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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.
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.
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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.
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| Oak grips |
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| 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.
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.
Today I've been tarting up my jo and bokken.
I've ebonised the oak, and inset a couple of mostly decorative buttons in the hilt of the bokken — they also give me some tactile feedback about where my thumbs should be for a proper grip.
I don't use them much these days due to some issues with my shoulders, but I still like to keep them around.
