Ducting

 

Fireplace Handle Replacement

 

The bakelite (or whatever it was) handle for the door of our log burner underwent spontaneous disintegration, so I whipped up a new one from a bit of oak. It took about ten minutes or so.

The steel of the handle gets hot, but I don't think it will get hot enough to scorch the oak. I'll keep an eye on it.

I think it looks a lot nicer than the old one, and it certainly feels nicer.

Oak bowl

 

I turned this bowl in green oak a few months ago, and today I put it back on the lathe to fuck it up by gouging a bunch of chips out of the inside with a scraper catch. Hey-ho.

I ebonized it with ferric acetate, and it really shows the difference in tannin levels between the sap and heart wood. The heart goes really dark, while the sap is affected to a much lower degree.

Another knife

 

Here's another bread-&-butter knife sharpening and handle replacement, this time with a bit of deer antler. The natural curve of the antler is very comfortable in the hand, and it polishes up very nicely with a clean buffing wheel and fine polishing soap.

Knife Regeneration

 

The casein handles on these old dinner knives tends to go kind of crappy over the years, especially if, like me, you don't take good care of them and submerge them in hot water repeatedly.

However, the steel is good -- flexible, and holds an edge -- and it's worth the short time it takes to give them new handles. Also, with a little attention from grinder and diamond paddles, they make really good paring knives.

Why I Disapprove Of Art Competitions For Commercial Use

If you are a business, and you want a piece of art work for some commercial purpose, it is tempting to stage a competition. It looks like a good way to get to choose the best of a wide range of offerings, while paying peanuts.

What it is in reality is a cynical exploitation of emerging artists' desire for publication.

You're asking a whole lot of people to do a whole lot of unpaid work in the hope that you might reward them with a handful of beans and the publication of their work somewhere.

How about you actually put in a bit of work yourself, do some research, find artists whose work resonates with you, and actually commission them to do the job? There are a multitude of sites on the internet that are ideal for seeing a huge range of talents to choose from. It would be more honest, and less exploitative, to source your commercial artwork that way.

You might retort: Well, what about the EXPOSURE? 

To which I reply with a hollow laugh.

Needle File Handles

 

Just idling around on this hot Sunday afternoon, I made handles for some of my needle files. They're small files, only about 150mm (6") long, and in truth they don't really need handles. However, now they've got them.

The two outside ones are sapele, the middle one is walnut. The ferrules are cut down from a piece of 10mm brass pipe.

Shot-glass Inkwell

 

I wanted an inkwell, so I made one out of a shot-glass and a piece of (probably) rimu.

The only shot-glasses I could get locally are double-shots, and it's really a bit tall. A single-shot (30ml) glass would be better. I'll keep an eye out for one on my travels.

It could do with a cap of some sort to help stop the ink evaporating and thickening, but for the moment it will be a use-it-and-wash-it thing. 

A bit later...

I did find some 30ml shot glasses, so I modified the wooden carrier to fit one. 

The notch out of the rim is just there to tidy up a chip that broke out when I was thinning it down enough to fit the new glass. 

---

Blender screenshots

Antique inkwell
with its new reservoir in place

I have an excellent nickel inkwell from the '30s, with a sprung domed lid that slides out of the way when opened.

Regrettably, its original reservoir was made of bakelite, and over the years it had got cracked.

I did briefly use an aluminium insert made from an old case for some fairly fancy fountain pen cartridges, and that worked just fine, but in the end I decided to design and print a brand new reservoir for it.

I had to print it in resin, as FDM isn't reliably watertight, and also it seems to disintegrate when in extended contact with indian ink. Hopefully the resin will fare better.

Chessboard Table Revisited

 

Way back in the distant past (2011), I made this chessboard table. In a failure of foresight, when I attached the top to the carcase, I glued it as well as screwing it to battens. That was a mistake.

The table is too low to be comfortably usable, so it would be better if the chessboard was detachable, to be used sitting at a table.

So today, at long last, I achieved that by the judicious application of brute force. The damage is all underneath, where it doesn't show, so that's good.

Next step is to formulate some method of attaching it to the carcase in such a way that I don't have to unload it all and turn it upside down to unscrew it (and replace it). I think I have a plan.

A few hours later...

I've added a collar moulding in sapele around the bottom of the chess board. It fits snugly against the carcase and holds it firmly in position, but can be taken off at whim. If I ever have to have it more firmly anchored, I could put a couple of screws through the moulding into the carcase, but I doubt very much that will ever be necessary.

The moulding also acts as a foot for the board to sit on when it's off its carcase.

Dip Pen Doodles

 

Like any hand-eye coordination skill, drawing requires constant practice to keep it up.

I've become very lax about drawing, not least because I tend to waste my life away these days on the goddam internet instead of doing anything productive.

I really need to take myself in hand and get back to drawing every day, even if it's just nonsense like this.

These two guys I drew in Indian ink, using a couple of dip pens.

My hands are not as steady as they once were, but I'm sure that a bit of practice will help with that — or at least let me figure out how to work around it.

Big Mouth

 

Quick sketch, probably never to proceed any further. But you never know.

Yet Another Box

 

Here's another box I made, another presentation piece for somebody who's leaving a job for pastures new.

 The box is made from walnut. The two plaques are deep-etched in copper. The corners are just mitred, and reinforced by some decorative square-cut copper nails. The floor of the box is a piece of 4mm sapele plywood, and sitting loose inside there's a nice soft cushion for things to rest on comfortably.

The lid has two sets of magnets as a latch — they're strong enough that I can pick up the whole box by the lid and not have it fly open, but not so strong that I have to struggle to get the lid open.

The walnut is all out of one board, about five feet (1.5m) long. There's a considerable difference in colour from one end of the board to the other, which I found a bit odd.

Airbrush Cleaning Jar

 

This is something I've been meaning to make for years, and have finally got around to doing. It's a jar for cleaning my airbrushes.

The jar itself is a big plastic peanut butter jar.

The black thing was designed in Blender and printed on my Ender 3. It has an inset ring in it that I've squished a bit of closed-cell foam into, and the foam has a hole cut into it that the head of the airbrush pushes into. It creates something of a seal around the airbrush head to minimize spray leakage.

I cut a matching hole in the lid of the jar and hot-glued the nozzle-sphincter to it, and drilled some little holes on the other side of the lid from it to release pressure while allowing a minimum of the spray to escape.

I can just load up the dirty airbrush with a solvent, jam it into the foam sphincter, and spray it through until it's clean. And there isn't a great cloud of aerosol solvent floating around my workroom.

Eventually, I'll have to empty it, but it will do quite a few rounds of cleaning before then.

Whorl Stone

 

Here's a little linocut I just finished. It's just about 90 x 80 mm.

The paper is nothing special; just 110gsm cartridge. The ink is Flint water-based black.

I didn't remember until I'd already started cutting that I hadn't finished flattening and sanding the lino, so there's some speckling apparent in the solid blacks. Ah well, I'm sure it won't be the last time I make that mistake.

Am I happy with it? Well, I'm never 100% satisfied with anything I make, but I will go this far: I've done worse, could be better.

Machu Picchu Linocut

 

I've finally come to a stopping point on this lino cut.

It's taken from a graphite drawing I did years ago, which in turn was taken from a photograph from Machu Picchu.

I don't absolutely hate it, but it's far from completely satisfactory. I could keep tinkering with it, but I doubt that I'd end up making it any better. And besides, I'm heartily sick of it now.

The image size is about A5. It's printed on Bunkoshi Select washi in Flint water-based black ink.

Wood Doodling

 

This is the wood-turning equivalent of doodling, just doing whatever with whichever bits of wood are to hand with no plan or intention.

Top to bottom: kauri, rimu, oak.

The oak platter is about 210mm in diameter, which isn't far off the largest size my little lathe will handle.

Turning Green Oak

 

I finished carving out this bowl on the lathe today. It's about 120mm in diameter, and about 80mm deep.

It's nothing much to look at, but it's my first real attempt at working with green oak, and it taught me a thing or two. One of which is that you shouldn't leave green oak on the chuck overnight, as it will start corrosion straight away. Another is that green wood sprays moisture all over the place as it's being turned, and you have to clean that off the ways or else they'll rust from it.

Dry oak can be very dusty to work on the lathe, but green oak has many issues of its own. I don't think I'm a great fan.

AI and Illustration

There are lots of people whining in outrage about the use of AI in art, complaining that it's being used to replace humans in the most human of endeavours, and should be restricted to automating more mechanistic pursuits.

I agree in principle, but the thing is that for the money men in the commercial art world, the art is just a commodity, like everything else. And artists are just peons, to be paid as little as possible, and to be replaced by robots if at all possible. The thought of being able to produce advertising graphics and illustrations without having to deal with troublesome human artists is a pure joy to them, not to mention the cost savings that allow them to keep more money instead of spreading it around.

For that reason alone, the intrusion of AI into the world of graphic art is only going to increase, and I don't see that there's anything that human artists are going to be able to do about it.

Merry Xmas.

Kerfing Saw Modifications

 

I've made some modifications to the kerfing saw I made a while ago.

I discarded the wedges, which never really worked very well, and added a pair of M6 bolts running down through threaded inserts in the body of the tool, to secure the fence arms. I inset brass plates on the top of those arms, cut down from an old door push-plate, so that the bolts don't chew up the fence arms when they're tightened up.

At the moment I've just cut screwdriver slots in the bolt heads, but one day I may get around to making some more attractive thumbscrews.

All this should make it a much more effective tool. Note: Red beech is a very bad timber for making this sort of thing out of. It works very easily, and it's a nice colour, but it suffers from terrible checking.

More Boxes

 

I've made a couple more presentation boxes for a pair of Annette's colleagues who are leaving.

The one on the left is 265mm long, and made of some reclaimed timber — I think it's Black Maire, but I cannot be sure. The one on the right is 250mm long, and is mostly the same timber, but with a lid plate of Sapele. Both have small copper plaques let in to their lids, and both are closed magnetically. They both have soft, padded floors covered with black needle-cord velvet.

Sapele is often used as a substitute for mahogany, since people started to get concerned about wantonly chopping down all the nice trees in the world. Personally, I don't think it's as attractive as mahogany, but it's certainly cheaper — and that's saying something, since a 2.4m length of 200x25mm sapele cost me a hundred and eight bucks. Jenkies!

Wakizashi Bokken

 

I made myself a wakizashi-size bokken, to go along with my regular katana-size bokken. It will be of extremely limited usefulness, but never mind, it was something to do.

The scrap of oak I used was less than optimal, with very coarse open twisty grain. I doubt that it would survive very much bashing, but I don't foresee it ever being likely to have to. I think that if it came to it, I would be best off to just remake it, using a decent piece of wood.

It is 540mm long, and has been ebonized with iron acetate.

Spike-Plate Plate

 

I made myself a spike-plate* for my lathe, using one of my faceplates, and tried it out by turning this little macrocarpa plate. It's small, only 165mm in diameter.

I was aware of the knot before I started turning it, but not of the splits that run almost the whole way across it. It's purely luck that it held together on the lathe long enough to finish.

* (A spike-plate is just a disc with some spikes in it, like a carving dish, used to temporarily mount a thin piece of wood to the lathe. The tail-stock holds the piece against the spike-plate and allows me to cut a tenon for a more secure mounting.)

Tanto

 

Wooden training tanto, a commission for a friend.

Rimu, 290 mm.

Parting Tool

 

I have an old blade off my old table saw, on which are several chipped or broken teeth. It's not much use as a saw blade any more for that reason, but I could extract some use from it by chopping out a bar with one good tooth, and mounting it in a handle for use as a thin parting tool for the lathe.

This will give me a kerf of a bit less than 3mm, compared with about 6mm for any of my other parting tools. The carbide tooth should last for a good long time too, but if need be I can still resharpen it with a diamond hone.

Little Oak Bowls

 

I'm making a batch of small oak bowls, about 90mm diameter, for no particular reason except that I had no other immediate purpose for the bit of wood. I have ten blanks, so six more to go. I guess they'd be nut bowls, or something like that.

The oak is very, very dry, and rather brittle. That means it chips out very easily, and I'm having to experiment with ways and means to get around that. It's been most apparent when cutting the foot and tenon. The most successful method so far seems to be to cut all the edges with the point of a skew, severing the fibres before moving on to other tools like scrapers.

The first one I did is at the top of the photo, and they progress clockwise. I'm hopeful that by the time I get to the tenth one, I might get a halfway decent result.

Organiser

 Messing about in the workshop today, I whipped up this little desktop note-taking organiser from a few scraps of rimu.

I do like making things, even simple little things like this.

Scraper for the lathe

 

I made myself a scraper from an old ½" square file. It's down to about 9.5mm square now, after grinding off all the teeth.

In truth, it's not the ideal steel for this purpose, as the burr is very fragile and doesn't last long. But it has the benefit of being available, and it will do the job, though at the cost of more frequent sharpening.

The handle is just a bit of pine cut down from a bit of framing timber, and there's a honking great knot half way along its length. Because of that I've left it a little bit thicker than I'd prefer. It'll probably be fine.

Laundry Shelf

 

I've put up a wide shelf high up in our laundry, in an attempt to fight off — or redirect — the Creeping Cruft a bit.

It's not exactly fine joinery, but I'm happy enough with it considering how badly the pine boards were cupped and winded.

Even a simple job like this is ten times more difficult single-handed, and having increasingly decrepit limbs is not helpful.

Tuber-head

 

This is a drawing I did back in 2010, at Winter Weekend.

It's watercolour and indian ink, drawn with a croquil nib. It's about A4.

Regrettably, I have lost the sketchbook I drew this in. It's a great shame, because it was a really good sketchbook. I've looked and looked, but I just can't find it. It's a complete mystery to me.

Keyboard Hooks

Hook deployed

Keyboard in place

Hook folded up out of the way

I usually have my keyboard propped up against my monitor stand when I'm working with my graphics tablet, but it has a habit of sliding back down again.

So I whipped up a pair of folding hooks that will hold it securely in place, and which I can fold up out of the way when they're not in use.

The hooks hold the keyboard at such an angle that I can still use it fairly easily, but it stays out of the way of my tablet.

Paint Tube Squeezer Thingamajig

 

I don't know what the formal name for this thing is, but it's used to squeeze ink or paint out of a tube by squooshing it between the ribbed rollers by means of the key to the side.

This is a very cheap version of the device, and if you really feel like it you can spend quite a bit of cash to get a somewhat better engineered version which does pretty much exactly the same thing.

I prefer to decant my printing ink from its tubes into small screw-topped pots so I can get at it with palette knives. It's more convenient, and also generally less messy.

However, those steel grips are not very comfortable to use. Not very comfortable at all. So I added some grips to make them easier to squeeze.

Oak grips

3d printed grips

I did it in two ways.

I made a pair of grips from a small piece of oak. It took about ten minutes.

I designed a pair of grips in Blender and 3d printed them on my Ender 3. All up, that took about two hours.

The 3d-printed grips are more geometrically exact, but that's about their only benefit over the wooden ones.

Sometimes the high-tech solution isn't the best one.

Old Doodles

2000 - 05 - 26

1999

2000

2000

2000

Tiny Tenon Turning Made Easy

 

There are dedicated tools available for the woodturner to enable the precise sizing of tenons. They're not cheap.

Or, if you're more ambidextrous than I am, you can get decent results with a caliper in one hand and a turning tool in the other.

However, I've found that for easy, repeatable tenons in small sizes, such as for drawer pulls and the like, a simple spanner does the job.

I grind an edge on the nose of one arm, at about 45° - 50°, and leave the other blunt. In fact it would probably be a good idea to polish the nose of the other arm, maybe.

Note that in this photo I've sharpened the wrong arm, as discussed below, though in truth it's not that critical.

I bring the blunt nose on the bottom side of the work into contact and then ease the sharp nose in, all the while bearing up on the bottom to keep it in contact.

When the mouth of the spanner slides in around the tenon, you've finished cutting, and you'll have a tenon exactly the same diameter as the size of the spanner.

The way that spanner heads are angled, one arm is canted forward and looks slightly longer than the other (I think this is just an optical illusion, but I'm not sure). This should really be the bottom blunt arm as it makes it easier to address the tool to the work.

Individual spanners are pretty cheap, and are generally made of decent quality steel — though not tool steel, of course. There's no reason why you couldn't have a whole range of spanners sharpened for cutting a range of tenon sizes.

The edge is not going to be a fine cutting edge, and it won't stay very sharp forever, but you can keep resharpening it as long as the length of the cutting arm is greater than the radius of the tenon. Just be sure, when sharpening, to keep the edge square to the length of the spanner; if it is angled, you won't get a square cut.

The only real issue I've found is with small spanners, say 6 to 8 mm, and that is that they're, well, small. Or rather, short. That can make them a bit more difficult to handle, but if you were really keen you could probably just cut off the ring-end and mount your little cutting spanner in a handle to give you a bit more to hang on to.

Wall Rack

 

I made a wall rack for my jo and bokken from a length of kwila decking.