24 February
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So the resin tests came out pretty damn good. The idea of putting the reflector under the resin worked quite well, and most of the colours came out well (the crimson guitars stains didn’t really pop but that was more down to the dark background – the way the red especially looked over the reflector suggests it’d be lovely over poplar).

Crimson guitars stains in walnut

Calum picked out a few he liked as well (the ones with crosses beside them in pen).… Read the rest “Resin results and carving again”

21 February
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So, like I said last time, there’s going to be some resin in the desk shelves for Calum. Because, you know seven year old clients, they’re all about the bright colours. And the North Atlantic. So, onto ebay and ordered 3kg of clear resin (I won’t need that much, but I want to do other stuff too…) and then pigments… well, Peter Brown had a “using household things for resin pigments” so I thought I’d try lidl acrylic and tempura paints and some other stuff…

And I also was thinking walnut is dark so any resin is going to look like it’s in a hole in the ground, but there’ll be an LED light above the walnut shelf, so what if I had a reflector under the resin?… Read the rest “Testing resin pigments”

17 February
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More shed time today, and I spent the first half of it fettling the middle shelf in the desk. Straightforward, if repetitive process – assemble, check what’s too tight and what’s too loose, cut or pare the shelf a little narrower with saw and chisel, reassemble, recheck, repeat until the dovetail joint that was horribly stressed by the shelf being too wide:

…is no longer stressed, but just snug:

And doublecheck all the other joints to be sure nothing else is opening up.… Read the rest “Fettling”

16 February
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Some more – increasingly rare – time in the shed over the last week or so, and I started cutting the top shelf for the desk.

While I had the desk assembled to this stage the last day, I scribed the top shelf angles with pencil and set the board aside. Then this week, after thinking about it a bit, I double-checked the angles of the sides of the walnut board – because it’s the core around which all this is built – and then I used the angles of the walnut board, and the width from the scribe marks (and yes, I double-checked that the sides were plumb to the desk before scribing), and used those two to cut the top shelf.… Read the rest “Angled dovetails”

02 February
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Shed time again (yes, it’s been a while, work stepped up a notch and it’s been a bit miserable and chilly here (granted, not -40C but you can’t move in my shed very much so you feel the cold rather a bit). Chopped the last housing joint and then spent some time wrestling with pieces that are definitely too large for the shed to do a test assembly.

Rather awkward to put together (and those clamps are the largest I have, they were comfortably large enough to make the workbench with padding on the clamps and still they only barely make it).… Read the rest “Creak…”

01 January
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So the last time I worked on the desk wasn’t as far back as October, but I didn’t get a chance to write it up (work has been a tad busy and other stuff has also been eating time). But with xmas dinner done, holidays finally kicked in for me and after collapsing for a few fallow days, I got back out to the shed in the last day or so. And managed to avoid breaking my neck on the decking outside the shed as well (some anti-moss napalm has been deployed and I’ll have to repaint that decking with some sort of high-traction paint before any really cold weather hits I think, and possibly drill a few sneaky drainage holes against standing water).… Read the rest “Well that took longer than expected…”

02 September
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So I decided to go ahead and shape the front curve today, since it was going to be awkward to cut and might be noisy so it’d have to be a weekend job really.

Why is it awkward? Well, the plan is to make the first rough cut with the bandsaw and then to get down to the line with the compass plane and the board is long enough that swinging it around through the bandsaw inside the shed would be awkward and would probably need the door open and the plank sticking out at some point.… Read the rest “More shaping”

01 September
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Not much time in the shed today, but enough to make a start. First, new toys!

So some catches to help with the mod to the Dewalt extraction hood (I think I have everything I need for that now, I’ll get to it soon), an incredibly cheap handplane ($4.30 from Aliexpress delivered) which is more to play with and laugh at than to seriously try to use as a tool, and two interesting tape measures.… Read the rest “Short day’s shaping”

25 August
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So, been sick. Children, they’re basically walking petri dishes that deposit germs on you. Anyway, back to it today. And nothing fancy, nothing terribly skillful, just milling timber to rough thickness.

Retrieved the mitre saw stand I bought from lidl a few weeks ago out of the attic, set it up, and mounted the Dewalt to it, spent a while faffing about with the mounting screws discovering that I’d fastened it down using the screws that are for adjusting the infeed and outfeed tables that are built into the thicknesser and had to re-mount it (turns out the thing won’t mount to the lidl stand quite perfectly because it’s too wide, but it’s stable enough to work).… Read the rest “Milling time”

30 June
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Still working on sketches for the next project, and it’s too hot to do very much (we’re Irish, we melt somewhere between 24C and 26C and we’re topping out at 30C now so of course we’re all draped over a couch, only moving if we hear the ice cream van…)

Sketchup and me and curved surfaces is an unfamiliar territory, but the way you draw it is fairly close to building it that you make a rectangle, match it against other shapes, cut off the excess and shape any curves and so on, so the actual process is like a long-winded finicky walkthrough with your brain on how you’re going to build the thing.… Read the rest “Shed jobs”