More Handsaw Practice

I haven't had much time in the shop. I have been ducking in for 5 minutes at a time to practice cutting to a line, though, using the method described in and earlier post.

I'm getting pretty good.

Bridge City Tools Jointmaker Pro: It's Here!

My Christmas present arrived yesterday afternoon. The box of Jointmaker Pro parts was left leaning against the front door, and I started to assemble it.

I will post pictures of the assembly process later, but my first impression: there are a LOT of pieces, and you don't want to lose any of them before you get the machine assembled. I'm glad to be assembling mine, but if you don't like assembly or know you are not careful about assembly projects it will be well worth spending extra and have Bridge City put it together.

6/4" Poplar Board

I spent time this morning consulting the U.S. Forestry Service's Wood Handbook. I was looking for an affordable wood that would not move too much, carve fairly well, take paint, and be available in 6/4 rough. I settled on Poplar over Basswood (lower movement coefficient and better paintability, especially with latex), and headed off to Downes and Reader.

I just love the lumber yard. I spent a minute just browsing all of the wood. I was tempted to look for more than I had come for (there was still some of the Friejo I bought the last time down) but the memory of the full wood racks and the pile of ash that will need to be added in a month or two when Sean leaves his current house made me decide to stick to my shopping list: at least 10 feet of 6/4 poplar in a board at least 6 inches wide. What I found needed to be cut to fit in the car, so I had it cut to slightly longer than the sword will be: 4 feet. I plan to make two sword blanks simultaneously, so that if I screw up the first one, the second will be ready to go.

Lumber Run and Joint Maker Pro

Tomorrow I'm off to Downes and Reader to get the wood for my next project: a wooden sword. More on this as things develop. It is a fantasy sword commissioned by a reader, and I'm trying to invent a way to sheath it without a sheath, so that the whole sword is visible on his hip.

Oh, and the Joint Maker Pro shipped from Bridge City Tools. I've been coming home with hopes of finding it on my front porch, but it does take packages a while to get all the way across the country!

:)

A Quick Child's Table

Last Saturday my friend, Mark, visited with his son. Mark's inventive streak runs long and he doesn't let limited experience stop him from making things. He brought the parts for a table he planned to build with August, and he and I took 15 minutes in the shop to sand all the parts.

Above you can see the table he assembled on Sunday with his son's help. The basic design is butt joints and screws. I don't think there is any glue. This table reminds me of many of the furniture pieces I saw in Belize in January: simple, practical, and without pretense. The joints are braced with both brackets and triangular braces. I expect it will hold up to everything August throws at it until after he outgrows it.

Mark plans to make a chair for this little table using the similar construction techniques and more scraps from around the house. Nice work, Mark. Send pictures of the chair when you finish it.

Photographs courtesy and © 2009, Mark Shar.

Crate Breakdown and Sword Commission

The wood stove was installed on Friday and I spent Saturday morning breaking down the crate and pallet. Sadly, the Aussies who built the crate used Torx screws—the one profile that I didn't have a drill bit for—so the drill in the picture never saw use.

I did have the required T25 profile in a manual screwdriver though, and took out at least 15 of the screws by hand. Those screws are still good and I'll use them and the crate parts (pictured above) for a garden project this spring. I expect the lower pallet wood, which was lower quality, will be used for kindling. With luck the stove will pass inspection on Monday and we'll be soon be disposing of project cut offs by warming the house.

On Friday I received a down payment on a commissioned wooden fantasy sword. I spent about an hour last night testing a method for attaching the cross guard to the body of the sword. The prototype joint worked. I'll likely need to fettle the router plane for this project, though I may try using a pattern bit in the power router first—the router plane is far from ready to use.

Journal Entry #8: Paint

I painted the corner behind the wood rack tonight. It is ready to receive wood tomorrow night.

Journal Entry #7: Do the Washing Up

Brian Eno, a musician and artist, has published several editions of Oblique Strategies, a set of cards designed to help break unproductive thought patterns. I've handwritten a set for myself and have been using it as a constant inspiration in life—there are so many things that I get bogged down with—and while the strategies were written for artists and musicians they are broad enough to apply to almost any endeavor.

One of these cards says "Do the washing up".

Mess discourages, distracts, and hinders progress on any project. If I can't get motivated, or if I feel overwhelmed in the shop, it almost always helps to take a break and clean everything up. Throw out the thin scrap strips from ripping down boards in the last project (why am I keeping them?), put all the tools back where they belong, file the hardware in the hardware box, and vacuum. Figure out where the pile of lumber should be (what, not the middle of the floor?), and paint the walls white to brighten things up.

And that's what I've been doing this weekend. I completed the woodrack, which will soon house the pile of project wood and open a bunch of basement floor space. The wall next to it is washed and ready for paint. And the workbench has been cleared completely: I'm ready for the next project.

Journal Entry #6: Bookshelves and Magnets

Last weekend I took down the first bookshelf I built, cut the shelves 3 inches shorter, reassembled it, and set it up on the other side of the room. I also took a smaller bookshelf that used to be in the new spot, cut an access hole in the back of it (for an electrical socket) and moved that shelf into a new place in the living room.

The cause of all this reorganization? We're getting a wood stove and bake oven installed in the dining room, and had to make room for clearance. I'm sure to dispose of a few cutoffs there in the coming years—a big improvement over throwing them all away.

Work's been busy lately, so I've spent only a short time in the shop. When the magnet holder of a new Min Max Thermometer broke on my shin (don't ask) it gave me the excuse I needed to get back into the shop.

Rather than trying to glue together the flimsy plastic magnet holder I broke, I made one out of wood. I sawed a small block out of a 2 x 4 cutoff, drilled a hole in the end to fit the magnet, drilled a smaller hole cross grain to hold the tether, and then on a whim did some shaping with a coping saw, a four-in-hand rasp, a chisel, and some sandpaper. The result is an oddly satisfying and quirky looking replacement that I actually like better than the one that came with the thermometer:

On slate for tomorrow: a wood rack for the basement and possibly a start on the cold frames I've been planning.

Journal Entry #5: Jointer Assembly Complete

On Sunday I finished assembling the new jointer. I still need to adjust this for use, but I'm within an hour or so of having it fully functional.

Journal Entry #5: Key and Sword

Tonight the key arrived for the jointer. So more progress was made on assembly: I put the drive pulley on the motor, put on the belt, and adjusted the tension. That was all I had time for tonight because I have a sword to make.

If you are not familiar with the Society for Creative Anachronism, you probably don't realize that making swords in my world is a woodworking project. I've been making swords for 15 years now, and I'm just starting to get good at it. They are made of ratan, which is technically a grass, but enough like wood to qualify.

Tonight I removed the old sword from the basket hilt, cut a new length of ratan to the same length as the old one using the nifty "new" miter box that my friend Glenn passed on to me—a big improvement over cutting freehand with a crosscut panel saw—determined the "direction" of the blade, and thinned the full length to 1.25" using a draw knife.

Tomorrow I'll shape and size the handle, aiming to have it pressure fit into the basket hilt tightly enough that it would stay seated without tape. Then I'll mount and tape the sword using a combination of strapping tape, nylon webbing (to add weight and durability), duct tape, and electrical tape.

Every sword is a bit of a crapshoot, but careful and consistent work tends to produce a superior blade. It is easy to get carried away with the draw knife, so even though I'm working to a deadline I'll need to be slow and deliberate with the handle.

I'm taking pictures of all this, so I hope to post a "how to" entry with roughly step by step pictures of how I do this—maybe on Sunday.

Journal Entry #4: Oil and Chock

Sunday I did a little bit of cleaning in the shop. A very little. But I did clear off the top of the file cabinet I've been meaning to fix and then took it apart to fix it. I thought it would need rivets, or some kind of clever metal work, but sometimes "fixing" turns out to be a spritz of oil and a wooden chock.

That's all it took: the top drawer's thumb lever had broken off leaving a latch that didn't unlatch without applying serious force. I cut a small wooden chock from one my "cut to a line" practice peices, wedged the latch open with it, and hit each of the rollers with WD-40. The bottom drawer, which seemed permanently wedged open turned out to be off its track. After oiling the thumb lever, latch, and rollers with WD-40 and putting it properly on track it was good as new.

Now—if I can figure out where it belongs—I can get it out of the shop.

Journal Entry #3: Small Victories

At the beginning of January I bought a Delta extended-bed 6" jointer from Rockler and started setting it up. The body of the jointer (175 pounds of metal) is mounted on the stand, as is the motor, but there were adventures setting it up (I might post these with pictures at some later date).

The short story: I dropped the motor on the floor while trying to mount it (if you assemble one yourself, don't believe the picture in the manual that shows the stand upright next to the mounting instructions: it should be turned upside down before attempting to mount the motor). Of course there was a big dent in the casing and I felt I needed to turn on the motor to make sure it still worked. I didn't notice there was a key in the shaft (the key prevents the pully from sliding on the shaft) and the key went flying. Lucky me, it did not hit me, but neither can I find it. So today I tracked it down at the Dewalt/Delta service Web site and ordered a replacement. It should get here around February 5.

Also, two of the wooden toy boxes we brought with us to Belize were broken by baggage handling. I glued these back together today, and they are ready for our next trip (either to see my grandmother in Nebraska, or my parents in Minnesota—or possibly in Mexico if it is affordable).

Finally The work on the Christmas present I gave SWMBO (in the form of raw material) proceeded slightly today. I find it hard to joint the face of a board by hand, and this shelf is being more stubborn than the other pieces. Once I get this last shelf flattened, I can use the power planer to flatten the other side parallel to the surface. Can't wait, since I expect things will proceed more quickly after the stock preparation is completed.

Journal Entry #2: Carving on the Beach

There was also a wood carving establishment on the beach in San Pedro: a board set across two saw horses just under a tree. The place was frequented by a number of dread-locked men, the foremost of which seemed to be Augustus (?) Ford. Ford, as he called himself, could be seen here, always working on something, with his wares spread out on the board and on a blanket in front of it. These included standards in Belize: shark, stingray, turtle, mermaid, and cross. Most were made out of a dark tropical wood that had an almost white sapwood running through it - a striking feature of the carvings.

I don't know if Ford made all of his wares, as he claimed. I tend to think the carvings were bought unfinished from the mainland and finished by Ford and his friends. But when I asked about how he worked, he gave me a tour of his workshop (a Rubbermaid bin that he was using as a work surface). Here's what he had:

1 machete
2 half-round wood rasps in 2 sizes
1 v-gouge (with a handle designed to rest in the palm)
1 small mallet that he had obviously made for himself
1 hack saw (for cutting up old machetes)
1 detail carving knife (made of the tip of an old machete)
1 gouge or round-tipped chisel (made of the tang of an old machete)
1 triangle file
1 medium sized piece of glass
lots of sand paper, all grades

That was pretty much it. He demonstrated the use of glass as a scraper, using the triangle file to cut the edge of the glass, then using it to snap a fresh glass edge. That edge was then used to scrape a shaving from the wood. Ford said this let him skip several grades of sand paper when finishing. The finishing started with a sanding sealer that smelled strongly of turpentine (even with the sea breeze going). The process as he described it was to seal the wood, sand carefully with the coarsest grit, seal again, and sand with the next finest grit, working his way down to a very fine tooth. At the end he used a bit of 000 steel wool and polished the piece with neutral shoe polish (the equivalent of a Butchers wax).

My brother's family brought home three of these sculptures, sold to them by a guy riding down the beach: a mobile outpost, I think, of Ford's operation. One of these statues has already cracked several times from the water loss (coming from warm and moist Belize to cold and dry Massachusetts). We're hoping the other two fare better.

Journal Entry #1: Woodworking in Belize

Over the coming year I plan to include journal entries amongst the other content on this site. I expect these will be more personal and less visual than other posts. Here's the first of what may be almost daily entries.

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I just returned from a vacation/wedding in Belize and was interested to see woodworking done in a developing country. I saw numerous commercial woodworking shops and recognized them not by a sign (there was none) but by the sound of power tools and the sight of lumber yards. I wished to get into one and talk with the proprietor, but did not get the chance.

Our hotel was next to a shop that had quite a stock of what looked to be 8/4 and 12/4 rough lumber and a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The wood was obviously air drying, not stacked and stickered as we commonly see in the States, but leaning against racks made of lashed together trees. These racks positioned the wood to catch the prevailing winds across the majority of their surface. I planned to take a picture of this but never did.

Another local shop opened onto the main road and I caught a glimpse as we drove by in a golf cart. I saw the industrial green of older but well cared for machines, which looked to include an 8" or 10" jointer, a table saw, a 14" or 18" bandsaw, and several other machines.

Because I was on an island, most of the wood was imported, and most of the woodworking in evidence was made right on the island. Joinery in most pieces was simple, but sturdy—generally butt joined, but sometimes rabbeted. I saw no dovetail or mortise and tenon joints; no doubt these complex joints required more time than could be afforded.

Mahogany and pine appeared to be the primary wood choices: this is the land of tropical woods, so mahogany is locally harvested and officially the national tree. On a tour of Mayan ruins I saw two mahogany trees that were easily 10 or 12 feet in diameter and grew tall enough to feel at home in Manhattan.

Most furniture examples were utilitarian, obviously assembled with glue and nails and either painted bright colors or covered with spar varnish to protect against the sea breezes and rough weather. Bracing was visible on all of these: a nod to the fact these joints would rack, and an attempt to prevent it. Still, all these chairs, tables, bars, and decks were sturdy, so this approach appeared to work well enough. I tend to over think my joints, and probably over engineer them as well. Here was an example of how glue and nail could do the job well enough. These examples would never last a century, but many appeared to have already weathered several years and remained serviceable.