Home / Tag "hand tools" (Page 25)

Done…

Well, thank feck.

I lined the drawer with green baize felt, which was as complex as “apply glue, shove cloth in place, run knife around inside to trim”. Then I drilled pilot holes and screwed on the drawer pull. Took the drawer inside, put it in the frame, evaluated how bad the rocking was, and trimmed the two high legs and re-chamfered the new cut surfaces. No more rocking. Then I assembled the whole thing, put on the mattress and a fitted sheet, and that’s it, it’s done.

It didn’t turn out too badly I think, given that it started life like this:
Have to say thank you to Herself Indoors here for looking after Junior for too many weekends while this got done. There’s a small army of stuff around the house that got ignored while trying to get this finished, I think that’s going to be my shed work for the next few weeks (not to mention that the garden is in dire need of fixing and the shed itself is now buried in shavings and rubbish and needs cleaning and the car boot needs fixing and we really need to change the car while I’m at it and ….… Read the rest

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Foostering

Right, I just need one or two hours of calm dry weather and…

*sigh* Feck’s sakes. Fine.

But at least I can put in the glue blocks to support the top panel. Yesterday I trued up a corner of a stick of walnut I had as an offcut from the drawer front and then cut it into four ~10cm lengths. Granted, this isn’t traditional, glue blocks are traditionally whatever cheap softwood was lying around, but I had this as an offcut so why not.

Then today I had a few minutes of trying to figure out how to clamp them in place because I didn’t know how this was done traditionally. One quick internet search later and yup, you just paint the glue face with glue (hide glue is traditional but apparently any wood glue works), rub it on the spot where you want the glue block to stick to ensure both sides have glue and there’s no air in the glue joint, then hold it in place for a few seconds and there it sticks.… Read the rest

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Drawering to a close…

The idea was to get the last bits done today. Didn’t quite make it, but came close.

Got the cot out of the shed first so I could do some work. Looks nice in the sunshine…

Then made up the glue blocks I was thinking about yesterday to support the top panel.

And then gathered all the tools up…

The #778 is there to cut a small alignment rebate on the inside of the tails for the dovetails, in what Rob Cosman refers to as the “140 trick”. I don’t have a Stanley #140 (it’s a rather expensive skew-blade block plane) and the #778 is a little finicky for this, but it works if you’re careful. The idea is that you cut a tiny little ledge in the tailboard and after the tails are cut you sit the pinboard up against the tails and on that ledge to align it and let you mark the pins more easily (and it works quite well).… Read the rest

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