03 June
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In Japanese Toolbox, Locker, Tools, Woodworking
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So it’s a bank holiday weekend and I was looking forward to lots of time in the shed, but on friday a nice lady held me down and shoved a screwdriver and a pair of pliers in my mouth so I wasn’t really up to much woodworking on the Saturday, but at least the extraction didn’t cause too much pain after the fact so today I decided to hit the shed and get on with some stuff, and I thought I’d start with some resawing. The fence they ship the Titan bandsaw with is ridiculously awful, so this is what I normally use – justRead More →

28 May
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In Japanese Toolbox, Woodworking
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Just minor tweaking to the dimensions of the small box tonight, and the housing joints (but I think I’ll be fettling those). And I cut the length of rippled sycamore for the lid, with a few mm spare on all sides so it’ll get planed to fit the box when it’s assembled. There’s enough here to do the lid and have about an inch of waste at most (I hope). I’ll say this, beech is no walnut when it comes to cutting joints, but it’s not bad. I do need to fettle those a little, but it’s not horrible for a first pass. And IRead More →

27 May
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In Japanese Toolbox, Tools, Woodworking
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…and almost none of it spent in the shed, but for once that wasn’t a bad thing 🙂 (I know this might be confusing if you’re reading this outside Ireland, but check the international news, we wound up in it almost everywhere). Herself was canvassing and leafletting and doing her part for this for the last few weeks, and we were all a bit on edge throughout because the No campaign were being violent and abusive and just plain nasty in an attempt to drive down turnout for the vote, but in the end people remembered thirty-five years of suffering and overwhelmingly voted yes. AfterRead More →

21 May
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In Shed, Tools, Woodworking
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Last project finished, next one not properly started yet (just have the rough cuts done) and another in mind but not off the notepad yet. So now’s the time to work on the shed itself… That’s the dust collection for the shed (it’s collapsed because the vacuum hose got clogged with shavings and the shop vac managed to pull enough air out of the barrel for atmospheric pressure to crush it). It’s a bit… big. For the shed at least. So a while back, I got a smaller drum. And it’s been sitting there since I bought it, getting in the way, because I wasRead More →

09 May
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In Desk Shelf, Finishing, Locker, Stringing, Woodworking
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So time to take the shelf out of the clamps and see if it’s okay… holds breath… That’s not too bad from the front 🙂 Different story from the back mind… Urgh those dovetails. There will have to be some remediation work there. At least the white inlay bits worked reasonably well (you just can’t do dovetails from end to edge like that if there’s more than one tail, the short grain on the pin means it always breaks off, so I deliberately broke off the pins and replaced them with some sycamore chunks). Okay. Time to start finishing. I could keep trying to touchRead More →

08 May
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In Desk Shelf, Locker, Stringing, Woodworking
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The resawn beech from yesterday is holding up well… But never mind that, time to focus on the glueup from yesterday. It went reasonably well despite the fiddliness of the clamping. They don’t look even from that angle, but they are: There’s some squeeze-out and the join needed some fettling to get it properly smooth, and I suspect I’ll be running round the piece with a chisel checking arises before finishing, but it’s not too bad. It’ll be interesting to see it with finish on. But today’s task is the final glue-up so I did a dry-fit and some inevitable tweaking and then did aRead More →

08 May
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In Locker, Woodworking
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While wrapping up the stringing and preparing to glue and finish the latest project, I got some time to do the initial rough-cut of the pieces for the next project; which is to take the roughest thing that’s ever come out of the shed and remake it with a bit of refinement 😀 A quick hacking with the large ryoba broke these down to approximate length, and then some quick ripping with the bandsaw… And that’s the rough stock almost ready. I want to see if I can resaw this (it’s some nice beech bought a while back in the timber yard, but I’ve notRead More →

07 May
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In Desk Shelf, Stringing, Woodworking
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Finally some decent weather combined with a bank holiday this weekend and I wound up spending some time in the shed (and got the weber out so yay!). Started off trimming and cleaning the lines put in on Thursday (Friday was a work do and I was done in by the time I got home so I just crashed, so this was all done Saturday evening). Then I checked the feet to be sure I liked how my idea for how to do these looked. I quite like the idea, but we’ll see. And I took the new laminated stringing out of the clamps: TheRead More →

03 May
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In Desk Shelf, Stringing, Woodworking
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Bit fiddly in one place this evening where the groove was slightly thinner than the stringing. A bit of work on the stringing with a scraper sorted that out. I’ll leave this dry overnight and clean it up tomorrow, and then add the remaining pieces. I still have other elements beyond the border stringing that I want to add though, but my plug cutters haven’t arrived yet… The feet are a different wood to the shelf, so I wanted some contrasting stringing there; the “variety pack” of veneers I bought an age back had some possibilities, but again, 0.6mm so I’ve laminated two sheets togetherRead More →

30 April
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In Desk Shelf, Stringing, Woodworking
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Trimmed off the excess from the weekend’s work, and it doesn’t look too terrible:   There’s some more outline left to do (for which I will need to bring the heatgun out to the shed from the electronics bench) and there are some more decorative elements I want to add, but not bad so far. I also need to think about decoration for the rest of the piece: I have some ideas, but they’re not settled yet…Read More →