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Platform and salvage

Sidecar CotWoodworking

Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d get this done by today, but I seem to be getting faster at chopping mortices, if not actually at marking them up. And it fits. There’s a small amount of twist here and there, I think I can straighten it out for the final assembly and then pin the tenons to help keep them flat (and it’ll look cool as well, little white ash pin dots along the walnut frame). The two long front and back rails are tilted with respect to each other, that will have to be planed away on the bottom but I’ll keep it on top as it gives a kind of lip to help keep the mattress centered which is nice.

 

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And then it was time to take the frame out of the drying form and see how bad the springback would be and how bad the splintering was and if it was salvageable…img_0010a… Read the rest

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More stock prep

Sidecar CotWoodworking

So while waiting for the steambent walnut to dry, I got on with the mattress platform. First up, ripping out laths for the remaining crossmembers and prepping them.

Is it me or is stock prep the most common hand tool job of all?

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I had an end piece of ash about two feet long that wasn’t going to be doing much else, so I chose that for the crosspieces. I wanted to get four out of it, a bit thinner than the walnut crossmembers for the visual look, but not too much thinner.

Then, once I had them ripped out, I had to thickness them down by a quarter inch or so. Four of them. In other words, I turned a 2″x1″x2′ length of ash completely into shavings. Even with Sid, it sucked.… Read the rest

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Steaming cracks

Sidecar CotWoodworking

Well, that didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.

The steaming jig was ready, the drying form was ready. all the shopping and other stuff was done yesterday, so this morning I finished planing up the two candidates for uprights so they matched perfectly in size, rigged up a wide compression strap from three narrower ones (thanks addresspal for losing my order for a wider one) and then into the plastic tubing one went, and in went the tube from the wallpaper stripper and away we went.

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It got steaming pretty quickly, but it was a rather chilly breezy day today (down around 10 degrees or so air temperature at this point) which was depressing the temperature a bit every time the wind breathed wrong.

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Some insulation was needed, so the airing cupboard got raided for towels.… Read the rest

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