Wakizashi Bokken

 

I made myself a wakizashi-size bokken, to go along with my regular katana-size bokken. It will be of extremely limited usefulness, but never mind, it was something to do.

The scrap of oak I used was less than optimal, with very coarse open twisty grain. I doubt that it would survive very much bashing, but I don't foresee it ever being likely to have to. I think that if it came to it, I would be best off to just remake it, using a decent piece of wood.

It is 540mm long, and has been ebonized with iron acetate.

Spike-Plate Plate

 

I made myself a spike-plate* for my lathe, using one of my faceplates, and tried it out by turning this little macrocarpa plate. It's small, only 165mm in diameter.

I was aware of the knot before I started turning it, but not of the splits that run almost the whole way across it. It's purely luck that it held together on the lathe long enough to finish.

* (A spike-plate is just a disc with some spikes in it, like a carving dish, used to temporarily mount a thin piece of wood to the lathe. The tail-stock holds the piece against the spike-plate and allows me to cut a tenon for a more secure mounting.)

Tanto

 

Wooden training tanto, a commission for a friend.

Rimu, 290 mm.

Parting Tool

 

I have an old blade off my old table saw, on which are several chipped or broken teeth. It's not much use as a saw blade any more for that reason, but I could extract some use from it by chopping out a bar with one good tooth, and mounting it in a handle for use as a thin parting tool for the lathe.

This will give me a kerf of a bit less than 3mm, compared with about 6mm for any of my other parting tools. The carbide tooth should last for a good long time too, but if need be I can still resharpen it with a diamond hone.

Little Oak Bowls

 

I'm making a batch of small oak bowls, about 90mm diameter, for no particular reason except that I had no other immediate purpose for the bit of wood. I have ten blanks, so six more to go. I guess they'd be nut bowls, or something like that.

The oak is very, very dry, and rather brittle. That means it chips out very easily, and I'm having to experiment with ways and means to get around that. It's been most apparent when cutting the foot and tenon. The most successful method so far seems to be to cut all the edges with the point of a skew, severing the fibres before moving on to other tools like scrapers.

The first one I did is at the top of the photo, and they progress clockwise. I'm hopeful that by the time I get to the tenth one, I might get a halfway decent result.

Organiser

 Messing about in the workshop today, I whipped up this little desktop note-taking organiser from a few scraps of rimu.

I do like making things, even simple little things like this.

Scraper for the lathe

 

I made myself a scraper from an old ½" square file. It's down to about 9.5mm square now, after grinding off all the teeth.

In truth, it's not the ideal steel for this purpose, as the burr is very fragile and doesn't last long. But it has the benefit of being available, and it will do the job, though at the cost of more frequent sharpening.

The handle is just a bit of pine cut down from a bit of framing timber, and there's a honking great knot half way along its length. Because of that I've left it a little bit thicker than I'd prefer. It'll probably be fine.

Laundry Shelf

 

I've put up a wide shelf high up in our laundry, in an attempt to fight off — or redirect — the Creeping Cruft a bit.

It's not exactly fine joinery, but I'm happy enough with it considering how badly the pine boards were cupped and winded.

Even a simple job like this is ten times more difficult single-handed, and having increasingly decrepit limbs is not helpful.