The Daydreams are Back

November 27, 2009 in Personal | Tags: | 3 comments

First of all, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

You know you’re really into woodworking when it’s all you think about. I’ve had times, usually when I’m planning or working on a project, when woodworking is the last thing on my mind before bed and the first thing when waking up. Especially as a neanderthal with a limited setup, it seems like mental preparation is 80% of what I do.

As we geared up to return to the States from Malaysia for a four-month visit, my woodworking came to a halt, and with it, my daydreaming about all things wood. Even if I might have had time to go buy the wood for my bench, it’s hard to get myself out there to do it when I know I won’t be starting the project for 6 more months. And sharpening? Pshhh. Those dull tools will still be there when I get back.

We’re now about 6 weeks out from our return to Malaysia. And you know what? The daydreams are back. The Roubo is re-forming itself in my mind, and I find myself going over once again the double-tenoned legs, the leg vise, lamination, and yes, even re-thinking my original decision not to have a tail vise. I’m also thinking about maybe throwing a few threaded rods through my entire laminated top, to assist my substandard clamps in glueup, and to help hold it together in general.

I’m mentally preparing myself for sharpening as soon as we return. Because I won’t start another project until I build a bench. And I won’t start the bench until all my chisel and plane blades are sharp.

Meanwhile, I’m accumulating my last (last? ha!) tools off eBay and the Old Tools list while I still can. I’ll be bringing back with me a #7 plane, a new (old) chisel, a generously-donated Lufkin folding rule, and hopefully a rabbet plane, drawknife and maybe a router plane! Of course, my luggage allocation is shot.

I still haven’t made that visit to my lathe buddy, and I’m still waiting for St. Roy’s email about his fall class schedule. But there’s still time!

Hugemongous Flea Market. One Purchase.

October 17, 2009 in Tools | Tags: , , | 13 comments

I mentioned in my last post that I planned on going to the world’s largest flea market in Canton, Texas. Well, I went a couple weeks ago, and was both overwhelmed and underwhelmed.

The size of the flea market was staggering. But what was more surprising was the ridonculous amount of garbage that people were selling. From the standpoint of tools, I found that 80% of the tools were covered in rust, 10% were too ordinary to even bother looking at, 5% were grossly overpriced and 5% were worth consideration. (Of course, there are some of you who would take a more serious look at the rusty stuff.)

There wasn’t really any order to the booths set up, so you just have to be alert and be ready to walk a lot. It got to where I would tell my dad, “Hey, I think I see a pile of wood and rust – let’s check it out.”

I did see a decent enough drawknife, but it cost $20. I think I can do better than that on eBay, even with shipping factored in. But I did find a halfway decent 1 1/4″ mortise chisel for $6. I really needed a good wide mortise chisel for my [upcoming I promise!] workbench. This one should let me do my big mortises in almost one pass.

It looks like the “handle” took quite a beating. I’m hoping to get it out somehow and get a new handle turned for it. I’ve been looking around at what mortise chisel handles look like, so I’m not sure right now how to do it. Any tips?

Mortise Chisel 2

So all in all, a mixed bag. But that’s what you get from a flea market right?

Back in the USA

September 25, 2009 in Personal | Tags: , , , | 6 comments

I’ve been back in the U.S. now for about 3 weeks, and it’s been great. For those of you who are Facebook friends, you’ll know from my status updates that I and my family have been experiencing a fair bit of reverse culture shock. Not only are things here different than in Malaysia, but some things are also different from the way we remember them in 2007 when we were here last! It’s also been fun to reacquaint (or acquaint, in the case of our baby) our children to their home country. Whether or not they consider it home, that’s another issue…

So what am I going to do with my time woodworking-wise while I’m here? Well, to answer the first question you may ask, no I didn’t bring back any tools. Our stay is only four months long, and considering the average length of time it takes me to finish a project, who are we kidding here? I actually had packed up all my plane blades and waterstones, but at the last minute changed my mind, realizing that I most likely would never get around to sharpening during our time here. I also forgot to bring along my big rotting wooden screw (dang!), so Bill, you’re off the hook for helping me put a new head on it!

So here’s what I hope to do during our brief time here:

  • Go to the Canton First Monday Trade Days. It’s a whopping big (they say the largest in the world) flea market held once a month. It’s apparently been in operation since the 1850s! We’ll be in Dallas next month and Canton’s just an hour east. I’ll go with my dad, who lives about an hour east of Canton. I don’t have a big shopping list – I mostly just want to see what can be gotten and for how much. I do want to find some mortise chisels at the very least.
  • Attend one of Roy Underhill’s classes at the Woodwright’s School in North Carolina. I’ve emailed St. Roy a couple times but a fall schedule has still not been released.
  • Pop in on some fellow woodworkers’ shops to see what they’re doing and to try new things. Among some of the new things I hope to experience are using stationary power tools for the first time! I’ve never so much as used a table saw before. I also hope to try out a lathe and practice a little turning.

So if I could do all of those things, I think that I could say that my time here in the States was well used. My blogging here may not be very frequent (as you may have gathered!), but I’ll blog as I accomplish my goals above, or if anything else woodworkingy happens to me.

MIA at WIA

August 18, 2009 in Personal | Tags: , , | 4 comments

Has it seriously been almost 2 months since my last post? Sheesh, get with it, Seidlitz.

One of the things I was most looking forward to during our 4-month visit to the States was attending the Woodworking in America (WIA) conference – specifically, the Hand Tools one that’s coming up in October. Well, I’m sorry to say I won’t be able to attend after all. While I think it’d be awesome to rub shoulders with some of the heavy hitters in the woodworking and blogging world (many of whom I now consider friends), the price tag is just a bit too steep for me. I figure it’d cost me somewhere around $500, including lodging. That’s power tool expensive, dude.

So instead, I’ll save some of that money and use the rest to visit some yard sales and flea markets, visit some of my woodworking buddies in Virginia (and maybe Texas), and hopefully attend one of St. Roy’s classes in North Carolina.

All in all, not a bad trade-off. But I’ll miss y’all!

Which Vise Do I Nurse in My Bosom?

June 22, 2009 in Workbench | Tags: , , | 8 comments

Bear with me. It’ll make sense eventually.

I’ve got two vise screws. One was generously donated by a “homeboy” from the Porch, Bill Taggart, when I visited his place a couple few years ago. The other was a $10 eBay purchase. I’m trying to decide which one to use in my leg vise. Allow me to present the two candidates, and then leave your verdict in the comments below.

Candidate A is a standard metal vise screw. I dunno, looks like about an inch or so thick, and the screw itself is about 12″ long. The nut might look a little odd to you because it was originally on a plate that was intended to mount to the underside of the bench. Bill Taggart hacksawed it off for me since I was going to mount it into the leg instead. I figured I’d just drill a hole in the leg to receive the nut, and then do a little chiseling to make room for the plate remnant.

Pros: Metal is strong. I shouldn’t have any problems with vise strength.
Cons: The screw is pretty short. Taking into account a 6″ leg and a 2″ jaw, I’ll be limited to clamping stock that is not much more than 4″ thick. I suppose I could bury the nut inside the leg during the glueup, which would give me an additional 4″ or so, but that would mean if I ever wanted to change vises I’d have to take an axe to the leg to hack the nut out, and then I’d have to build a new leg.

Candidate B is an old wooden bench screw (about 2″ thick) that I just couldn’t pass up for $10 on eBay. This thing is in rough shape. At first glance it might not look too bad:

But pick it up (gingerly, now!) and you see that this is a fixer-upper. First the nut. Outside – ugh. Nasty. But the inside is solid and the threads are in perfect condition:

The screw itself is in great shape. There are one or maybe two places where a small segment of thread is missing, but otherwise it’s solid. But the head of the screw…oh my:

Pros: The vise jaw would be able to open about 10″ or so. The threads are huge and in good shape, so the vise is theoretically very strong.
Cons: In order to keep the vise from shedding bits of wood anytime it’s handled, I’d have to plane/chisel/sand about 1/2″ or maybe more off of the surface of the screw head (I’d likely leave the nut as is). Would that affect in any way the integrity of the vise? There’d be very little shoulder to catch the jaw of the vise, but I suppose if the hole for the screw is exactly the right size, I wouldn’t need much of a shoulder, right?

I have now presented the two candidates. For which one would you cast your vote?

P.S. Oh yes. The title of this post. I was looking for a witty title so I went searching for quotes containing the word “vice”. The title above came from Thornton Wilder. Below, for your reading pleasure, are more quotes with the word “vice” that almost make sense with the word “vise”.

  • We do not despise all those who have vices, but we despise all those who have not a single virtue. - Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
  • Vices of the time; vices of the man. [Lat., Vitia temporis; vitia hominis.] - Francis Bacon
  • Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today. - Aristophanes
  • There is no vice so simple but assumes some mark of virtue on his outward parts. -William Shakespeare
  • Vices are often habits rather than passions. -Antoine Rivarol
  • Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you’ll have the miser who’s no liar; and the drunkard who’s the benefactor of the whole city. -Thornton Wilder
  • It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. – Abraham Lincoln

Cold Feet

June 21, 2009 in Workbench | Tags: , , , , | 6 comments

So I had my order all lined up: 123 board feet of kapur wood. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. Why? The price. The total cost of the lumber needed for my workbench would have been $212. Maybe that’s not a lot; I don’t know what lumber costs are like where you are. But it’s about $50 more than I expected to have to pay, and in our world, $50 is a lot of money.

While I was there, I did find out that they have four different kinds of wood: nyatoh, selangan batu, kapur and “oti”. This oti was the cheapest by far. In fact, if I selected this wood for my workbench, the total cost would have been $120.

When I inquired about this oti, I learned that it is in fact “O.T.” which stands for “other timber.” I tried to learn what this meant – is it different species of wood all lumped together? All I could learn is that some of the boards are light in color while others are dark or red; some boards are harder while others are softer.

So here’s my question for you experienced woodworkers and armchair wood jockeys. Do you think I’d be okay using this “O.T.” wood for my workbench? I’m thinking that since we’re in Malaysia, most if not all of the wood here is hardwood. And I would be able to choose the individual boards. And they still would plane it down for me so it’s all of a uniform thickness.

I don’t really care if the wood isn’t all the same color. This is a workbench, not a work of art (I just heard some of you workbench lovers gasp). And frankly, I don’t care if it isn’t all the same species. Of course, I might be forgetting to consider something, which is why I pose these questions.

So I’ll either go back to the lumber yard this week to select the O.T. boards for the bench, or I’ll save up my money a bit longer and then go back for the kapur.

Cross Training

June 12, 2009 in Personal | Tags: , , , , | 5 comments

When going through marathon training (I ran three in 2001 and hope to run another in December of this year), one thing that you should always incorporate is cross-training. Typically one day a week, do something other than running to perhaps develop supporting muscle groups, or at least to give your body a little variety.

While I’m not too sure how much it will “develop supporting muscle groups” for my woodworking, I have picked up a new hobby. Thanks to a birthday present from my parents in celebration of turning 40, I took an Open Water scuba diving course and am now a certified diver!

But while scuba diving is as much a hobby as woodworking, the two couldn’t be more different. And I don’t just mean that you can’t build furniture underwater (your coral workbench would just snap right in two). What I mean is that woodworking is a productive hobby. You can’t take up the hobby of woodworking for very long before you produce SOMETHING tangible. Of course, it may take a little longer before you produce something that will actually last, but that’s another issue. If you’re a woodworker who doesn’t have anything to show for it, then you’re really just a tool collector (another hobby).

Scuba diving is entirely unproductive. But being unproductive doesn’t mean it’s useless. It’s just that the things you get out of scuba diving are internal, entirely for you. It enriches your own personal soul, enhances your appreciation of God and his creation, and gives you some memories and perhaps stories. But other than that (unless you have an underwater camera), you have nothing really to show for it.

I think I like that this hobby is so very different from woodworking. Honestly, my time on the islands entirely wiped the Roubo from my brain. That’s good. My slate is clean, and as I start planning again, I’ll be more fresh and will be able to think more clearly.

More Roubo Musings (and Questions)

June 2, 2009 in Workbench | Tags: , , | 20 comments

There was (and still is) a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, and while I never read it, I remember one of the claims the book made. The claim was that the more one thought about playing tennis (and playing it well), the better one played tennis in real life. The parallels have been drawn in many other sports and indeed, in many other facets of life. So why not woodworking? I am convinced that my workbench will be far better, and the construction far smoother, because of my ruminations. With that, here are my latest thoughts, with questions in bold face:

  1. I think I need to build a bowsaw or frame saw before starting my bench. I think that will be a much better way of cutting the legs (and later, the benchtop) to size. My ryoba is great, but is so thin it could easily wander while cutting a 6″ square leg, or a 2′-wide benchtop.
  2. I’m not sure in what order people build benches, but I get the idea that it’s better to build the base and then the top. For me, I’ll have to do a little of each. The center of my bench will be made up of the the thickest stock I can find (probably only 3″ or 4″ laminated to about 12″ total). I’ll have to see what that total thickness is before figuring out how long my short stretchers will be. So here’s what I’ll do: First I’ll build the legs, then I’ll laminate the thick stock for the middle, then I’ll build the stretchers, and lastly I’ll laminate the three outer boards (8/4) on each side of the top (with mortises for the leg tenons).
  3. Where should I position the legs on a 6′ bench? Should I allow 6 inches of free space on each end? Or 1 foot? Or other?
  4. Do I need to add anything to my F-style clamps? They only have smallish pads unlike parallel clamps. Will they be sufficient for laminating my 8/4 stock for the top, or for the 12/4 stock for the legs? Or do I need to use cross pieces to better distribute the clamping pressure?

I hope to buy all the lumber this week!

Woodworking Magazine – A Review

May 26, 2009 in Personal | Tags: , | 9 comments

Until last week, I had never read Woodworking Magazine. It first hit the press when I was already in Malaysia, and I never ran across it during my time in the States in 2006-7.

But when my Shortcut on cutting curves without a bandsaw got accepted for the Spring 2009 issue, I got a free one-year subscription. I got my first issue – along with Winter 2008 – the other day.

Wow.

I had read woodworking magazines before, but as a neanderthal was always put off by the powertoolcenteredness of the articles. The team of editors over at WM (not just Chris Schwarz!) have clearly decided to give the hand tools enthusiasts a bit more to work with, while still letting the majority of you know how to tackle the project with power tools as well.

Literally every single article (of the two issues I have seen) are either directly relevant or at least informative to me. Recently I went through all the woodworking magazines I had, and found myself saving one or two articles out of each – throwing the rest away. Not with WM!

I’d be curious to know how you blended or power tool woodworkers feel about WM. I admit that my enthusiasm for it stems mostly from the fact that I’m a neanderthal apprentice hungry for instruction, tips, techniques, etc. from any source I can find. And I’ve been plenty frustrated in the past by magazines and books that don’t even seem to know people like me exist.

My First Incomplete Project

May 23, 2009 in Workin' the Wood | Tags: , | 2 comments

In my short time in this great craft, I’ve many times wanted to give up on a project. Sometimes the difficulties seem too great, or the things that go wrong seem unfixable. Yet I’ve always managed to carry on and finish.

Today I had my first shop time since before we moved (on May 13). I am far from set up at our new place, and I knew it would be a while before I was, so I had left all my woodworking stuff at the old place.

So I had about 2 hours of shop time, and planned to work on the Sawdust Chronicles desk organizer build challenge. If I had a shop full of power tools, I’d probably be half done! As it is, I got just far enough to realize that there’s no way I’ll be able to finish this thing in a week.

I set up shop in our kids’ former room, so I could make use of the A/C. Hey, climate control in my shop, this was a first! My first task was to fix my planing mess from the other week. And just like some of you said, it was a simple matter of evening the blade with the lateral arm. It all went smoothly. Pun intended.

Planing Fun

Getting most of my lumber smooth (planing and a bit of sanding), and then cutting the first four pieces I’d need, took about an hour. The next hour I worked on the dados into which the bottom two pieces would go. I was going to have two horizontal pieces to form the paper slot, and each of those would just fit into dados in the side pieces. Here you can see my initial knife lines to define the dado.

Groovy 1

Then I used a 1/8″ chisel to hog out the waste. I tried deepening the lines with the knife, but in the end found it more effective to use my saw to try to cut to the depth of the dado. Then I had to do the same kind of thing to make the tongue for the paper slot pieces. Oh, if only I had a rabbet plane.

Groovy 2

It doesn’t look pretty, but it doesn’t really need to because I was going to have a horizontal piece dovetailed into the front to cover it up. The piece was to look decorative but would actually be removable, revealing a secret document compartment.

Alas, I think I’m going to have to give in on this particular project. If the contest had been held in any other month but May 2009, I’d probably have been able to do it. But right now with our unpacking and everything, a desk organizer [that we don't really need] isn’t the highest priority right now.

I’m bummed, because I’m a finisher. But now I can at least start to set my mind running again on my workbench!

P.S. Yes, I’m aware that the Schwarz had just written about dados by hand. Believe it or not, I just read it this evening. I’m such a dork.

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