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Busy day

Well, I’ve never clamped anything to this side of the vice before….

I couldn’t move the boxes beneath the bench out of the way because there’s nowhere for them to go, and I didn’t want to spin the piece around because I was using the nailgun and I’m not quite ready to point anything at myself that has the word “gun” in the title just yet. But this worked well enough.

It’s just scraps of pine – that base was actually a board that was in the living room for the last four years and I’d forgotten about it because it was up on top of a bookshelf. Some glue, a few brads and on we go.

Again I didn’t have brads of the right length here so glue and screws provide the holding strength and the brads just pin everything in place long enough for me to get the screws into it.… Read the rest

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Using up offcuts

So with the lockdown in Ireland now extended to May 5 – or The Lock-in as we ought to be calling it the way WW2 was The Emergency – garden centers are closed (apparently the Greens asking us to feed ourselves from our window boxes full of lettuce didn’t make Woodies an essential business 😀 ). I ran around one before the Lock-in commenced and got a lot of seeds and potting compost (and we already had a general-purpose liquid fertiliser and tomato feed and for high-nitrogen stuff like Basil, well everyone knows that trick of mixing eggshells and used coffee grounds with their compost, right?); but I thought we had more planters than we had. Seems I threw the ones we did have in the bin a few weeks ago because the UV had finally mangled them past maintenance’s hopes.… Read the rest

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Thank you Tom!

Tom Murphy was the mad eejit who got me to try woodturning first, when I was perfectly happy making stuff like boxes and tables. He’s been into it for quite a while now, and was always telling me I should try it. Though he also did the Jackie Chan end credits thing of pointing out the times it went sideways on him, and constantly scaring me into always wearing a faceshield…

First up today, I had to sharpen the lathe tools. I was lucky enough to get a cheap wolverine jig clone (which is well made to be fair) before we locked down and I found my original 80 grit gray wheel for the grinder as well, so today I put that back on where the wire wheel had been.… Read the rest

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