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Well, we’re moving in three days. We put 16 boxes on the boat, and I’ve dropped 12 boxes in the mail so far. I think we’re about 5 boxes away from being done. On Tuesday, they come to pick up our car, which will be loaded with awkward-shaped things and other stuff that doesn’t look very steal-able (like the step stool I made).
Today I cleaned out the shop and did a final sweeping. The shop is now officially closed.
I already know what my first major woodworking project is going to be once I get to Kota Kinabalu. I’m going to flatten the backs of all of my chisel blades and plane irons. I had flattened the backs as I was taught at the Woodcraft class I took, but after watching this great video by Keith Cruickshank, I realized that I hadn’t come close to a good enough job. Basically, the back should have a consistent mirror shine to it. If it does, you never will have to touch the back again (except to rub off the burr after sharpening the bevel). I looked at all of my blades/irons, and none of them have a consistent shine. So that’ll be my first job.
First, I need to figure out how to flatten my 800-grit waterstone. So far, I have always flattened my stones with the next lower grit stone. So I sharpen my 8000-grit stone with my 4000-grit, I sharpen that one with the 1200-grit, and I sharpen that one with the 800-grit. The 800-grit stone has been flattened so far with 200-grit or 300-grit sandpaper placed on the washing machine. I thought it was doing okay, but I noticed that the center of the stone is higher than the two ends. I suppose that’s better than having a crown going the other way, but still – I’d like it totally flat like my other three stones. Any ideas?
After I flatten the backs, I might just go ahead and work on the bevels some more. It’s been too long since they got some attention.
I’m also mulling over whether or not to start a podcast. I’ve already got a half dozen topics, which should be enough to get me started, but want to be sure I’ll have the time and energy to do it right. Of course, that doesn’t stop you bozos from releasing your podcasts. Ha ha.
And that’s a wrap here in Kuala Lumpur. Next post will be from Kota Kinabalu, on the island of Borneo!
So I had a good couple days in the shop before I packed it all up the other day. Besides doing the cushion frame for my friend, I did a lot of work on my marking knife. The first task was to get the blade satisfactory. In the end, I did this by cutting a 30(ish)-degree bevel on a piece of scrap, and then filed the bevels of the blade along that angle. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. I then honed the blade on my waterstones, which was a real bear with no honing jig. By the way, the blade is not discolored – that’s just me in the reflection! The black line is just to let me know how far in it’ll be mounted.
Then I drilled a hole in the very center of the top (as best I could determine it) with my little dowel bit (for the tang), and hammered a few tiny nail holes in along the blade line to create a channel for the blade. Then I took my failed blade (first try) and drove it in spear-first to pave the way for the final blade. After that, I cut, trimmed and whittled the top down to the shape you see below. The ferrule is actually a flange nut, and as you can maybe see, I was able to carve some threads on the shaft by test-fitting the nut onto the handle.
Since I am using a nut as my ferrule, the hexagonal nut shape isn’t the most attractive thing to look at. I thought about filing down the corners of the nut, but that’d take too long. So I decided to cover the nut with a wooden sleeve. It’s a mystery wood, but I’m hoping the color contrast will be nice. (That’s just black paint there on the outside – it’s from a chair I found on the side of the road.)
When that was done, I epoxied the nut into the sleeve and trimmed/sanded it so it was the exact depth of the nut.
Then I glued and screwed the nut/sleeve onto the shaft of the handle.
Finally, I mounted the blade! First I slathered epoxy on the tang and base. I then pushed it in as far as it would go with pliers (covered with cloth to protect my nice shiny polished blade). When I couldn’t go any further, I mounted the blade in my vise and pounded down with a mallet until I was at that black line I’d drawn.
The knife is now wrapped in bubble wrap in my Box O’ Tools somewhere, getting ready to go on a little cruise. When I unpack it at our new home, I’ll whittle it down to its final shape. In retrospect, I really should have done the whittling first, and then mounted the blade. But I was just too excited. You know how it is.
A few weeks ago I shared about my problems resawing with a handsaw. Several people suggested various jigs, and more than one told me just to go buy a circular saw.
Well, I decided to try to give myself a nice long straight edge to guide the saw. Ended up getting more and more complex, until this is what I ended up with:
In the end, it didn’t do that great of a job. So I put off doing this until the day before I had to pack up all my tools. I figured it was now or never, so I just slapped a board in the vise and went to work. And boy, was it work!
That picture was taken just after I finished resawing those four boards you see on the bench. Next, I used my bit brace to create the mortises in the side rails, and then chiseled out the waste until the mortises were mostly rectangular. Then I slapped some glue in there and clamped it all together. Here’s the finished product, side by side with the original:
It’s far from fine woodworking, but for something that will be under someone’s butt all the time and never in their field of vision, it should do the trick. And hey, I got some more mortise practice!
We’re moving in about 10 days to a different part of the country. Tomorrow the movers come to haul off some of our belongings. We’re mailing what we can, as it’s much cheaper, but some things (like a TV) are best moved by professionals. Our stuff is traveling by boat and should arrive about a week or so after we get there.
Today I had to dismantle my workshop and pack everything up. It was fun in a way, as this was my first real workshop and I had some good times here. I’ve had workspace before, in our last two apartments, but I never before had a place to call my own. A place where my wife had zero interest in entering. A sanctum, of sorts.
So today, I methodically waxed all my important tools, and then buffed them before wrapping them in bubble wrap. Once everything was wrapped up, I meticulously placed everything just right in the plastic tub that functions (for now) as my tool box. My training as a grocery bagger served me well. Here are all the tools I own:
As I reflect on the past 8 months or so we’ve lived at this house, I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t give props to my workbench. I put it down almost every chance I had, since I knew (or at least had an idea) of what it would be like to have a proper workbench with real vises and solidity (Oh, solidity! What I wouldn’t give!). This workbench is basically just a stand-alone cabinet. It had a white melamine (I think?) top, which I foolishly ripped off, revealing a mere 1/8″ (if that!) sheet of plywood underneath. As a result, I had to reinforce the vise mounting with a sheet of thicker plywood, and anytime I needed to do anything workbenchy (like chiseling, sawing, etc.), I had to whip out thicker boards (like my shooting board) on which to work. You can see in the pic below that I had to rip out a door and drawers (even cutting out the drawer supports) to get some clamping room.
But as flimsy and substandard as this workbench was, it did the trick. I have two great projects (my wife’s jewelry box and my kids’ step stool) and a couple smaller projects that were built on that bench. So here’s to you, Cabinet. You’ll be on the scrap pile in a couple weeks, but I’ll never forget ya.
P.S. I had a flurry of woodworking activity the past couple days (my marking knife and the reverse engineering project) – pics to follow once I get past the movers’ visit tomorrow!
Still working on the marking knife. Now I need to drill a small (3/32″) hole for the tang of the blade. Got the bit, but it’s too small for the chuck of my bit brace. I decided to “mount” the bit inside a dowel, and either put the dowel in the bit brace, or just twist the “dowel drill” by hand.
First, I hammered a nail into the dowel, since it was easier than trying to twist the drill bit into the wood by hand. I wasn’t sure if it would split the dowel or not, but it didn’t.
Then I did a dry fit of the drill bit, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the nail hole was perfectly sized for the drill bit. It was nice and snug. So nice and snug, in fact, that I learned the hard way that pulling on the business end of a drill bit is usually a bad idea. You can see that the super glue is almost dry when I took this pic…
Slather some epoxy on the shank and pop that sucker in there!
My hole (and correspondingly, the drill bit) is not perfectly straight, so there is a very slight lean to the bit. However, it shouldn’t present a problem since I’ll be drilling at such low speeds. I actually haven’t cut the dowel down to size yet, so it’s still about 12-15″ long. I might just leave it like that and use it two-handed when drilling the hole in the knife handle!
I saw this in a projects book recently and took a couple hours to knock it out. It was a very doable project for me, despite my lack of toolery. The head of the arrow is about 3/16″ or so larger than the hole. The entire project was done by hand – I think I used my ryoba saw, a chisel or two, a pocket knife and a rasp (oh yeah, and my bit brace, duh!). I was pleased with how cylindrical the shaft of the arrow is, considering it was purely done with a bench chisel!
The heart is kempas and the arrow is pine. FYI.
A week or two ago, I got a private message on LumberJocks from a Malaysian (named Masrol) who had recently signed up. Turns out he only lives about 30 minutes away from me (which, in a large city like Kuala Lumpur, is nothing). Masrol is a recent retiree who has been woodworking for a few years (at least). Most of the tools in his shop, including the power tools, were purchased overseas and shipped to Malaysia; in at least one case, the shipping was double the cost of the tool!
During our subsequent conversations, I offered to sell him my Ryobi router, and he was interested. So today he came by and bought the router (and the transformer needed to keep that American-made tool from frying). He also gave me a nice set of books from Taunton Press (articles from FWW). I, in turn, gave him a decent little stack of woodworking magazines as well as a book of projects compiled from Wood magazine articles.
It was a nice meeting, although too short and without sawdust or shavings flying anywhere. Hopefully this won’t be the last gathering of woodworkers in Malaysia! (Although it will be more difficult for us to visit each other after I move to a different part of the country next month.)
I was wading through my old woodworking bookmarks, and stumbled across this great guide to making a marking knife. It looked like a fairly easy project, and cheap! Looks like I can take that Japanese marking knife off my wish list. So here we go:
The blade is taken from a jigsaw blade, and it didn’t take too long to file off the teeth:
For the handle, I took a 6″ section of kempas scrap that I had lying around. Incidentally, you can see on the bench that I filed the point of the blade into a spear shape.
Okay, so I had no idea what to do at this point, just as a disclaimer. I have no lathe, so I can’t turn a handle. I have no carving tools, so I can’t carve it. I decided to trim it down a little with my saw, and then use my chisels to round the corners off until it was more round than square. Here’s the first take, after I cut the corners off (basically creating a long diamond-shaped handle). Why didn’t I just start with smaller stock to begin with? I dunno.
I knew that I wanted the handle to be thickest at the bottom, to be able to hold and use the knife more securely. I chiseled down from the thicker part to the thinner, for a smoother transition, and then just kept working at it with my 3/4″ chisel until I was generally happy with it:
It’s got a kind of Louisville Slugger look to it. The top part will likely taper quite a bit, but I’m going to wait until I have a ferrule and know what dimensions I need.
Thanks for reading!
The results of the LumberJocks Summer 2008 Woodworking Challenge are out, and my step stool managed to get 21st place!
What? You’re not impressed? Well I’m happy with it. And I don’t think my daughter minds either.
P.S. In all fairness, my entry was certainly not the 21st best one out of the 58 submissions. I do think that my active participation on LumberJocks has helped. I’ll take it!
Today I began a little reverse engineering project for a friend. He saved a sofa from the junk heap, but it was missing one cushion support frame. I told him it shouldn’t be too hard to make a matching one. So here’s what the original one looks like:
The width of those outer boards is pretty close to 2″, so I figured it would just take a couple rips of a 2×4 to get these parts. I ran a line down the 2×4 with my marking gauge (although it’s never satisfying trying to cut with the grain), out comes the ryoba, and let the show begin!
As you can see, I have zero clamping options with my current setup. How do you go about resawing with a handsaw anyway? I started on one end and changed to the other end when it got too difficult. My saw stayed with the line on the top, but on the bottom it was a different matter. Here’s a shot of the bottom of the board after I finished my resawing. Notice how I had to stop in mid-cut and just finish coming from the original direction. Oops.
Needless to say, it don’t look so hot.
Because I need to cut some 1/2″ mortises in this 3/4″ wood, this gack left me with too little room to work with, so I’m going to have to scrap this attempt.
If any of you have any tips on resawing with a handsaw, I’m all ears! But in retrospect, here’s what I think I’ll do differently:
- Clamp a board on either side of the board I’m cutting, aligned with my line. The boards will act as a guide for my saw. As long as I keep my blade flush against the clamped boards, my line should be straight.
- Position the board straight up and down and just cut down from top to bottom, rather than along the face of the board. Seems like I’d have a more consistent cut that way. If I have two boards clamped on the outside, the whole apparatus would probably be heavy and stable enough that I could just pin it against the bench with my other arm while sawing.
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