Wednesday, December 28, 2016

She'll be right, probably

This bit just fell off my lawn-mower.

Do you think it's important?

Also: Steel-capped boots, kids. They're not just for weddings any more.

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Folding chair up-cycling: Number 2

This is the second of a pair of cheap and crappy folding chairs we bought some years ago to have something to sit on while we were camping.

The first is here.

This one is just done in treated pine, with a very light oil stain. Unfortunately one of the seat boards split when I was screwing everything together, but that's not disastrous — I just softened all the edges and called it "rustic".

Friday, December 23, 2016

Doodles


Here's a couple of doodles I drew while I was watching TV. Both are in black ball-point pen.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Router Lift

It's up-side-down. It normally goes the other way up.
I have a Black & Decker router that I was given as a birthday present quite a few years ago. It's not the worst router ever made, but it's not great. It came with a 3/8" head, and fortunately I found a 6mm collet to fit it, because 3/8" cutter bits are pretty bloody thin on the ground in New Zealand.

I have a much better Ryobi 12.5mm plunge router, so I stripped the Black & Decker down and attached it to a small table that clamps in the bench vice.

The other day, its depth-lock broke. This was a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to build this, which I should have done ages ago. It's a lockable router-lift.

What it does is lift the router up and down by means of a threaded spindle, which I made out of a 10x130mm hex-head bolt. I couldn't find one that was fully threaded right up the shaft, so I cut a new thread for it. The head of the bolt is buried in a plywood disk — you can see it in the picture — with a big bead to act as a winding handle. I may have to put a plywood cap over the bolt-head, just to ensure that it doesn't work itself out.

The bolt passes through a nut buried in the top of the frame, and on to a plywood cushion on the router itself. When I turn the handle, the router goes up or down, and can be locked firmly in place by means of the locking-nut. It will make my routing very much more precise than was really easily feasible when trying to hold everything in place against spring-pressure while fumbling around for the depth-lock.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Shelf Building

Stage 1 — 2016-12-06
Note: Those aren't the shelves.
They're just braces holding the plywood in place
while the glue cures.
We have an ever-increasing need for storage space, owing to the ever-increasing amount of stuff we just can't bring ourselves to throw away. Therefore, I am filling up some dead space with some shelves. It's over some older, larger shelves I put in many years ago to take our TV and video stuff, but that's all been moved elsewhere now.

The dead space in question is the niche between an old fireplace (long walled over) and the exterior wall. This creates some issues when it comes to making built-in shelves.

The fireplace is brick, behind the plaster-board, and thus would need rawl-plugs to anchor the shelf supports. That's not a big deal, but it's kind of a pain in the arse.

More troublesome is the right-hand side, the exterior wall. It's lath-and-plaster, which is pretty much just fancy-schmancy wattle-and-daub. It has no structural strength in itself, and to cap it, it makes it really hard to locate the studs and dwangs.

So, to make life a whole lot easier for myself, I'm lining the cavity with plywood, which will take nails and screws perfectly well. The pieces are just glued to the walls with construction cement (No More Nails); I'll put a couple of screws through each for a bit of extra earthquake insurance, but the shelves themselves will provide all the bracing they'll really need.

Note: the glue has to set for 24 hours before I can take the braces away, so this will be slightly drawn-out project.

Stage 2 — 2016-12-07
Small display shelves

2016-12-07

It's the next day, the glue has cured, and Stage 2 of the shelf-building project is underway.

This bottom space is quite tall — 700mm — to accommodate a decent-sized TV, just in case that becomes relevant again some time in the future. At the back of this niche I've put a grid of quite shallow (140mm) shelves to display knick-knacks and what-not. The higher shelves won't have this feature; they wouldn't be visible. At the moment it's just held in place (fairly firmly) by friction, but I'll add a few screws just as insurance.

All of the shelves above this are quite deep (400mm), designed for storage, not display. If I get really carried away I may install cupboard doors over them, but not just yet.

Stage 3

Stage 3

The first of the big shelves is in.

They're going to take a bit of fitting owing to the un-squareness of the surrounding house, but this one at least is very, very nearly square on the left hand side, which eases matters a bit. The situation gets worse as I get higher.

These shelves are just 18mm MDF, so I've added a strengthening member underneath which also adds a bit of a curve to soften the otherwise rigidly straight (but not square) lines.

This is all going to be painted white, so I don't have to be all that careful about hiding screw-heads — I just make sure they're well below the surface, and then cover them up with builders' bog. It's excellent stuff, though it does reek a bit while it's curing.

Stage 4-ish, I guess

2016-12-08 — Stage 4

Second shelf is in, and I've jumped ahead a bit and started adding the trim. Things will get a bit cramped up the top when the last shelf goes in, so I thought it would be easier to do the trim first and then the shelf.

The trim serves no structural function at all. What it mainly does is disguise all the gaping gaps resulting from the chronic unsquareness of my house.

I have learned that the existing shelf is not quite strong enough to stand on, and there was an alarming noise from underfoot when I did. I'm going to have to fix that now, whatever it is that made the noise.

About done

Stage 5

The construction is done and done now; all that's left is paint.

I think I have some leftover flat white somewhere — I hope so, because paint is ridiculously expensive.

I might put a strip of LEDs behind the lowest shelf's brace. I'm not at all au fait with electrics though, so I might enlist some aid to wire it up. I'm sure it's quite simple, but imagine how embarrassed I'd be if I burned to death in my bed because my shonky wiring set the house alight.

Painting begins

Stage Whatever

I can't say that I'm all that fond of painting, but painting is sometimes a necessary evil.

Still, it is tying it all nicely in with the surrounds, so that's nice.

Complete

Aaaaaaaaand.....
We're Done.


I'll want to leave them unoccupied for a couple of days to let the paint harden properly, but that's it for this lot.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Iaito Refurbishment

Tsuka
Some years ago I bought a fairly cheap, fairly crappy iaito, which I decided to make a bit less crappy.

I started by grinding out the fake etched hamon on the blade and polishing it back to a plain, un-fake finish. Then I put it aside and more or less forgot about it.

Seppa
I revived the project a few days ago and got to work on making an oak tsuka (grip) to replace the extremely shitty plastic one it came with. I've given it a dark rosewood-ish stain.

I'll replace the original nasty nylon webbing binding with leather, just as soon as I get some to make some 10mm lacing with. That'll be a bit of a job; I'll have to rig up some sort of strap-cutter to make sure it's cut evenly. I'll need about four metres, I think. A strip of grip-tape along the top and bottom will serve to keep it all securely anchored.

Wooden tanto - leather binding
This is some that I did on a wooden tanto about twenty-five years ago, for aikido training. This lacing is only 5mm wide, which is fine for such a small hilt, but a sword requires something a bit meatier.

The fittings — tsuba, kochira, fuchi etc. are all pretty ordinary. They're cast in some sort of zinc-based muck-metal, and have been plated in copper. They all had fairly prominent mould seams left, which I ground out, but of course that exposed the zinc base metal. I originally planned to re-plate them, but in the end I just used some patinating solution (intended for stained glass leads) to blacken the zinc wherever it's exposed, and that will serve well enough I think.

I made a new seppa (the washer between the tsuba and blade) out of a bit of copper. I left it bright, and I'll just let it age to whatever colour it eventually chooses to adopt.

Once the binding is on, it will be functional again as an iaito, and it should look a lot less cheap and nasty in spite of still being pretty much as cheap and nasty as it ever was.

Later....


Well, it's done. In the end I used the same leather lacing I'd used on the tanto, first because I already had it, and second because leather lacing — especially wide leather lacing — is ridiculously expensive and I didn't want to spend any more money on it.

It's certainly not a good sword, but it's a better sword than it was.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Kintsugi(ish)

I'm trying my hand at kintsugi, though I'm using epoxy resin rather than lacquer.

We have a few bits and pieces of ceramics that have suffered due to the earthquakes over the last few years, and that I'd like to bring back to life. I think this might be a good way to do it.

The small crack to the left has been finished — the resin ground down, polished, and over-painted with gold. The long transverse crack's resin has gold mixed in with it, but hasn't yet been finished off.

And by "gold" I mean "gold-ish", since actual gold dust is a bit beyond my means.

For this small test piece, I'm just using Araldite two-part epoxy. It's strong and durable, and will probably be quite adequate, but I'm keeping my eye out for an epoxy that cures to a harder surface — Araldite remains kind of "plasticky". That may actually not be much of an issue, but we shall see. I'm also trying out both quick-cure and slow-cure epoxy to see if there's any benefit to using the slower, stronger formulation.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Scrap Box — Complete

I finished off the little box I was making for Annette, and I'm reasonably pleased with it.

Dimensions are 175 x 110 x 55 mm.

I inlaid a bit of copper I'd etched with my logotype a couple of years ago into the lid; it's quite corroded (that's the black bits), and I'm not sure quite how it will age, but we'll see.

One thing I'd like to do is find some more attractive latches and hinges. These ones are OK, and they work well, but they're pretty uninspiring.

The inside is lined with cedar from some old venetian blinds. It's very soft, and not very strong, but for this purpose it works very well. The bottom is a piece of 1/8" sapele plywood set into a rebate in the walls, so there's a couple of millimetres clearance underneath.


Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Scrap Box

Being something of a hoarder, scrap wood tends to build up. So, from time to time, I make something out of it.

This time, it's a small box. The body is some laminated fake-mahogany (sapele) that used to be a counter-top, and the top is some spalted beech that I've had sitting around for a few years. I have no particular purpose in mind for it, but I quite like making boxes, and Annette likes collecting them, so it works out quite well.

The carcase is just mitred together, which is a very weak joint — it's held together only by glue; it has no mechanical holding power of its own. So, to reinforce that join, I'm adding splines at the corners. These are just tabs of 3mm (1/8") plywood glued into slots that run through the mitre to give it a bit more strength.

I'd normally cut the slots for the splines on the table saw, using a jig to hold the box at 45°. Once the jig is made, this is a pretty quick and accurate way to go about it. But for this one, I wanted to stick to hand tools exclusively, so I cut the slots with a dovetail saw and remove the waste with a little 3mm chisel.

I didn't actually own a 3mm (1/8") chisel, and getting hold of one proved to be harder than I'd expected. My favourite 2nd-hand tool shop has closed down, and none of the local tools shops stock anything much even the slightest bit unusual. So, I took a chisel from a cheap set of carving chisels and ground it down to 3mm, a process that took quite a bit longer than I anticipated due to the puniness of my bench grinder. Still, it got done eventually, and now that it's been shaped, polished and sharpened, it works pretty well.

I also had to do some surgery on a throwaway 500mm Bahco panel saw to turn it into a rip-saw for resawing thick boards down to thinner ones. I ran out of lighter fluid for my little pencil torch with about a fifth of the teeth still left to anneal, and the set of the teeth isn't that great, so up to this point that hasn't been a completely successful conversion. I'll finish off annealing and reshaping the remaining teeth, but I don't have a saw-set, and haven't been able to find one. Googling has shown me a multitude of sets of saws, but nothing for setting saw teeth.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Bissel vacuum — buyer's regret

A few months ago I bought a Bissel Cleanview Compact upright bagless vacuum cleaner.

Its suction is certainly good, but it's less convenient in almost every single way than a regular vacuum with a hose and what-not.

It doesn't get into corners or edges or under furniture as well and it's much less convenient to store, not to mention being so noisy that I have to wear earmuffs when I'm using it.

Also, the build quality is not stellar — if I pick it up by its carry-handle, it falls apart, and there's no straightforward way of fixing that.

D-, would not buy again. If I could find the receipt, I'd be taking it back for a refund.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Backsaw


I came upon just the sort of back-saw I was looking for last weekend and did not find — this one was in an antique shop on Ferry Road, and cost me all of $38, a real bargain.

This saw is from an a Philadelphia maker I haven't heard of (Henry Disston & Sons, who turn out to be amazingly famous saw-makers and I am just ignorant) and will suit me very well. I don't know how old it is; it's a design that has been around for a very long time.

It sharpens up easily — I'll have to wait and see how well it keeps its edge. The brass (or maybe bronze?) spline is thick and heavy and straight. The blade is good and stiff, and the handle (beech, by the look of it) is worn smooth as smooth by use, and fits my rather small hand perfectly.

At some point the blade has been allowed to get rusty, and there's a bit of surface puckering that will need to be polished out. It looks like it's been chemically blued, probably by an antique dealer to disguise the rust damage. I don't care about that, and a lot of it will go when I grind and polish the surface smooth again.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Mundanaeity

Because I had nothing better to do, today I made us a new dish-drainer for cups and glasses, made of only the finest oak off-cuts, to replace the shitty crappy plastic one that didn't work that I bought to replace the old raggedy and busted plastic one that did work.

My dish-drainer is artisanal.

I was going to oil it to bring out the figure in the wood, but then I thought that might be a bit pretentious in such a workaday piece of equipment, so I didn't.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Thursday, October 6, 2016

'Twas in th' Nubbins o' '94....

Back in 1994, the University of Canterbury Science Fiction Club put on a convention called Ikon, with Terry Pratchett as the guest of honour.

Things did not go according to plan, and there were kerfuffles. Feelings were hurt.

However, I knew little of that except for the problems I had getting the poster for the convention printed, in the face of a crappy scanning bureau and a shitty, absent printer.

While I was looking through a box of old stuff, I came upon the large-format transparency I'd had made of the artwork, so I scanned it and here it is.

I got Terry's autograph on the little folder that the transparency is kept in.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

I sawed something nasty in the wood shed.....

We have several spots where we stack firewood to get us through the winter. This is one of those spots.

This season just passed, I arranged a cunning set of tarpaulin awnings over and around here to keep the wood dry, since the carport roof doesn't actually extend right to the fenceline. I was quite pleased with my ingenuity until the time came to actually use the wood at the bottom of the pile, when I discovered that my cunning awnings had cunningly funneled all of the rainwater off the carport right on to the firewood, and, as is the nature of water, made it very, very wet.

So, now I'm engaging in sterner measures, and building something more permanent and weatherproof.

It's a simple construction job, but it has had its share of frustrations. Not the least being that the cladding is some treated shiplap palings I bought from Bunnings a while ago for another job, and had been sitting in storage since then. There wasn't enough to do the lot, but I thought I could just pop down to Bunnings for a few more..... oh, the naivety! Oh, the innocence! No, Bunnings had decided since then that they weren't going to stock that particular product any more.

Fortunately, some pretty elementary table-saw and plane work turn some regular palings into shiplap palings to match what I'd started with, so it was only a minor setback. However, I must say (as I have said before, more than once), that my table saw is a piece of shit.

Now I just have to wait for it to dry (because of course the palings are sold sodden wet) and paint it, and then slap on the polycarbonate roof. Which will, no doubt, be an adventure in itself.

Three days later....

Well, our wood shelter is finished and ready to receive wood.

Or buses.

I was originally going to paint it white, but it turned out that of all the colours of leftover paint at the back of my workshop, white was the sole colour absent. So it's grey, which serendipitously is better, I think.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Earrings — With Hooks! For the Ears!

Shapeways can now print and cast interlinked metal objects, which means that I can now add integral hooks to my earrings.

These are my first try at it, and they're available at http://shpws.me/MKEa — just in rose gold and rose gold plate at present; I'm trying to find out why the other metals I've selected have been tagged as unprintable, in spite of the model complying with all their printing guidelines.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Home-making

The bedstead, oiled up like a Tongan flagbearer.
 With the arrival of visiting relatives becoming imminent, and the spare room still being basically a rubbish tip, I felt that it behoved me to get my arse into gear and sort out a spare bed.

I've had an old oak bed head and foot cluttering up my garage workshop for as long as we've lived here; that's coming up on thirty years now. It's not a masterpiece of construction, but it's adequate* and it means that I only have to build the base. I'd like to be able to make the stretchers out of oak as well, but that would cost a whole dump-truck full of money, so they'll be pine. They'll hardly ever be seen, anyway.


Mmmmmmm.... oaky!
So far I've just scraped off the old flakey varnish, given them a sand down, and slapped on a coat of linseed oil.

I've made and stained the stretchers, and I'll just assemble the whole thing with steel brackets rather than engaging in any more complex joinery. I want the base to be as high off the ground as I can manage with these components, so that we can store as much crap as possible under the bed. That means that, having long legs subject to racking stresses, it will benefit from the diagonal bracing of the brackets.

I have some old bed-boards from an old bed, but not enough I think. Still, making some more bed-boards is hardly a challenging woodworking task.

* Though it's a weird width that does not match any modern mattress width. The closest we can come is with our foam-rubber foldy-sofa-mattress-transformer thing, so that will probably end up doing the job.

Bonus driveway mushroom picture, because why not?

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Moebius Racing Strip

I think this is a pendant, though if I added a couple of loops for a pin it could be a brooch I suppose. I'm a bit reluctant to pollute the purity of the edges with those sorts of shenanigans though.

It's a Moebius strip with little teensy-tiny racing cars on it. I've made it available in rose-gold plate, polished bronze, and silver.

It's available for sale at http://shpws.me/MAgC

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Flower Cup Brooch

This is a brooch. A 3d-printed cast metal brooch.

It has no fastening pin of its own, but there are two loops on the back which allow it to be attached with a hat-pin or the like.

It's available at http://shpws.me/MzYD

Monday, August 15, 2016

Splash Whirlpool Pendant

This time I'm trying my hand at a pendant. It's not large, only 40mm or so in diameter.

The pendant is upside-down in this render, but being a symmetrical object that doesn't really matter too much.

The loop has a 4mm opening, so it's large enough to accommodate a leather thong or a reasonable sized chain.

It's available for sale at http://shpws.me/MyOC

Friday, August 12, 2016

Regarding jewellery...

I quite enjoy designing jewellery, and I get plenty of compliments about the pieces I've done so far, but nobody — or almost nobody — is willing to actually part with any money for them. I feel like I'm bashing my head against a brick wall.

What actually sells are my toy tanks and stuff. So I think I'll just concentrate on that.

Screw the arty-farty stuff, show me the benjamins!

Note: I don't actually know which note has Benjamin Franklin on it. Is it the fifty? Perhaps I should just have said "show me the Sir Apirana Ngatas!"

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

New Arrivals

http://shpws.me/MfnC
A new lot of jewellery arrived on my doorstop today from Shapeways, after being held up and expensified by Customs.
http://shpws.me/MdPw

http://shpws.me/Mh6Y

http://shpws.me/MfnE

http://shpws.me/Mf6U

http://shpws.me/MhRp

http://shpws.me/Mm72

http://shpws.me/Mks1

There are some bracelets too, which I got printed cheaply in plastic to make sure that they'd fit before ordering them in much more expensive metal.
http://shpws.me/MtDr

http://shpws.me/MtQO

http://shpws.me/MtSj