DogBoy

 

DogBoy

Indian ink and watercolour

Approx. A4

More Old Tools

 

Yesterday I bought a box of old woodworking tools from a guy over in Lyttelton. Apparently they came from an old carpenter friend of his.

There were three wooden planes, two of which are in decent condition. Two hand-drills that just need a bit of a clean and oil, and both of which are infinitely superior to the horrible crappy plastic-bodied piece of garbage I already own. And most important from my point of view, a roll of nicely-kept bits for my brace, and this box of assorted specialty bits.

I remember making a box like this in woodwork class at intermediate school, though that one was supposed to be a pencil case, and it was made of pine.

This one is made of cedar I think, and it's had a pretty hard life, probably rattling around in the carpenter's tool bag for decades. Cedar is a pretty soft wood, and it doesn't take much of an impact to leave a mark.

There's history in the battering this box has taken, and I don't want to obliterate that, so I've just cleaned off the worst of the dirt and grime with a solvent cleaner, and given it a light coat of boiled linseed oil.

Ink reservoir insert

 

This is an insert to fit a Parker Quink bottle, with an internal neck diameter of 30mm.

With the insert in place and the cap on the bottle, the user can just tip the bottle to fill the reservoir. Then a dip-pen or brush can be loaded easily without having to reach right down into the bottle, avoiding a whole lot of potential messiness.

Printed PLA doesn't create a reliably watertight object, so I suspect the ink may seep away over time. However, it's a simple matter to just refresh the reservoir, or else I guess you could line the inside of it with epoxy or something.

The STL can be downloaded free from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5984034

Silhouette

 

We have a silhouette, made in 1851, of a great-great-great-uncle, Alfred Edward Hands, when he was two. (There may be another great or two in there).

It really needs a bit of protection from ambient dust and dirt and what-not, so I shall have to make a glassed-in shadow box to house it.

The drawing-in over the silhouette appears to have been done with a gold stylus; the metallic sheen doesn't really come through well in this scan. The background drawing — the toy and floorboards, and the curls of hair — appear to have been done in croquil pen and ink line and washes. I'd describe it as being careful and meticulous work, to a good professional standard, rather than the work of a highly skilled artiste. Nevertheless, it's a pretty little thing.

Next day...

The shadow-box is complete, and Alfred is safe behind glass. I've left a space at the bottom for a caption plate, which I will no doubt get around to in another decade or so.

I used a nicely figured bit of rimu for the frame, and plain old 7mm plywood for the backing board. The top is not glued, just held in place by brass screws, so I can access the innards at my whim.

Kunz cabinet Scraper Modifications

 

I have a Kunz #80 cabinet scraper. It's basically identical to the Stanley #80, and Veritas also make one, but both the Stanley and Veritas versions are two or three times the price while being functionally identical.

Where the Kunz falls down is in its fastening and adjustment screws. They're all standard M6 threads, which is handy, but the screws holding the bar at the back are just slot-heads, requiring a screwdriver for adjustment, and the front thumbscrew to adjust the blade deflection is tiny and difficult to tighten.

I've used my Ender 3 3d printer to make bigger, more easily manipulable thumbscrew heads for all three. The back screws are limited in diameter to 16mm by the geometry of the scraper body, but they never need to be super-tight since they only need to hold the bar and blade in place. The front knob can get up to 32mm diameter, allowing plenty of surface for my cranky old fingers to tighten or loosen it in the blink of an eye.

Abstract

 

Another painting today, just because I felt like it. An abstract this time.

300 x 800 mm, acrylics on canvas.

Tree

 

I think this is about finished. I've had enough of it for the moment at any rate.

300 x 800 mm, acrylics on canvas.

Tee-Vee Stand

 

I finally got around to making a new stand for our living-room TV, to match the oak coffee table I made some time about 2010 (I think).

The oak I had was just a bunch of off-cuts, and it is exceptionally gnarly and twisty and knotty, so it was pretty difficult to work with and required much planing. So much planing.

Snappy Sammy Smoot
by Skip Williamson,
sometime late 1960s.

This is the old stand I replaced. It's a shabby old thing that I knocked up out of 12mm MDF some time about 2005 and pressed into service as a stop-gap.

As tends to happen, it ended up being a very long-lasting stop-gap.

Door Work, Part Two

 

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had a home maintenance job awaiting my attention, and today being warm and fine, I thought I might as well get on with it. I'm scraping the old varnish off one of our doors, from between the kitchen and the living room.

How old the existing varnish is I have no idea. There's a pretty good chance that it's the varnish that went on in 1920 when the house was built.

I'm not sure yet what sort of finish I'm going to put on afterwards, but on the kitchen side at least it had probably better be something pretty tough and moisture-resistant. 

Scraping complete, first coat of polyurethane applied.

The depressing thing about this sort of job is that it's a whole lot of work with entirely unspectacular results. 

People will look at the door when it's done, and they will think "Oh, a door."

"Oh, a door."

Cup

 

Pill Box

 

I made this little wooden box today from a scrap of rimu tongue-and-groove panelling.

The timber had been milled with a pair of grooves running down its length, which I filled with strips of kwila. The hinge is cut down from one of some small brass-plated piano hinges I got from Ukraine not long ago.

The dimensions of the box are roughly 80 x 112 x 25mm, with an internal cavity 55 x 90 x 15mm. It's held closed by four 3x3mm cylindrical rare-earth magnets, which keep it fairly firmly shut without being too difficult to open.

I've rounded off all the corners so that it will sit comfortably in a pocket.

New Painting — First Beginnings

 

I've started a new painting. Acrylics so far.

I have only the vaguest idea about what I want to do with it; I'll just let it develop as it wants to I guess. The terracotta colour is just a base coat, there won't be anything much left of it in the final image.

It's not huge — just 800 x 300 mm, on canvas.

I'm really not confident when it comes to colour.

Note: it's upside-down in the photo, so that I can reach the top half while I'm sitting down.

Door Work

 

Some time ago — a year? Two? Three? I swapped out the door-handles on our kitchen door for these brass lever-style ones, so that I could open the door with my elbow while carrying two plates of food. The old handles had larger escutcheon plates than the new, and their removal left visible silhouettes in the varnish, not to mention ugly screw holes. So, I scraped back the varnish around the area on both sides, fully intending to take the door off its hinges and scrape back  and re-finish the whole thing.

As usual with renovations, I kind of didn't get around to that, and then winter came and we needed the door in place, and I sort of kind of forgot about it.

But no more! I've filled the old screw holes, and I fully intend to get the door off while the weather is good and I can work on it outside with my new(ish) Kunz #80 cabinet scraper.

I'm absolutely definitely positive that I won't forget about it this time. Absolutely.

Easel Shelf

 

My stand-up easel is too tall for the low ceiling in my workroom, which means that a canvas on it is too low to stand at comfortably. One option would be to chop a bit off the top, but I am loathe to do that, so instead I made a shelf to lift the canvas up to a more comfortable height.

It's made of scraps of pine and macrocarpa that I had lying around. I should probably get a couple of small G-clamps to hold it firmly in place, but I think it should be okay for the moment as long as I don't get too enthusiastic.

I have another (smaller) table easel, but I've almost never used it, as I find it rather uncomfortable to paint on a near-vertical surface when sitting at a table.

Oil Palette

 

Mahl Stick

 

I lost my old bamboo mahl stick, so I made a new bamboo mahl stick. This one is nicer.

A mahl stick is used as a hand rest for painting. The end is covered in a soft material that won't (hopefully) damage the surface; in this case it's some of that sticky silicone shelf liner.

The shaft is a bit of bamboo from our garden, the knob on the end is turned from a bit of an old broom handle.

When you're finished painting, you can flourish it at people and cry out "Expelliarmus!" It won't do anything, but there you go.

DragonRat

 

looking Back — 2006 Working Drawings

 

Study for armour movement

Technical pen (Rotring) and fibre pen/watercolour

Brush and indian ink

Design for the key-block of a woodcut

This is the completed woodcut,
with some additional watercolour

Small studies for a fantasy map illustration

Brush and ink

More map elements

Fibre-tip pen

End Trimming Jig for the Vice

 

This is a jig for planing thin bits of wood, especially end-grain, square in both directions. It's essentially a shooting board, but everything is held in the vice. It takes up no bench space, unlike a regular shooting board, so it means I don't have to keep an area of my work-top clear to use it.

The body of the jig is thick enough to keep the sole of the plane level to cut the wood square across, and the stop keeps it square in its other orientation. I just ride the back end of the plane along the jig until the plane blade just kisses the surface, and then I've got a nice clean, square end. Very simple.

It will need to be re-squared as it wears, but that's no big deal, and the stop is just held in its mortice by friction and can be renewed as required.

The idea comes from Paul Sellars.

That Bloody Moon

 

We had a total lunar eclipse last night, which created a small amount of nerdish excitement. Apparently the next one isn't until 2025, by which time the USA will no doubt have descended into full-blown fascist repression and/or civil war.

Dice Tray

 

I made this dice tray out of laminated pine, stained and waxed. It's about 255mm in diameter, and 50mm tall.

The outer ring, as you can see here, is to keep your dice-in-waiting in, and the central cavity is for rolling them. The rolling pit has slightly undercut walls, to lessen the chance of dice leaping out.

Half way through turning this, I blew the capacitor on my lathe's motor, so that'll need to be fixed. I can still use the lathe, but I have to start it spinning manually, which isn't ideal.

Wood Pile

 

The fruit of my labour, the last few days. It looks a lot less impressive than it feels in my arm muscles. All that's left to cut up now is a bunch of skinny scrapply branches.

That Bahco bow-saw is excellent. It's not exactly effortless, but it really makes short work of cross-cutting even fairly hefty bits of wood. Green wood is easiest, but it'll tear through old dry timber pretty fast too. It's a hardened-point blade, so it needs diamonds to sharpen — in theory it's a replaceable blade, but I've never seen the blades alone in Bunnings or Mitre10.

One result of all this is that the eastern side of our back yard is now a lot sunnier than it has been for years and years. Probably decades.

Silver Birch Goblet

 

I finished off the silver birch goblet I started turning from green wood a little while ago. It's been sitting in my hot water cupboard since then, which was sufficient to dry out the thin shell of the bowl, and the surface of the thicker stem.

It did not go entirely smoothly. In the course of drying out, it bowed very slightly, which made it very difficult to remount on the lathe to turn true. Unfortunately I'd already turned the shell down quite thin, and truing it up on the lathe made it thinner still.

Never mind, lesson learned for next time.

Green Turning

 

I had my first go at turning green wood today, and cut this goblet rough from a bit of the silver birch I cut down and cut up recently.

It will have to dry out a bit before I do anything more with it. The green wood handles quite differently to when it's dry, and it's a lot softer and spongier. It means I get nice long ribbons coming off the gouge, but the surface doesn't get as smooth as on dry wood and I doubt that I could polish it very well. You can see that the lip of the goblet is a bit furry, where the fibres have torn rather than been cut.

It'll take a couple of months to dry out sufficiently for finishing (though I've read that you can microwave it for more instantaneous results... I might try that one day) and I'll just have to hope it doesn't crack while it's drying.

Lumber or Timber or Wood

 

This may seem at first sight to be a pile of junk, but to eyes that can see it's a goldmine.

I shifted a bunch of timber from a place where I couldn't see it or get at it easily, to somewhere I will see it every day, and still can't get at most of it easily. There's a variety of timbers in there: pine of course, and also some rimu, kwila, oak, sapele, ash, and even a little bit of cedar.

All waiting patiently to be turned into something else.

It's not ideal; I really ought to get it all raised up off those damp bricks for a start. I have some pallets that will do that job, but that doesn't really address the access issues, which seem to be perennial with any lumber stack. I'll also need to think about protecting it from the weather, but a tarp or two will do that job, if in a fairly ugly fashion.