Planes in Order

 

I've finally got around to organising a permanent home for my planes, in an old filing cabinet at the end of my workbench.

Most of them are sitting on some soft squishy foam tiles in the bottom of the drawer, and there's a plywood sliding till above the #6 and #7 holding my beech rebate plane and a couple of little block planes. I use te #6 and #7 very infrequently, so the till is unlikely to be much of an impediment.

I still have to find a proper home for my #78 rebate and my #45 plough planes — I'll probably end up putting them (and a bunch of other special-purpose tools) in the bottom drawer of the cabinet, which at the moment is full of circular saws.

It's not the perfect position for the cabinet; if I leave the drawer open for easy access, shavings from anything held in the vice will fall straight into it, and when the drawer is fully extended it interferes with turning the vice handle. However, that last is something I can probably address.

I really want a bigger workshop.

Graphite Stick Holder Thingummy

 

I'm a sucker for new tools. This one is a mechanical pencil for holding big, fat, greasy, black graphite sticks (or charcoal, or sanguine, or whatever). It came with a raw wood barrel; I gave it a few coats of shellac so that my finger-grease won't make it look too disgusting too fast.

I have another one somewhere that I bought decades ago, but exactly where it is I'm not sure. I was using it as a scraper/burnisher holder for doing mezzotints, but it's not with my printmaking stuff — no doubt I've put it somewhere very safe.

Advertising 1950s Style

What do you suppose this magazine advert from the 1950s is pushing?

Did you guess...

shoe polish?

Of course you did. What else could it possibly be?

Dayglo Pixie

 

Technical pen on Reeves cartridge paper, digital colour

Approx. 70x80mm

New Huion Graphics Tablet

New! With added Glove Power!

My wonderful new toy arrived today, a new Huion Inspiroy graphics tablet to replace my old Huion 1060PLUS graphics tablet which replaced my even older Wacom Intuos, which stopped working in Photoshop, because Adobe are bastards. 

The 1060PLUS was a fine tablet, but it had its minuses: it had good pressure response, but was not tilt-sensitive, and the stylus was powered by an internal battery, which meant that from time to time I'd find that it had no charge. I could run it with the charger cable connected, but that's a bit of a pain; I haven't had to use a corded stylus since my very first Genius tablet back in the stone age.

The Inspiroy fixes both of those issues, and is also a thinner, lighter tablet to boot. It claims 8192 levels of sensitivity: my old Intuos only claimed 1024, and to be honest I haven't really noticed any real difference. More important to me is its 266 PPS sample rate, so drawing is very smooth.

Also, the Inspiroy came with a little slippery half-glove, to keep my hand from sticking to the tablet while I'm drawing, so that's nice. However, it's very synthetic, and I don't know how comfortable it will be to wear for any length of time, and I might just revert to my old soft cotton conservator's glove with the thumb and two first fingers cut off.

I got the shipping notice on August 25th, the same day I ordered it, so it's taken 24 days to get here from China — not too bad, considering the current international situation. It cost a little over a hundred bucks, all up; about one sixth what I paid for the smaller Wacom tablet all those years ago.