and you can get packs of 50 of them for pennies on ebay if it comes to it.

Hmm. I think the alignment drifted by a mm or so during the clamping. Or the kerf was wider than I thought. Oh well, still not too shabby.

And some very rudimentary roughing out for the handle. More work there yet, but I want to get the nuts and threaded rod and stuff before doing too much, so I know what size the holes will be and where they’ll go exactly. So I set it all aside there for the moment and went back to the slats for the crib and marked up the blanks for resawing.

At that point I drew a line under it. Only an hour in the shed (late start), but I might get that press done over the weekend. Have the electrics to do as well though, and the weather is finally forecast to be dry enough to paint the shed. Might have to make that the priority, there won’t be many opportunities between now and winter to get that bit done.

Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — No Comments
03
Oct 16

Smaller steps worked

So, after taking the three new bevel-edged chisels and my new ⅜” mortice chisel (needed for the mortices for the slats’ tenons) to the 80-grit paper (I’ll do the stones and stropping tomorrow), it was on to taking the four ripped down 2x1x30″ ash boards and getting going on the resawing. I ran over each on four sides with the jack and the smoother to get a more square board, then gauged a midline down the edges of the board and penciled the gauge line for visibility, cut a starting notch with the chisel on the end grain and started in with the ryoba at a slow and steady pace. Leave dido singing away into one ear, and flip the board every other chorus line, and the saw just followed the line itself most of the time.

In fact the only times it drifted, the saw went from this nice sweet noise:

… to a horrid vibrating, shuddering noise and was a pain to hold onto. Which is a nice sort of warning mechanism I guess. Also, the shiny saw blade is damn useful – you can check the reflected edge in it, and so long as it looks like the edge behind it (as in, so long as the two edges seem parallel), you’re tracking fairly straight.

It’s an old trick, but it’s a useful one. The first of the four slats deviated by less than a millimetre at the worst point and the cut was nice and clean:

And the second cut did wander by nearly two millimeters at the worst point, but that’s still well within the tolerance for this job, so that’s four slats from two boards.

I did find it was really necessary to wedge the board as I resawed, to stop it clamping up on the blade – the moment it did that, the saw wanted to wander off and follow the grain line and not the gauge line. So I wound up using a long splinter of plywood from the floor, but in the opposite sense to how you’d normally wedge these things:

But it worked, it kept the saw moving freely and now I have four more slats done. Twelve more to go and I’ll get to the other two 2x1x30 blanks tomorrow. If all goes well, that’ll give me four more slats and I’ll just need eight more (but I’ll have two 8x1x30 boards out of the ash I have to give me those and with plenty spare as margin).

A bunch of bits for the shed arrived today as well, but I probably won’t get to add them in until the weekend (it’s the sockets and things to tidy up the electrics in there – it’s never going to run more than a few lights and a radio and an oil-filled radiator to keep the shed above freezing during the worst of winter, but I’d rather have actual sockets on the walls even if they’re only a fancy extension cord instead of an actual ring on the mains, just to keep it tidy and protect the wires in case I’m moving stuff in there and I wallop the wire with a board or something).

Also, this arrived today:

One wallpaper stripper, plus hose, plus a ten metre length of six-inch diameter thick polythene tube. Some of you have guessed what this is for already 🙂 The rest will have to wait – I have a fair bit of work to do with forms and prep before I can play with this…

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