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I made this box for my friend Irene's 60th birthday from an old oak board.
The plaque is brass, deep-etched in ferric chloride.
The nails are square copper nails, and don't really serve any structural purpose; they're just there for decoration.
It's roughly 110mm square, 300mm tall.
I've shown these before, but I thought I'd get them all into one place. They're a series of illustrations for the Tale of Tuan Mac Cairill, a very ancient Irish origin story about the coming of the first men to Ireland. Tuan does a lot of transforming into animals.
It's 110mm tall.
Alas, it's not much use as a vase, not only because there are various holes and cracks present, but also...
...because I delved too greedily and too deep, and burst through its bottom into the tenon.
When I sawed the tenon off, it left this gaping void in its bottom.
It could be fixed, but I'm probably not going to.
I've found that one of these disposable plastic tumblers is almost exactly the right size to fit inside the wooden shell.
I'll add some open-cell self-adhesive foam tape (the sort of stuff you use for sealing windows and the like) around under the rim of the tumbler. That will keep it centred within the vase, stop it from rattling around, and give it a bit of grip so that it won't just fall out while still being easily removable.
It's not 100% perfect as far as shape goes, but it will make the vase somewhat usable as a vase.
This one is 125mm wide by 40mm tall.
I like a foot on a bowl; I think it gives it a better visual connection with the ground than just curving away into nothing.
This is a bit of wood I pulled out of the firewood stack a while ago. It had split along one of the growth rings to create a smoothly curved piece.
I just adzed out the inside of the curve and smoothed out the rest of the contours, and flattened off the bottom so that it would sit a bit more stable.
I don't know what you'd do with it. Put a couple of bits of fruit on it maybe, or use it for change and keys and what-not. Whatever.
It's just a piece of pine, stained, oiled and waxed.
Turned from an offcut of oak this time, this little cup is about 85mm in diameter and 45mm tall.
Little things like this are handy for using up scraps of wood that would otherwise just go to waste, and at the same time they teach me things. So, win-win!
What I had failed to take into account is that then I would have a much longer lathe to accommodate in my fairly teensy-tiny workshop. Ah well. So, now instead of a lathe that is a bit cramped, I have one that's probably going to be too long 99% of the time.
I knocked up a side table out of crappy, soaking wet fence rail and plywood. It does the job, and as an added bonus, there's space underneath it to store my car-jack router lift. The minus is that I now have to find somewhere for some other stuff, but no doubt that will be resolved eventually.
The lathe bed extension just bolts to the end of the original bed, but there are no positive locating lugs or anything, so it's just held in place by tension on the two bolts. It doesn't match the corresponding surface exactly in dimension, so the tail-stock and tool rest don't slide smoothly across the border; there has to be a certain amount of jiggling to get them past. Still, it's workable, and possibly the connection could be fettled a bit to make things work more smoothly.
Next up, I really need a wider tool rest. The one that came with the lathe is only 150mm long, and that's just too claustrophobic. Fortunately, a tool rest is a very simple thing to make for anyone with welding capabilities.
Fibre-tipped technical pen and coloured pencils.
Approx. 100 x 120 mm.
Approx. 120mm square
First, in using a Forstner bit on the drill press to cut the small 28x7mm mortice to hold it in my small chuck jaws, and
Second, in applying beeswax directly on the lathe without any other finishes (like oil or shellac) and to polish straight over the wax by friction with wood shavings.
I'd call both of them a success. Drilling the mortise on the drill press rather than cutting it on the lathe really sped things up, and the friction-finished wax gives a very nice smooth surface, very pleasing to the touch.
So now I know that.
It was in pretty sad condition, but fundamentally sound — the plate was very rusty, but straight, and Disston's steel is (or was) excellent. No missing or misshapen teeth, which is unusual in a neglected antique like this. The handle was shabby and all the old finish was peeling off, but the wood is still sound.
I dropped the plate into a salt-and-vinegar bath overnight, and refined and refinished the handle. After it came out of the bath, I scrubbed the plate down with steel wool to remove the rust layer, gave the whole thing a going over with a wire wheel, and then wiped over a light coat of oil.
The plate went back into the handle again, and with a good sharpening it's cutting as good as new. Or as good as old, which is better.
I think this is going to become my favourite ripsaw. It cuts good and straight with a nice narrow kerf, and with no bows or kinks to get in the way.
It's pity that I didn't get a "before" photo; you'll just have to use your imagination.
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I've been reshaping the handle of the Spear & Jackson skew-back saw I got from Amazon. It will have very little effect on the usefulness of the saw, but I'll like it better. I've given it a few coats of shellac, which should probably have been a bit thinner to get a properly smooth finish, but never mind.
The original handle is fitted with brass-plated locking studs, and they work just fine — if they ever get a bit loose, all you have to do is hit them with a hammer. However, it does mean that the handle can't be easily removed as they have to be drilled out and destroyed to do so. I replaced them with connector bolts and caps, since actual genuine brass saw nuts are amazingly expensive.
I had to anneal the saw plate around its holes so that I could drill them out to 8mm. I could have just drilled them out without all that faffing around if I'd had any 8mm cobalt bits, but I don't. As far as the saw's function is concerned, the discoloration is just aesthetic, but one side-effect of the annealing is that the plate got a bit deformed in that area, which makes it a bit more difficult to get the handle on to the plate. Not impossible, just more difficult.
The discoloration on the plate came away with a bit of scrubbing with emery tape, so that's all right then.
Not very spectacular, but quite fun to make, this is just a platter turned from a grungy old oak off-cut. It's about 240mm in diameter, and about 25mm at its thickest. This is about the largest diameter my little lathe will handle.
Its old handle was rimu I think, and it had suffered badly from years and years of being submerged in dishwashing water, and had warped badly. The slot cut to accept the knife tang had splayed open, creating a nasty place for dirt and fat and bacteria to collect. So I decided to make a new handle for it, to keep the knife alive.
I used a piece of oak, which is not an ideal timber for this purpose, but it's what I've got. It's not a fancy handle, but it is functional, which is all it needs to be.
One sure way to find out all the cracks and flaws hiding inside a piece of wood is to put it on a lathe and try to make something nice out of it.
This piece of oak looked fine from the outside, but once the outside was gone, all of its cracks and things became glaring plain. Hey-ho, never mind.
The shape of this bowl is based more or less on a porridge bowl I had as a child. It flares out towards its flat base, so that it's harder for a toddler to up-end and get porridge all over everything.
The piece is 170mm in diameter by 45mm tall.
The spoon I made yesterday from a small scrap of oak, just because it was there and I had nothing else to do.
After struggling with hollowing a couple of cups, I thought I should buy myself a proper hollowing tool set. And so I went and had a look on Bangood, where I thought I could probably pick something up.
Sure enough, I found something that looked likely. This is what I thought I was buying:
This, however, is what I was actually buying:
I checked back on the page I'd ordered from, and after careful examination determined that they had not actually lied, they'd just presented the product in a very misleading way. So, that's it for me and Bangood; they've failed me one time too many, and I won't be doing business with them again.
The slot in the end supports the bar of the tool so that it can't twist, and the screws through the ferrule into the handle's tenon prevents the whole ferrule twisting.
I turned up a nice chunky, meaty handle and stained it. One of these days I probably should give it a few coats of shellac as well.
It got its first outing today, and I made this simple little oak bowl, about 120mm in diameter and 35mm thick, from rim to foot.
I foresee it getting quite a bit of use, so I'd probably better buy some more carbide cutting tips.
Not from Bangood though.
On the principle that there can never be too many spoons, I made another spoon, out of a bit of rimu this time.
It's quite a long spoon at 420mm, but probably still not long enough to safely sup with the devil. However, my experience in that area is pretty limited.
It's the essence of doodling.
It's about 170mm long and 70mm wide.
One of these days I must get around to making myself a round-ended scraper for smoothing out the bowls of things like this. But it is not this day.
I turned this little oak handle from a scrap fished out of the rubbish for no particular reason but to experiment with using some 15mm copper tube as a ferrule. It works pretty well for small pieces like this.
I might find a use for it some day, but it would be no good as a general purpose chisel handle or the like — the piece of oak has some pretty serious checking going on, so it probably wouldn't survive much mallet work. It might be okay for a paring chisel that wouldn't get much walloping. I don't have a suitable blade right now, but you never know what might turn up.
It's about 140mm long.
I put a chainsaw file in it.
Maybe it would have been a better idea to get a file that fits my actual chainsaw blade, but I'm not one to truckle to The Man like that.
Today I made myself a square awl from an old drill bit (4.4mm, probably some weird archaic Imperial size*), a bit of 9mm brass tube, and a bit of white oak.
I planed a facet on its base so that it will stand upright, as seen here, and another on one side so that it will rest on the workbench without rolling around.
The whole thing is about 110mm long.
I might sharpen it with a more acute point, but I'll see how it goes as it is for a while first.
* I'm told that 4.4mm is a #16 drill bit.
I did this mainly as an experiment in deep hollowing, and though it's not totally successful, it has shown me several things that I needed to know.
I don't know how food-safe or water-tight this would be, but that's not likely to be much of an issue.
The goblet is 160mm tall, and 70mm in diameter.
Walking home from the Richmond Working Mens Club after a pint of beer and a few games of pool, and we were treated to this as a dusk sky.
This is another bell jar base. I'm not sure what the timber is; I think it might be black maire.
If the first oak base was teetering on the edge of the envelope for my little lathe, this one is definitely over it. It can be done, but the vibration when spinning something this heavy is slightly terrifying.
If I ever win Lotto, I'll probably buy myself a bigger, meatier lathe. And also a new workshop to put it in.
And here we are with the bell jar in place.
The monkey is a very old, fragile doll that belonged (I think) to my great great grandmother. It's Victorian, though I don't know precisely how old it is.
They came without bases of any kind, so today I turned one out of some laminated oak.
This is about the largest diameter my little lathe will handle, both because of the distance between the head and the bed of the lathe, and because the lathe's motor is pretty puny. The turned oak base is about 230mm in diameter, and roughly 40mm thick.
For that reason, I made this little footstool out of some very raggedy bits of gnarly, knotty oak off-cuts.
It's about 300mm (12") tall, so not too high to easily step up on to, but high enough to get me within reach of the top shelves in the kitchen.
It's pictured here on the hearth, in the warm, so that its coat of linseed oil will cure within my lifetime. The weather is starting to cool down a bit now, and out in my workshop the oil would probably take about three days to go off.
I really should do something about cleaning up that hearth a bit too.
I turned this little plinth from a piece of cherry that I chopped off one of our trees in the back yard, and stained and waxed it.
While the timber was drying out it became infested with borer, so it's not a great piece of wood, but I was interested to see how this cherry would respond to my manipulations. I rather like it; it looks rather like a piece of lignum vitae I once had.
I edited the video down from its original 250 megabyte size using Windows 10's internal video editor, which was pretty simple to use for my very basic requirements. Unfortunately I couldn't find any way to crop the frame, so all the background clutter on the photo stage is still in shot. Blogger's video handling is pretty basic.
Up until now I've been using them in a graphite-stick holder, but I thought I might as well get on to making some permanent handles for them.
The scraper is the first out of the gate. I turned the handle out of a bit of beech dowel; it was once a broom handle I think.
This one is a burnisher, for polishing the scraped copper. The smoother the metal, the less ink it holds, and the whiter the resulting tone in the print.
Another burnisher, with a curved blade (that needs a bit of polishing, by the look of it). This time the handle is ash.
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I ordered this mortise gauge maybe a month or so ago, and it just arrived. I got it via AliExpress from https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003389703825.html and it was pretty cheap; about thirty bucks including postage.
It's well made with no slop in the bars. The circular blades need a bit of sharpening, but that's easily done. The bars are graduated, though I think that's likely to be of limited use as the fence has a cut-out to house the blades, which means that the graduations will only ever be an estimate as there's no hard-cut-off to read them against.
The blades don't roll on their shafts, so the blades act just like a normal knife.
It's a decent enough piece of kit, but I don't like it as much as my traditional pointy beech mortise gauge. The lines left by the rollers aren't as definite or easy to see as those left by scratch-points or blades.
It is oak, coloured with a walnut spirit stain. It's had its first coat of oil, and it will need a couple more and then some wax to finish.
I could do with some better tape for the sageo (the binding around the scabbard). The stuff I've used is just flat lanyard tape, and it's okay, but it's a bit narrow. I could do with something about half an inch wide, and neither too flimsy (like ribbon) nor too stiff (like nylon webbing). The genuine silk article from Japan is fairly pricey, and I'm not keen enough to spend that much money.
I reshaped the tip of my el-cheapo iaito to give it a more curved profile, rather than the fairly angular pointy-stabby tip it had before, as can be seen in the shot of the sword on the bricks.
It could probably do with a bit more polishing, which I might get around to one of these days. But the blade is just stainless steel (440 I think) so there's not much point in getting too precious about it.
