Friday, April 28, 2017

Spokeshave Sharpening Grip

This is a design by Paul Sellers for a simple sharpening grip for a spokeshave blade.

It uses the spokeshave's own cap iron to hold the blade firm while it's being sharpened, and the length of the wooden grip gives me much more control and power than I can achieve with my fingers alone.

The body of this grip is an off-cut of laminated bamboo, but just about any wood would do. The little brass locating lugs are a pair of brass screws with the heads cut off. The cap iron screw is a 25mm pan-head No.10 screw with its point ground off. The front end of the grip is bevelled at 25°, leaving about a millimetre thickness in the front and with its heel rounded off. The but-end is rounded and bevelled for more comfort in the hand.

It only took about ten or fifteen minutes to make this little thing, and it's improved and eased spokeshave sharpening enormously.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Dice Tray

An issue that arises from time to time is that of keeping dice from scattering all over the place, knocking around playing pieces and disappearing off the table and rolling away under bits of furniture, never to be seen again.

To ameliorate the problem, I knocked together this little dice tray. It's about 180x200mm with an oak frame and a cork inner, flat enough to make dice like the d24 readable and soft enough not to knock the corners off them. It's compact enough to not take up too much table space, but large enough to allow reasonable freedom in rolling the dice, and the frame is deep enough to keep them in (as long as you don't get too enthusiastic with your throwing) while being low enough to see them clearly from any angle. The feet aren't really necessary, but they're decorative and I had them hanging around, so why not make use of them?

Monday, April 10, 2017

Thursday, April 6, 2017

Psychedelic!

Krita includes a tool they call Multibrush, which repeats strokes on a user-selectable number of axes. By default, the centre of rotation is the centre of the image, but that too can be changed. This image uses 16 axes throughout, but the number of axes can be changed on the fly.

It makes the creation of kaleidoscopic mandala images like this one very simple, but I don't really see much use for it other than that. Still, it's a fun toy as far as it goes.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

Bamboo eHDD rack

I'm making a little rack for my external hard-drives, of which I have several in action.

I was originally going to make it out of 12mm untreated pine plywood, but for some unfathomable reason Bunnings doesn't have any in stock. They did have some 16mm laminated bamboo boards though, so I thought I'd give that material a go and see how it is to work with. The individual shelves are just 7mm ply that slide into housings in the walls of the bamboo shell.

This is by no means a complex construction job, and I haven't attempted any dovetail joinery or the like; I tend to suspect the bamboo laminate wouldn't particularly suit that sort of thing. However, it cut, routed and planed easily and cleanly. I think it would be quite unforgiving of tools that aren't absolutely sharp; being bamboo, the long fibres are quite tough and stringy, and if they're not cut cleanly they'll tear. Likewise, the arras needs to be taken off the edges or else the fibres will start to fray and tear away from them in use.

It's quite a heavy material, a lot heavier than pine or birch plywood of equivalent thickness. The laminations are a lot thicker than traditional wood ply too, which I rather like — I find the porous-looking end grain quite attractive. So far I've just oiled the inside and the top and bottom, and the oiled colour is quite attractive. I don't know how well it would accept stain, but my gut says it should be OK. I have no idea about its stability versus warping or cupping; in a piece of this size and conformation that's unlikely to be an issue in any case, and laminated materials, in my experience, are fairly reliable as far as that goes.

I'd say that so far I like it as a construction material. It's not especially expensive, and from what I hear it's pretty hard-wearing (I think it's used as flooring) so it would probably work well as desktops and the like.

Next Day...

Well, here's the finished article.

It just needs time for the oil to dry and then I can fill it up with hard drives.

In retrospect, I'm thinking that maybe I should have stained the shelves, but I think I can live with them as they are.