Experimenting with various finishes on my red beech pens. They are, from top to bottom:
Of the four, shellac is the most time-consuming, as it needs at least three coats, with a rub-down between each with 320 grit.
This pen, 190mm long, I did in red beech, with no finish except for some oil and beeswax. It's a pretty boring timber with the sole virtue that it's pretty easy to work.
The nib is held in place with a bamboo plug fixed by friction alone, and though it would be theoretically possible to swap nibs, effectively it's a permanent fixture.
Today I have increased our coat-hanging capabilities.
The hangers themselves are matai, the baseboard is rimu, and the mushrooms that hide the mounting screws are oak.
I suppose I could have just gone down to Bunnings and bought some metal coat hooks, but where's the fun in that?
This one is in matai (I think), and is very small — only 65mm long, and 17mm in diameter. I oiled it with rice bran oil, so it's food-safe.
One thing I learned from this is not to be too stingy about the waste, and to give it a decent bite in the chuck. This one I knocked off its axis and had to try to reseat, and though I got it turning mostly true, it was never really the same again.
Also, if I was to do these on a regular basis, I would definitely have to make myself a custom small bowl scraper for carving out the bowl. I bodged up this one using my swan-neck carbide scraper, because it was the only tool I had with a small enough cutting edge to get in there. It worked, but it was not ideal for the task.
They are, from left to right:
I started with the kowhai, when I pulled an old dead dry branch off a tree alongside our driveway the other day. Then on to the others to try out this or that — the most recent being the tiny one on the right, today, to try out a new set of 8mm chuck jaws that just arrived.
I have no immediate use for finials of any size, but they're a quick and useful test bed for trying things out. Something that has become especially apparent with the tinier ones is that I need better eyes, and possibly smaller tools as well.
So I made a set of collets in Blender and 3d printed them.
With this set I can get down to about 7.5 or 7 mm, but if I need to go any smaller than that I can whip up another collet in about quarter of an hour.
Because they're being used for very small pieces, they don't have to endure much in the way of working pressure. Which is good, because though PLA filament is fairly tough for plastic, it is still just plastic.
I did once buy a set of jaws from AliExpress that would go down to about 6 mm, but it turned out once they arrived that not only would they not fit on the chuck they said they would, they wouldn't fit on any of the other chucks I had either. They'd need some attention from a machinist to make them fit, and I don't have those skills or that equipment. Fortunately, they were fairly cheap, so I didn't lose much by it. But it still pissed me off.
I pulled a dry dead branch off the kowhai that grows alongside our driveway this morning; it didn't so much break off as exploded into fragments. I turned this little finial from one of its sticks. It's about 80mm long, so not very big.
The kowhai turned well enough in general, but it is very brittle, and it chipped out badly around the collar of the piece. Also, it has an odd colour seam running up it — I'd normally assume that it was a heart-sap differentiation, but it runs across the grain, so it beats me what causes it.
It's not an unattractive timber (apart from the bug holes) but its brittleness would severely limit its usefulness.
I assume they're supposed to be vases or something. We have no idea of where they came from, nor how old they are. Both of them are somewhat damaged, but neither beyond the bounds of displayability.
Both of them were missing their original bases, so today I turned one. I think it's matai. I'll get around to the other one, one of these days.
Well, one of these days turned out to be this day.
The other piece of matai (?) I had turned out to be full of splits and a nail, so, bugger.
I therefore turned the second plinth in white oak, and ebonized it with iron acetate.
The piece was only 40mm thick compared with the matai's 50mm, so I did the oak one in two pieces (with a 10mm base plate to bring it up to 50mm) and glued and screwed them together.
It doesn't bother me in the least that they're not identical, so that's good.
It is very little, only 50mm in diameter and 40mm tall. I don't know what it would be useful for, other than looking at. It might serve as a whisky bowl or something, though I don't know how good kwila is for that sort of purpose.
I gave it a stepped bowled bottom so that it would catch the light a bit more interestingly than would a flat or fully bowled bottom.
It'a manaia motif.
There are a couple or three colour blocks still to come, though I have only the vaguest idea at this stage what I'm going to do with it. Doubtless something will happen.
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| This is a watercolour colour test to be going on with. It may or may not end up having any relation to this. |
Some test prints, plus the colour sketch at far left. I'm happy enough with the foreground orange, but the background green needs a bit more blue in it, and be more transparent to let the white of the paper glow through.
Here I've experimented with a gradient across the top of the background colour (image on the right). I like it I think, even though the photo is 100% arse-drool. Worth pursuing.
This blue gradient is better than the raw sienna I think; it's cleaner and richer, and gives the background the depth that it needs.
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These are what I've been working on for the last little while — a pair of slab benches for some people over the road. The seats are slabs of macrocarpa, supplied by the clients, while the legs are built up in horrible treated pine. They're going to slather them with some sort of preservative oil stain, which should make the difference in timber colour less apparent.
The second one went much faster than the first, once I'd worked out what I was doing.
I made another pen nib holder, again in oak, again for a Speedball C-6, but this time I ebonized it with iron acetate. Nice.
This one is a tad longer than the last, being about 200mm to the tip of the nib.
I'm not 100% sure what the timber is, but I think it's probably matai. I got it from an old flooring joist, and matai was used a lot for that sort of thing. The splines are white oak.
The plaque is copper, deep-etched with a manaia design.
It's a fairly crappy photograph, but I just snapped it with my phone by room light, so I guess you reap what you sow.
I'm in the process of making a presentation box out of pieces cut from an old flooring joist. I'm not 100% sure what the timber is, but I think it's matai.
It amazes me that builders and joiners in Olden Tymes largely ignored the stunning beauty of these native timbers, and instead just wasted them on unseen construction. Our house was built in 1920, and it has rimu panelling throughout, but that's not due to any virtue of rimu itself, but because at the time it was much cheaper than "proper" English timbers for the purpose, and our house was intended for the hoi-polloi, not the nobs.
Old joists and flooring are a good source of some very nice wood, if you can still find them, but you do have to beware of ancient broken-off nails hidden inside. They're getting harder and harder to come upon these days, as old construction timbers and panelling and what-not were mostly just discarded into landfill when the old houses were demolished.
Etching today.
I'm using Lascaux acrylic stop-out varnish as a resist to deep-etch a piece of approx. 2mm copper that will eventually be a plaque inset in a box top. The Lascaux is easily cleaned up with water while it's wet, and later on it can be removed with meths.
The mordant is "Edinburgh Etch", which is a combination of ferric chloride and citric acid. It's a lot safer on skin than nitric or hydrochloric, and it also bites fast and clean. Note: "safer" is a relative term; I still wouldn't go bathing in it.
It's a relatively warm day today, so I shouldn't have to go to all the faff of warming the bath. I'll probably have to etch for four to six hours to get the depth I want.
The tape is so that the back of the plate doesn't etch, and the chopstick rests on the lip of the mug to hold the plate vertical in the bath and to allow me to lift it out without touching it.
And now, six hours or so later, it's done.
The size is about 75 x 100 mm.
The etching really reveals the grain of the metal — not a grain in the way that wood has a grain, but gravity acting on the tiny granules of copper separated by the acid makes them slide down the face of the metal so the bite becomes uneven. There's also an element of uneven density within the metal itself, a relict of the way the sheets are produced in rolling presses.
This is not because I'm awfully anally particular about the implements I use to stir my coffee. It's because a stainless steel teaspoon, all nicely rounded off and polished, is a very useful tool for hand-printing relief prints.
The bowl of the spoon is used for rubbing down larger areas, and the rounded end of the handle is useful for picking out detail areas.
I've slightly re-curved the handle to make it more useful in this respect, and I've also engraved my name on to it so that no bugger can accidentally claim it as theirs.
It's about 120 x 155mm, printed on 45gsm layout paper — not quite tracing paper, but nearly.
The texture of the wood grain shows quite nicely I think.
I thought it would be an excellent mobile digital art platform, and so it has proven to be... eventually. I installed Procreate, a very nice iPad art app, and set about learning how to use it. However, being an old model iPad, none of the newer affordable third-party iPad styluses would work with it. And in fact I wasted about a hunnerd-twenny bucks on what turned out to be a useless Logitech Crayon finding that out. In the end I just bought a cheap passive stylus, basically little more than a pointier artificial finger, and it served for very basic work.
At long last I girded my loins, gritted my teeth, and spent the money to get myself a 1st-generation Apple Pencil, and now all my digital drawing dreams are fulfilled.
The two coloured critters in this picture I drew, in Procreate, with my passive stylus. The two on the left in black & white I sketched using the Apple Pencil. The difference in drawing ease and fluidity is like night and day. The Apple Pencil is both tilt and pressure sensitive, and combined with Procreate's textural drawing algorithms, it's very much like drawing with pencil and paper.
There is a lot more of Procreate that I have to learn, but even with the little that I do know, all of a sudden this iPad has become a useful art-making device. I suspect I'll get a lot of use out of it.
I've started playing (not very well) with layers and colour and some more of the brush types.
It's not a great picture, but it's been fun to mess around with.
Tinkering with a kind of scraperboard effect.
The top one I've cleaned up and reshaped the grip very slightly, given it a few coats of shellac, and replaced the old bent and wobbly blade with a 300mm one from a modern plastic-handled Bahco saw. The new blade has seven teeth per inch while the old one has ten or eleven; I'll see how it goes, and if need be I can always recut the teeth finer. It's a tedious job, but not that difficult.
The bottom one's blade is in much better condition, and it just needs to be given a bit of a polish and sharpen. I'll probably clean up the grip as well, though it doesn't really need much.
I got myself a new tool rest for my lathe, on the cheap thanks to AliExpress. It cost about 22 yankeebucks, it's 230mm long, and is chrome-plated steel.
How the plating will survive I've yet to see. I may end up having to get rid of it and just polish the steel underneath, but we shall see — no need to borrow trouble.
Next task is to turn a collar for it so that it rests at about the right height for my lathe.
The paper is pretty heavy, about 380gsm I think, and has a pronounced tooth. That makes it a bit problematic for the sort of drawing I do, but it is excellent for watercolour wash.
I'm using it primarily as a swatch book, with examples on each page of various watercolours that I've acquired, so that I can see at a glance how they behave, while keeping the resulting swatches protected from the light.
The examples shown here are Schminke 787 Payne's Grey, and Winsor & Newton Cotman Sepia.
This is a pretty crude and amateurish binding, but I've learned a lot since then. I'd do better next time.
They're made from treated pine, so they should last a good while.
Working treated timber is not all that pleasant, and when the timber is also soaking wet it becomes a real trial.
They've been primed in this photo, but not yet had a finish coat of paint applied. They'll eventually be grey, I assume, to match the steps and the rest of the verandah decking.
The cloth is a light cotton fabric that I found in a rack of swatches at Spotlight — probably intended for quilting or something. They're 600 x 450 mm, sufficient to cover a couple of A5-ish books, or one A4-ish.
I lay it out flat on a polypropylene sheet, and then use a spatula to drive a 50/50 mix of acrylic medium and 4% methyl cellulose paste through the weave, right across the whole surface of the piece.
Then I turn the fabric over, smooth it out again on the polyprop sheet, and with a wide, flat brush I brush more of the paste/medium mix across the whole surface. You can see the brush marks reflecting in this photo.
The paste mix glues it to the backing sheet, but it won't stick to the polypropylene and can be peeled away after it's dried.
When it has dried thoroughly, I'll peel it off the poly backing sheet, roll it up loosely, and put it away ready for later use. The paste mix forms an impermeable barrier so the cloth can be glued to boards without the glue striking through the weave of the fabric. It also provides a measure of protection for the cloth from dirt and grease, and makes it easier to clean.
It's soft-bound, stitched 16-leaf signatures of 90gsm laid paper, with the signatures alternating between bright white and ivory (cream) coloured paper. It has 192 leaves, 155 x 205 mm.
The cream-coloured sheets are dark enough that three-tone drawing would work well, but not dark enough to be overwhelming.
The paper is fine for drawing on, being fairly smooth but with an adequate tooth, but it is really too light for wet media. Its surface is okay, but it does cockle quite a bit with moisture.
It's a very convenient size to slip into a bag, or even a (fairly large) pocket.
I quite like it, though I'd like it better if the paper was heavier — say 110 to 150 gsm.
I like the format of this book. It feels a bit more spacious than an A5 book (though in fact it's pretty similar in size), but is more compact and convenient to carry around than an A4. I could wish the paper was a bit heavier, but at least it's of good quality.
Copic Multiliner 0.3mm and watercolour wash.
The paper accepts watercolour well enough, but it is really too light for liquid media, and it cockles quite a bit.
Faber-Castel 14B pencil.
I'm not enthralled with it as a graphite support. It's not terrible.
The light weight of the paper means quite a bit of show-through from the page below.
Copic fibre-tip pen and Faber-Castel coloured pencil.
It's okay for this sort of thing. Nothing special.
The paper really excels for this medium. The paper surface is quite hard, and doesn't grab at the croquil nib the way that softer papers can, and the pen leaves a very clean, controllable line.
My favourite of these four is the second from the right; my least favourite is the right-most one.
The one on the right is made from stainless steel I think, and it's quite stiff and unresponsive. The other three are made from very thin, springy carbon steel, and they'll give me a beautifully fluid and variable line.
They take a bit of getting used to for anyone used to drawing with, say, modern fibre-tipped pens or the like. The croquil nibs are very sharp, and will dig into the paper at the least excuse. If the tip catches, the springy steel releases very suddenly and can spatter ink a surprisingly long way. They require a very sensitive and delicate hand, and unlike a ball-point pen, they can't just be scrubbed around in any old direction.
I've had these pens for years, and I love them, but the nibs aren't immortal. They do wear out. And I know remarkably little about them as a class of tool, so if I have to replace them I'd really be flailing in the dark a bit.
I think the one on the left is a Speedball Hunt nib, but I couldn't swear to it. The second one to the right has 66 (or maybe 99, but I'm pretty sure it's 66) engraved on its barrel. What that means, I have no real idea.
I had a go at making a holder for my favourite croquil nib from a fragment of oak. It works well and feels good in the hand, though I think I was a bit timid about thinning down the tail — that could go a little further.
The nib is held in place in its 6mm hole by a short oak plug. It's pretty firm. I bored the hole a bit too deep, which made getting the nib in the right place more troublesome than it needed to be; in future I'll measure the length of the nib's barrel before I bore the hole.
Buying a commercial version of this thing would be about ten bucks, which means that making my own isn't exactly fiscally viable if I was charging minimum wage for my own time. However, it is satisfying.
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| Output — my hands aren't as steady as they once were |
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| Right to left: Hunt 101 Speedball 99 Speedball C-5 Speedball D-5 |
It goes without saying that different nibs give you very different results. The two croquil nibs (the 101 and 99) are very similar, with just a difference in average line weight. The C-5 provides much less line weight variation, though there is a little. And the D-5, with its disc-end, gives a very heavy and consistent line, varying only because the disc on the end of the nib is oval, not round.
I made this pair of hand rails for the steps up on to some friends' verandah, so that their 90-some year old Dad can get up and down without toppling into the garden.
They're just treated pine, and they'll be painted. Eventually.
The one on the left will also have a grab-rail mounted on it; I haven't yet fully decided how that will be achieved. A few galvanised plumbing fittings and a length of threaded pipe will probably do the trick, though it wouldn't be all that difficult to do in wood either.
I generally use 2mm or 3mm grey board for this purpose.
I designed these cutting templates in Blender and printed them on my Ender 3 in PLA+, and they not only ensure that I'm cutting the right distance away, but also that I'm getting a perfect 45º mitre.
In truth, the tolerances required aren't all that fine, and I could easily get away with just using the 4.5mm offset template (for 3mm board) for both board thicknesses, but it's not really any more trouble to make a separate template for each. So that's what I did.
I'd always intended to replace those with something a bit less ad-hoc, and today I finally got around to that. I turned a couple of knobs from a scrap of pink birch, set a nut in each, and put a couple of M8 bolts up through the trolley top and press carriage to secure everything.
The new shiny knobs are indicated in the photo by the big red arrows.
I'm pretty sure that just the two bolts will be quite adequate to keep everything in place, but I can always add more if need be.
