Home / 2019 / April

All sides now…

Baby blanket chestWoodcarvingWoodworking

So, four day weekend so almost six hours in the shed 😀
Got the last of the background removal done…

Mix of hand pressure on the gouges and whacking the everloving stuffing out of them with a mallet, and trying to get the background down about 4-5mm or so relatively uniformly across the background. Then to eliminate the unevenness, stippling!

Basically, lots of spikes on the end of a punch, and thwack it with a lump hammer lots and lots of times until…

And then just douse it in boiled linseed oil to show it all up. There are some decorative punches as well, just five or six on the panel.

BTW, Peter Follansbee makes all this look easy. This is a LIE. HE LIES. The git 😀

Front, back, and both sides now carved and all bar the front wiped down with BLO.… Read the rest

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Spring cleaning time…

ShedWoodworking

So, after the whole resin-casting-a-mug thing, it’s fair to say that the shed was in need of a cleanup…

Turns out, sanding resin will actually leave a bit of residue. Also, the shavings are starting to pile up again…

And the bandsaw is getting buried…

And the shop vac wasn’t actually vac-ing much either. So I started there, and checked the drum for the vortex separator, but it wasn’t even a tenth full, so I took out the filter from the shop vac…

And sure enough, there’s the problem:

Totally clogged with fines. So out with a stanley knife, and scrape all the dust off because I don’t have a spare filter right now. Took about five minutes, and it’s definitely not perfect but it’ll hold till I get a new one:

Then dustpan and brush to fix the floor:

And then wipe down the planes, and dip the handles of all the chisels in a jar of BLO and wipe down the handle and blade (after getting rid of all the surface rust with a scotchbrite pad), and all the marking gauges and so on:

And clean up the bandsaw and restack everything and wax the table…

Yeah, it’s not exactly tidy, but you try putting a litre in a pint pot sometime.… Read the rest

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Epoxying a mug

Humour

So, one of our team at work went on holiday to Peru and left his mug behind him in Dublin. And was scheduled to return on April 1.

So what happens next is entirely his fault.

(COL-PROD was a work project thing which won’t mean a thing outside of work)

You know, it’s harder than you think to shatter a mug using a wedge from the inside out so it doesn’t look like some heathen just belted it with a hammer…

Foamcore mould, held together with packing tape and hotglue.

And now we start the first of several batches of resin…

Holding the pieces in mid-air so they’ll be in the right place when you pour the resin around it, and holding it in place while the resin sets, is a fiddly job.… Read the rest

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