16 November
By
On
In Shed, Tools, Woodworking
With 0 Comments

After a week, checked the carved, resawn, planed scraps of walnut. No warping, no twisting, no cupping. I’m okay with calling that a success. The thing for me about making boxes is that without a large bandsaw to do proper resawing, the only way to thickness pieces involves planing away the excess and that excess wouldn’t be waste ideally, it’d be the other half of a new set of thinner boards. The bandsaw I do have can manage up to 75mm of material but beyond that doesn’t work because it can’t physically fit under the top bearing. I can resaw more than that by handRead More →

12 November
By
On
In Shed, Woodcarving, Woodworking
With 0 Comments

More tidying up. It’s starting to get a bit neater… Next job, tidy up the panel and grasshopper gauges and put up one of the five(!) magnetic bars I got for the shed walls (if you buy two and bury them in shavings, you’ll forget you bought them and buy them again when they show up in Lidl again). Little better. Want to tape up the f-clamp handles as well. It’s just hockey stick grip tape, but it makes it a lot easier to crank on those handles when tightening up the clamp. Now, onto tonights little experiment. Take one offcut of walnut, mark itRead More →

10 November
By
On
In Shed, Tools, Woodworking, Workbench
With 0 Comments

After every long project, the shed is usually a mess – stuff I can’t reach around the piece of work physically to grab and put back in its place, finishing supplies out of their usual storage boxes, sawdust and shavings everywhere, and so on. Stuff you’ll get to when you have a minute. So today was cleandown day after the desk. On with the kneepads, pop out the collapsable garden waste bin (useful little thing that) and I wheeled the bandsaw and sander outside to give room to get all the detritus out, stuff that had built up over the last year or so, includingRead More →

27 October
By
On
In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
With 0 Comments

So during the week I had to work from home for a day, so while doing that I took my lunch break to pull the shelves out of the shed and put a second coat of Polyx on them. They didn’t look too bad.   And after they’d cured for a few days in the shed, I went out again and glued on some leather pads on the contact points between the shelves and the wall so that they wouldn’t rub against the wall and destroy the paint. Awkward to clamp though. And then today while Calum was out at a birthday party, I snuckRead More →

16 October
By
On
In Desk Shelf, Finishing, Woodworking
With 0 Comments

Got the LED strip during the week, cut a length off, soldered on the wire, tested it in the lab and it all lit up well, so I pulled off the paper on the back (the strip is self-adhesive) and stuck it in place inside the aluminium extrusion with some heatshrink around the cable end for strain relief and put the diffuser and endcaps in place… The cable fits in the hole that I drilled for it, so that’s grand, but the connector for the 12V power supply on the other hand, is just a little too big so I’ll have to expand that hole,Read More →