Tag: bench

Plugging away…

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Finishing, Japanese Toolbox, Locker, Woodworking , , , , , ,

So first things first, take the clamps off and see if the hide glue cured…

Not too bad, lots of squeezeout in places but I can deal with that.

Well, bugger. I thought I had that better aligned than that and there’s no real way to fix it now. Feck.

Clean up the squeezeout and smooth the surfaces. Mostly the #04 with a few pieces done by card scraper. Not too bad. Broke the sharp edges as well.

Couldn’t get all the edges with the #04 though, so various other tools made an appearance. And then leveled the legs so it didn’t rock. I don’t like MDF for, well, anything, but it is nice to have a flat surface for this sort of thing and I don’t have room for a granite slab so I do keep a piece or two of MDF handy for this task.

Not bad, but now I have to plug those gaps at the top rear corner where the dovetails used to be. Should be simple, cut a block of wood to fit oversize, glue it in, let the glue set, cut it flush with the flush-cut saw and then some chisel work and some sanding…

…looks okay to me!

Okay, that now goes to rest for a little while so I can figure out the door, decoration, finishing and so on. I’ll have to give it another smoothing or sanding pass before finishing, but when you see it in the flesh it looks far more even than it does in the photos, and it’s smooth to the fingertips.

But first…

Glued up the carcass of the toolbox, and cut the mangled rebates off the old sides – they’ll make good material for handles or the top parts.

While the glue dries, it’s time to make pegs from some small offcuts of walnut that have reasonably straight grain. These are left over from making the sidecar cot from a while ago…

Smashy smashy!

It’s always the last one….

Still, I can use those. The short one I’ll use for a test hole, I haven’t used the brace on beech before now.

Drills reasonably well, but lots more dust than shavings off the bit than I’d see in something like oak. Takes a lot more effort to get through. I’m pretty sure that bit’s sharp as well, it definitely wanted a bite out of my fingertips. Now to flushcut and then plane down to see how well it looks…

That’s quite nice actually. Good fit too.

And with the glue dried, plane down the edges until we’re all level and not rocking (again, the MDF sheet’s handy as a reference surface here. I really want to flatten my benchtop but there just isn’t room to do so in the shed).

Some marking out and drilling of holes…

And in go the pegs and the glue. I’ll let it set up then trim off the pegs and they’ll go on to make more pegs later on.

And I glued up a panel for the base. Gotta love sprung joints. I’ll plane up and cut to size tomorrow. And lastly, a quick test of finishes – on the left, danish oil; on the right, crimson guitar’s royal blue stain (just because). I must find out if boss lady wants her locker any particular colour…

That blue is seriously intense while wet, it’s mucking up the camera’s colour balance even against a white background.

 

Cleaning down

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Shed, Woodworking , , ,

So it’s the usual post-project loss of traction time; I do still have a few half-finished projects to be getting on with, but I thought I’d take a little time first to clean down after the chest, given that it’s left things a tad messy (especially given the pace of work on stuff leading up to xmas). The shed’s a mess, to be honest:

 

Buying a small bunch of things over the weekend didn’t help, but I was out of Osmo 1101 after the baby blanket chest and having corner mending braces is always useful for shop jigs and the like.

It’ll take a while to get this done; partly the problem is down to putting a litre of stuff in a pint pot sized shed. There just isn’t room for everything *and* all the wood 😀 I also want to replace that blue drum on the dust collector to get some space back, and some more tools need to go up on the walls and all my paintbrushes need to be cleaned (and some may need to be thrown away as too far gone). But at least I made a small start today.

 

Groovin’ right along…

Mark Dennehy 2 Comments Baby blanket chest, Woodworking, Workbench , , , , ,

The rails were all prepped and squared last night so today at lunch I hobbled out to the shed and started grooving them with the #044.

First off, checking the position of the groove and the shadow lines (if we have any) with the long rails.

Line up the reference face of the rail with the stile and nick the corner with the marking knife at the edges of the groove on the stile. Then use the marking gauge to run those lines around three of the four edges and reinforcing the lines on the edge with the groove using the cutting gauge. Then into the vice and plough the groove out with the #044.

But the inside edge is a bit rounded and ragged which could cause issues, so out with the japanese chisel (which I’m starting to enjoy using – it’s great for anything involving chopping but for paring it leaves a lot to be desired) and the narex to clean up.

And when the straggly bits on the bottom are cleared out and the inside edge is straightened up, a single pass with the #04 along the top to tidy up and we’re done.

Not every rail needed quite so much work (and I went back and fixed two grooves on the stiles the same way later). And with the long rails done…

…time for the short rails.

Same procedure as before, right down to the cleanup. By this point we’re through lunch, and a coffee break around four, and into afterdinner time, but:

Done. That’s the main carcass of the chest ready for the mortice&tenon joinery. But by now it’s too late to start chopping mortices (because of the noise and the neighbours) so something else needed doing. I still hadn’t picked material for the lid so I started picking through the timber store and found two short oak boards that are already prepped from an earlier build I didn’t pursue, they’ll do for the frame of the lid. For the lid panel I wanted a single solid piece of nice looking oak between three-quarters and an inch thick. Couldn’t find any offcuts, so…

Measured off slightly more than I’ll need and crosscut with the 300mm ryoba in the face vice, then skim-planed off both faces to see which side should be up. Sometimes that’s a hard choice. This time… not so much 😀

Three guesses which way’s up? 😀

Also, it lets me use up the end of that board that had a damaged edge – I won’t need the full width of the board for this. The idea is to have a frame-and-panel lid, but where the lid has a groove around the edge instead of a tongue so that the bottom edge of the groove acts as the tongue for the frame and the top edge of the groove is proud of the frame:

Of course, you don’t really need the groove on the frame, you could use a simple rabbet. I’ll have to think about that a bit. The panel does have to be grooved though, because I want to shape the half-inch or so that would be proud of the frame and I’d like to be sure the line between lid frame and lid panel is hidden away.

With the parts skim planed and set out (I’ll rip out the frame rails and stiles tomorrow), and the floorboards already picked out (I have some cedar for that), there was something I wanted to check, namely whether parts in the vice are definitely at right angles to the workbench top; that would explain the slight angle on the base of the 044’s grooves.

Nope, not even very close. That’s a tad disconcerting. I wanted to see if it was the vice jaw or the apron…

Seems like it’s both. Well, I guess I can’t think of the corner of the workbench as a square anymore. I suppose it’s not bad for cheap 2×4 material, but I do see the attraction of hardwood benches now.

That done, I laid out tomorrow’s job, wrapped up for the night and hobbled back indoors.

Tomorrow, we mortice!

Standing upright

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Side Table, Tools, Woodworking, Workbench , , , , , ,

Last few days have been the first really cold ones of the year. -2C to -3C in the shed. And work was… somewhat excessive in the last few days so tonight was the first time in the shed in a few days and a to-do list was waiting. So…

Ran a slightly larger drillbit through the aprons to give some flex room for the bolts, and flattened the top of the aprons (I also spent a half-hour before this with the scrub plane and #5 flattening the underneath of the tabletop and hand-cutting the panel to width to trim out the worst of the bandsaw wobble).

The stainless steel inserts arrived on Thursday in the post, thankfully. Seems everyone makes these in zinc-plated steel, but actual stainless is a bit hard to find.

Bit of faffing about getting the legs centered on the tabletop, then putting in the drill bit and thwacking it to mark the drilling point with the drill bit (it’s a brad boint bit).

And now it’s time to drill the holes for the inserts. Look closely enough and you can see the marked point.

El cheapo drill bit depth stop so I don’t drill through the table. I have a fancy one for auger bits, but for drill bits, it’s blue tape time. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh. Right. Well, at least I noticed the shavings were shoving the tape backwards before I chased it right through the table.

Who says calipers aren’t good for woodworking? Check length of insert with calipers, get automatic depth gauge setting on the other, stabby end of the calipers. So I drilled the rest of the insert holes, stopping to poke the stabby bit in the hole until I had my depth.

Then it was time to realise that Richard Maguire had gotten inserts that you put a hex key directly into in order to drive home, but these sodding things need a bolt put into them and you drive them home with that. And since they’re going into a blind hole, the bolt has to be shorter than the insert. I managed to find some short M6 bolts (they came with the Triton sander as the bolts to bolt it down to the table with but I had my own), but they were too long. So. Time to break out my metalworking setup 😀

This is my metalworking setup. It’s a Record Imp, which I got back in February. It’s a nice lightweight metalworking vice designed to be clamped to a bench by people who didn’t need a full-size machinist’s vice. And it has nice features – you can bend pipe with it, you have a small anvil at the back and a striking surface (that small round thing just behind the jaws) and so on. Plus, it’s old – it’s a later model so this wasn’t made in the 1930s but it would have been somewhere between the 1960s and early 1980s, before Record went downhill. This is a small vice, but it is not a toy vice. I’ve screwed and clamped it down to a scrap piece of inch-thick oak, which then gets holdfasted to the bench.

So I clamp the bolt in the vice, mark off the length I want, remove the insert from the bolt, then fire up the dremel with a cutting disk (it’s a 6mm bolt lads, if I fired up the angle grinder it’d be like firing a sandblaster at sponge cake) and nip it off.

And now, just because we can, out comes the file and the tap-and-die set…

File off the sharp bits left by the dremel, recut the start of the thread after the file’s mangled it. Then thread the bolt into the insert and get out the socket driver.

Now, pick up that 14mm long insert, in a shed where it’s around 6-7C, slip with your fingers and drop it down behind the bench into the sawdust and shavings.

Swear profusely.

Get out the magnetic-head telescopic torch thing…

Right. Enough faffing. Paste wax to the threads and drive it on home.

Nice. Now we just do that with the other three…

Why is it spinning so easily on insert #2?

Ah, shite.

Apparently my bolts are made of particularly firm cheddar.

Mole grips to unscrew the insert, pointy thing to screw the bit of the bolt still stuck in there out the back of the insert (glad I didn’t get the blind inserts now).

Okay. Prep another bolt. Repeat all the steps above. Keep going, but be more careful this time.

Shite! At least I felt it go this time and stopped fast enough to be able to unscrew it in one part. Prep another bolt…

Felt this one going before it snapped. Definitely cheddar.

At least all four are in now. I might come back if I can find a non-cheese bolt and drive them below the surface later. For tonight, that’ll do.

Bolts in, and they fit (they’re a bit less than drop-in, but wood moves, blah, blah, blah, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

That’s a pleasant sight 🙂

Out with the MDF board at this point for a flat surface and check the rock – the front left leg there is about a millimetre out. Plus the feet are all at 12 degrees to the ground because geometry, so I mark off a flat on each leg, disassemble the table and even the legs up. And I leave it there for the evening. I’ve been up since… well, I was in work till around 0400 this morning after getting called around 2330 on friday, and I was back at work just before 0900 until 1730. On-call sucks sometimes. Oh well. There are worse complaints.

I have to shape the feet and thin the table edge and do the final smoothing of the tabletop and legs (cabinet scraper time!), all of which are finesse tasks so I’ll leave them for tomorrow, and I can be starting the finishing by tomorrow evening which is a good timetable for this.

Oh, and I also have a custom scratch stock profile to file. I’d rather do this with a hollow plane, but I don’t have hollows and rounds and I know (a) how much a set costs and (b) how much space one takes up 😀 So that’s not happening for a while. Hell, that was why I got the #050C combo plane, but alas I didn’t get the special doo-dads to let it act as a hollow or round 🙁  I’ve got an eye open, but the problem with the combiplanes is that they came with a lot of bits and doodads, and that was in 1930. You can’t keep both socks together for more than six months before you’re suddenly looking at lefty pining for righty who is has returned to the fjords; what odds that someone will have all 53 pieces from the original combiplane box that they bought in 1933?

So obviously, I just need to get a set of hollows and rounds.

looks up prices

passes out

Holy crap. I could buy two cars (second-hand) for the price of a set. Sod that. I wouldn’t have the room to put them anywhere anyway and the larger ones are all for things I don’t have the physical space in the shed to build.

But on ebay, unmatched planes (“harlequins” apparently, in a rare example of nice naming) are way less expensive – you can pick them up for a pound apiece in some cases. So I’ll probably wind up buying one or six hollows/rounds/beading wooden planes over the next year. You don’t need all that many for the kind of stuff I do. I might start with one that matches the profile above, which is drawn to match one of my gouges to do some decorative carving work.

I guess I’ll just have to try my “build something and sell it to pay for the wood” plan this year to let me do that 😀

 

French cleats and bench grinders

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Shed, Woodworking, Workbench , , , , ,

So I’ve said once or twelve times that I needed to do something about this stuff in the shed:

The little air compressor proved useless for shellac and stuff so it’s moved indoors to the lab for future mucking about with airfix models with junior and the like. The dremel, well, that’s handy for stuff so it still lives there, but the grinder was just a pain in the fundament. It’s on an MDF base with a small cleat on the bottom for the Black&Decker Workmate to grab onto (or the vice on the bench these days). So I finally got round to fixing that up and getting it out from underfoot.

Smaller base, cleat at the front end to act like a bench hook and a holdfast at the back keeps it nice and stable (the base tends to cup a bit, I don’t think it’ll last forever). Pulled the stone on one side (the finer grit stone because if I need that grit, I just use sandpaper for the scary sharp method or I use the diamond stones – I’ve never used that fine grinder stone since I got it) and put a wire wheel on there to help clean up rust off some older tools. The wire wheel wouldn’t fit in the guard, so I lost it.

If that cleat looks familiar, it’s because you’ve watched woodworking videos on youtube in the last decade. It’s a french cleat with a matching cleat on the wall.

So now it’s out from underfoot and positioned perfectly to remove an eyeball as you enter the shed. Who really needs to look to the left though?

Small jobs again…

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Shed, Sidecar Cot, Woodworking, Workbench , , ,

Just not a very productive Sunday really. Checked my squares, found one is so not square that I threw away the crosspiece and I’ll use it as a straightedge from now on.

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Then got on with building the jig. Laid out the geometry (a 10.3″ radius curve gives a 12″ radius curve and 15 degrees of springback).

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Shop cat is somewhat critical of the layout…img_9829a img_9831a

Laminating MDF to make a drying form (which will have the 12″ radius and the walnut gets clamped to this for a week after it’s had a day or so on the bending jig to cool).

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Lots of laminated MDF and 2×4 chunks. This is when you not only have insufficient clamps but also insufficient space to put the drying bits 😀

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I thought it was a bit of a gimmicky thing when I bought it, but those silicone glue brushes work damn well. Worth every cent (especially when buying them from Rutlands in the UK instead of buying the Rockler ones from the US).

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And last job, fixing and reattaching the vice jaws (finally – shop jobs seem to be cobbler’s children really). img_9843a

Simple enough job, just counterboring for nuts and ensuring they were below the surface of the face. Complicated only by not having a drill press or fostner bits, but an auger bit and brace and a little fustering sufficed.

Then went through the stock in the woodpile matching pieces to cutlists and finding that for the largest panel in the crib, I don’t have long enough boards to do lengthwise glue-ups in the panel. Hmmm. Is it okay to run the glue-ups crosswise I wonder….

Tidying up and small jobs

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Shed, Woodworking , ,

Didn’t get the jig built. But did get the lawnmower and a lot of other annoying floorspace eaters cleared out to the garden storage box, so I’ve now gone from this:

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being under my feet to this:

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It’s a remarkable change 😀

Mind you, while getting that done other stuff had to be moved about so for a while, this was my bench…

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So not ideal. I finished breaking down almost all of the boards from friday (there’s still one 6’x6″ walnut board I haven’t cut yet) and stacking them and generally doing small bits of tidying away (like putting some mdf on the floor under the timber because that floor looks manky):

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So a little crowded again, but the dremel, the bench grinder and air compressor are all going up on french cleats on the wall or elsewhere in the shed, along with those clamps; and as to the wood, well, that’s three or four projects on the go so it’s not just sitting around taking up space, it’s raw materials. I can live with that.

Still way too small a shed though.

And then I started trying to get some more things off the bench to free up more space. So the holdfasts finally got storage holes in the legs…

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(I couldn’t drill a second in the right leg because there’s a tumbledrier in the way. Don’t ask).

And the scrapers finally get a small holder to get them out of the way and kept together.

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And last small job was to get the hammers off the bench and onto the wall. So a small lath of 2×1 and some holes drilled at a 15° angle and some 18mm dowel and glue gives this work in progress:

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I’ll let that cure overnight, then drill some pilot holes down from the top of the lath through the dowel centers, and drop a screw down the middle to add some strength, then chisel and plane the back flat and screw it to the wall. Then I’ll hang the hammers on it and hold my breath…

Veritas

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Woodworking, Workbench , ,

2016-09-18-13-12-02a

So. I was kindof impressed with the veritas end vice for surviving the wallop the way it did. I mean, “Must survive having 500lb of bench and idiot dropped on the handle by the idiot” can’t have been on the design specs after all, and yet it managed it. So I wrote off to Veritas just to say nicely done lads, that’s a nice bit of kit. Because that sort of thing ought to happen to engineers a bit more often.

Hi Mark,

Ouch! We hope you are OK? Definitely a good test for the vise!!

Please let us have your full postal address and we will be very happy to send a replacement main shaft and handle at no charge. It will be our contribution to  finishing off your bench as intended and having everything working and looking good. The shaft should be an easy switch by removing the spring pin in the handle and the two screws holding the end cap in place.

Regards,

 

They’re posting – unasked for and free of charge – a replacement screw shaft for the vice, so it’d look its best.

I mean, I know, cheap marketing and so on, but still. Deserves a bit of a thumbs-up I thought. Can’t see Bosch doing that because I dropped a drill and the casing survived the impact. And it’s kindof — not to be too much of a leftie pinko commie hippie about it — but it’s kindof nice when a manufacturer does that sort of thing, especially these days.

So there it is. A nice little postscript to the build.

Almost there…

Mark Dennehy 0 Comment Woodworking, Workbench ,

Nice dry day today, and only had to work for an hour, so it’s benchtime again!

You might have noticed that the benchtop’s lamination didn’t go as smoothly as it could have and the surface was a tad irregular as a result:

And indeed, you’d be right. I was not expecting a fun time flattening that out. And I was not wrong. Read more

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