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Low angle planes

Published on October 11, 2011 in Tools and Uncategorized. 4 Comments Tags: .

Found in a flea market

I love hand planes.

The look beautiful, they raise no dust; and I find using them a meditative joy. Of course, they’re not so popular with my friends in the woodturning community, but those of us who also do flatwork know that you cannot get a better finished surface than that produced by a sharp and well-tuned hand plane.

I’ve bought several premium planes over the years, most of them from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. And occasionally I’ve been lucky enough to find an old warhorse at a flea market, ready to reward tender, loving care with beautiful shavings. I actually use my planes, so when I restore them I clean them up, replacing damaged parts as necessary.

Veritas low-angle jack plane

But ever since I first learned to use bench (bevel down) planes decades ago, I’d thought the chip breaker (which forces the blade down against the frog near the mouth of the plane) was essential to good performance. It broke the chip, I reasoned, to keep the wood from splitting below the planed surface and tearing out. But Neal White, who teaches a Hand Plane class at The Sawdust Shop, told me that wasn’t the case. And he backed up his contention by letting me use his new Veritas low-angle jack plane. This plane mounts its blade bevel-up, like a block plane, and has no chip breaker.

After a couple strokes with that plane I knew I wanted one, and I recently received it.

This plane came sharp and perfect, right out of the box. A couple strokes on the strop and the blade was sharper than a harpie’s curse. Almost without effort, it would take full-width shavings, half a thousandth of an inch thick.

This is my first Veritas plane, but I’m impressed with the fit and finish, as well as the functionality. Sides and base are flat and square. The back of the blade is flat as well. This flatness saves hours of labor tuning the plane.

There are nice design features, such as set screws in the ductile iron body on either side of the blade that center and stabilize it. There’s also an adjustable mouth, with a stop screw so you can quickly close down the mouth to a preset size. And then there’s the sheer mass of the plane, which provides the inertia to power through hard spots.

Veritas offers two blade options: A2 and O1 steel. A2 holds an edge longer, but is harder to get really sharp. I don’t mind sharpening, and want that blade to be really keen. So I opted for O1 steel.

The plane isn’t cheap at $219, but it’s becoming one of my favorites. I find myself reaching for it ahead of my others for trimming edges and flattening sides. Like Neal, I recommend this plane.

Lathe spindle lock – pt. 3

Published on August 20, 2011 in News, Sharpening and Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

Sorry about the delayed post. We’re consumed with software polishing at the moment and there’s not much time for anything else.

Metal polishContinuing with the lathe lock, I cut 3″ from a 1/4″ brass rod, grabbed that in a Jacobs chuck, and polished it. I start polishing with sandpaper (grit depends upon existing scratches—usually #220 is good to start) up to #2000, then metal polish. My long-time favorite is Mothers, which leaves a beautiful polish. I then sanded (with #120) the part of the brass to be glued into the handle (to give the glue something to hang on to), mounted the rod on the tailstock in a collet chuck, and glued it in. Mounting the rod instead of just shoving it in by hand insured good alignment—important for the next steps. I also glued a scrap block to the bottom of the handle.

Waste block glued in place.

The scrap block let me stabilize the piece with a live center while I turned off most of the waste from the butt of the handle. After all, the rod I’m holding by is brass, and not very thick. It wouldn’t stand up to a lot of punishment. If I’d omitted the scrap block, I’d have had a small hole in the end of the piece, which would require further turning.

Here you see most of the turning complete. The work exposed more voids, which I again filled with the mixture of padauk wood dust and epoxy. That’s the shiny goop you see on the right end.

The finished product

The finished product

The final step is finishing, and here a problem arose. I wanted to use a CA/BLO finish for durability, and I’d forgotten how much heat that finish generates. As I put the first coat on and it cured, the cone started to open up from the heat! As soon as I heard the first “pop”, I knew what was happening and shut things down. I let that coat of finish cure, sanded it lightly, then did the rest with a spray can of lacquer. I got a shiny, hard  finish with no more heat problems.

Cones are interesting to turn, and they produce fascinating patterns. If you need a small handle, knob, or pen, give them a try.

Turning a Shaving Brush—part 3

Published on July 7, 2011 in Uncategorized and Woodturning. 2 Comments Tags: .

Cutting internal threads with a machinist's tap

The brush blank was already mounted in the chuck, so this was a good time to turn the outside profile. I could see the brush tuft hole in the end, so it was a simple matter to create a nice shape with adequate wall thickness around the hole. Because this Dymondwood is so tough and abrasive, I had to sharpen several times. The saying in turning is, “if you even think that maybe, possibly, you should sharpen, you should”.
Now it was time to cut threads in that 5/6″ hole, so I could turn the brush around and remount it. Getting taps to cut straight in is always an issue. If the tap’s a thin one and you start at an angle (easy to do if you’re holding the tap in your hand), you’ll often break the tap. The 3/8″–16 tap won’t break in the Dymondwood, but it would easily strip out the threads it’s cutting if I went in off-axis. So I used the lathe to help me.
In the photo you see the tap in a home-made tap wrench (the knurled handles sticking out to each side. That gadget to the right of it is key to the job. It’s a spring-loaded tap guide, held in a Jacobs chuck in the tailstock. Taps often have a slight depression in the tail end, centered on the axis. If you align the spring-loaded center with the tapping axis, put its point into the end of the tap, and bring up a little spring pressure, that will hold the tap on axis as you begin cutting threads. Every few turns you can bring up the spring pressure again as the tap advances into the workpiece. It’s less than $10 and has saved many a threading job for me.
Once the tapping was done, I screwed a Beall Collet Chuck onto my lathe spindle, pushed a piece of 3/8″-16 threaded rod through a collet, and clamped everything securely. Then I screwed the brush blank onto the stub of threaded rod and snugged it up tight against the collet face. Notice, in the photo, the little bit of blue shop towel sticking out around the left end of the brush. That protects the finished rim from the metal collet.

Finishing the end

Once the brush was remounted, it was a simple matter to clean up the end. That’s when I realized it was a little too plain. Fortunately, a friend had given me a little bag of 1/4″ mother-of-pearl dots, the kind luthiers inlay into the necks of guitars. You can find them at Stewart MacDonald, a luthier supply house. I drilled a shallow 1/4″ hole with a Forstner bit (for super clean edges), epoxied the dot in place (slightly proud of the surface), and leveled everything.
I wet-sanded to #12,000 with 3M MicroMesh, which left a high-gloss, waterproof surface. Then I finished by epoxying the brush tuft into place.
I’ve been using the brush for three weeks now, and I really like it. This is a good, fast project that yields something really useful. Now my son is asking for one.

A comment on comments

Published on January 10, 2011 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

I appreciate the comments you send in, and especially questions that suggest directions for future posts. My goal is to build a woodworking community here, and have some fun at the same time. Unfortunately, we bloggers get bombarded with spam comments, which the botnet managers hope I’ll be sleepy enough to approve so they can get a shot at you, my reader.

Here’s how I protect our community.

I use a spam filter to weed out link-choked “comments” so you and I don’t see them. I vet the rest. A lot of those are schemes promising webmasters “…huge amounts of traffic…” or “…make thousands by doing hardly any work.” I got three of those this morning. Peace was just a click away.

The rest of the spams are generic nonsense in broken English. How about, “I think everyone will really like to study this write-up once more & once more and am quite sure that most vsitors of this page will come here once more in future.” (sic). These try to get you to click on their URLs, which take you to sites that try to sell you something. They never relate to the article to which they’re responding. Click. They’re gone.

Finally, there are questionable ones that might be just pats on the back, but don’t mention anything specific about an article or about woodworking. I’ll usually post those if they show a person’s name. Otherwise, they go.

That’s it. Please comment. Please don’t spam.

Doorbell: Installation—the final frontier

Published on September 11, 2010 in Uncategorized. 7 Comments Tags: , .

Here's the cabinet's last day in the shop, ready for installation.

It’s been a long and interesting project for me, and now the payoff. At left is the cabinet all glued together, finished, and waxed. It’s ready to plug into the wall niche. The hole is for power wires, and will be covered by the motor housing.

My contractor (working on other projects) advised gluing the cabinet into place with acrylic latex caulk. If you’ve every used this stuff you know it’s both very sticky and gap filling—valuable traits when you’re trying to glue something to an un-square, uneven wallboard surface. I liked this idea because it meant I could glue the mouldings into place out in the shop, where everything would be square, rather than nailing through the cabinet sides to hold it into the wall, then concealing the nail holes with mouldings I would have to apply (and clamp, somehow) on site.

I glued shims to the sides and back of the piece, so they would just touch the walls of the niche with the cabinet in place. I really wanted to get this right, because it was my final chance to screw things up if I didn’t. So I did a lot of test fits. In the process, I found a hump in the wall under the left vertical moulding, and had to grind it away with a Fein MultiMaster. This is a tool I rarely use, but it was just perfect for this job.

Finally, I applied gobs of acrylic latex to the wallboard where it would touch the gluing shims, then shoved the cabinet into place and clamped it with cauls across its face for 24 hours. Next day, I screwed the mechanism in place over the hole, wired it, and covered it with the motor housing.

Here's the payoff—the project installed, ready to welcome visiting friends.

Here’s the end result, installed in its niche near the front door. I’m very pleased with it.

INTERESTING LESSONS

I’d never kerf-curved plywood before (for the arched cabinet top), but the technique worked well here. The key was to find the right kerf depth, to allow the needed curve while preserving enough strength. It took three iterations with practice strips to get it right.

For the motor housing, kerf cutting might have shown at the bottom edge, so I resawed and laminated veneer into the right shape. Again it took some tests to find the right lamination thicknesses, but this was a great technique for this application.

The final new experience in the project was using a tiny router bit in a Dremel tool, mounted in the Stewart-MacDonald router base, to cut .030″ inlay channels in the curly-maple-veneered feature panel. The delicacy of the bit forced me to go slowly, cutting each channel three times at increasing depths, to get what I needed. Then I could insert veneer edgewise to get the delicate lines I was after.

That’s the end of this project. Thanks for coming along with me. Questions and comments are welcome.

Next—a student project.

Doorbell: Making the feature panel

Published on August 20, 2010 in Routing and Uncategorized. Closed Tags: , .

The most eye-catching feature of this project is a panel veneered with curly maple veneer, with a cherry cross-hatch pattern inlaid over it. I blogged back on June 22nd about having to bleach the maple veneer because it arrived too red. Here’s how I did the inlay.

I vacuum bag veneered the maple onto one side of an MDF panel, and put a backer veneer on the other side. Then I sealed the maple veneer with a coat of shellac. Once the panel was ready to work on, I wanted to create a pattern that referenced the floor where the project would be installed. That floor is 20″ limestone squares, separated by 1/4″ grout lines. I scaled down by a factor of ten, and wanted to produce 2″ diamonds in a pattern, separated by .025″ lines of inlaid cherry.

Here you see the special router base screwed onto my Dremel tool. In front is a router guide.

The essential tools came from Stewart McDonald Co. They included a very precise fixed router base, shown attached to the Dremel tool at left; and a six-pack of .030″ straight router bits (I needed several because they break easily). With these tools, I could route a line just wide enough to accept the thickness of a sheet of cherry veneer.

Next, I attached a sacrificial hardboard sheet to a straightedge and cut it off with the router bit in the Dremel tool. You see the results in the first photo. This would tell me exactly where the bit was going to cut. Finally, I cut a 2″ spacer from another piece of hardboard.

Here the Dremel "router" is ready to cut a .030" inlay channel, once a new bit is inserted. The black strips are shims to let me cut to final depth in three passes.

I made the first cut on one corner of the panel at 45º. Then it was a simple matter to run a stop up to the straightedge, remove same, drop in my 2″ spacer, and re-clamp the straightedge for the next pass.

Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple, because the router bit wasn’t stout enough to cut to final depth in one pass. So I cut a couple of plastic shims from a .012″ thick sheet. On the first pass, I stacked both pieces under the router base. Next pass, I removed one. Finally, I made a pass with no shims to get sufficient depth.

When I reached the end of the panel, I ripped my cherry veneer into roughly 1/8″ strips with a newly-sharpened paper cutter, and glued them in place. After the glue set, I leveled them with a hand plane before making the intersecting cuts.

When the inlay was complete, I leveled everything carefully with a sharp plane and card scrapers, sanded and vacuumed the surface, and applied five coats of shellac. After a few days, I rubbed out the surface with 0000 steel wool and wax.

A week at a craft school

Published on July 25, 2010 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments Tags: .

This sign directs arriving students.

If you’ve never been to a craft school, you’ve missed a treat. These schools are adult summer camps—a chance to obsess about craft (if you want to), chat with like-minded artisans in a variety of disciplines, and learn from some of the best craftspeople in the world; all while eating great food and living in beautiful surroundings. What’s not to love?

Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, in Gatlinburg, TN, is one of my favorite schools, and I’ve been there at least four times. The town itself is a tourist trap; but stroll up Arrowmont’s driveway and you enter a different world. Here’s what it’s like to be there.

Most classes are a week long and begin with Sunday evening dinner, followed by a welcome from the school and the first class meeting. That meeting focuses on introductions, goals for the week, and lists of materials students might need to get locally. Our class, forging jewelry from natural shapes, was sent into the surrounding forest to find leaves, flowers, and pods to use for inspiration.

Most students stayed in housing on-campus, as we did, but some booked into the several motels within easy walking distance in town. Campus housing is a bit spartan, but very convenient and quiet.

Breakfast was at 7:30 each morning, served buffet-style in the dining hall. The studios opened at 8:30, and our instructor began her presentations at 9 AM, demonstrating and discussing new techniques each day. Then we planned our individual projects and began work, attempting to apply what she demonstrated. We had a dozen students, and could call upon both the instructor and a very capable assistant to help us through any rough parts. After watching a demo and getting some individual help, I finally got my soldering technique down cold (so to speak).

Lunch was from 12—1:30 PM each day, then dinner at 5:30 PM. In between, students could work, raid the school store for supplies, books, and t-shirts, or to wander through the studios seeing what other classes were doing. (During our week, there were classes in raku pottery, felting, monotype printing, painting, woodturning, and photography running in parallel to ours.) Those who didn’t want to do any of that could relax in the library or their rooms, hit the stores and eateries in town, or drive up the street to Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

The four resident artists opened their studios one evening, and talked with us about their work over wine and beer.

Each evening featured a 7:30 slide presentation by a couple of the instructors, discussing their work and influences. One evening, the four resident artists opened their studios to us, presenting their work in process and talking about what they were trying to do. There were two potters, a woodworker, and a jeweler there for a year’s intensive in their craft areas. Another evening, there was an art show in an impromptu gallery in one of the studios.

Studios stayed open until 1AM each morning, for the truly driven. A handful of people did take advantage of all that work time. But most worked for a while after the evening’s entertainment, then socialized on the big screened porches or cruised Gatlinburg for entertainment and souvenirs to take home.

Classes ended Friday afternoon, followed by studio clean-up and a farewell dinner. Some people departed at that time, while others stayed on for Saturday breakfast.

I won’t say it was a relaxing week, because I really wanted to learn certain techniques and kept working until I got them. There was always lots to do, and I barely made a dent in the books I’d brought to read. Unfortunately, I gained a few pounds from the great food, and there was no time to hit the local gym and work them off. But I had a wonderful time, learned some things I can use, and really enjoyed both the instructor and my fellow students.

I’ll be happy to go again.

Arrowmont, part 2

Published on July 21, 2010 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment
SamplesTrent Bosch was at Arrowmont during my stay, teaching ways to carve and decorate woodturned vessels. Here are some of his samples.

Trent Bosch was at Arrowmont while I was there, and I had some interesting meals with him and his assistant, Al Hockenberry, discussing all that’s going on with the American Association of Woodturners and Mary Lacer’s firing.

Trent was teaching techniques for altering woodturnings through sandblasting, carving, coloring, and burning, to highlight grain and interesting features. I wasn’t in that class, but he and Al allowed me to come in with my camera and shoot some pictures, which I’ve posted to a second album in Facebook.

In my next post, I’ll describe what it’s like to attend one of these craft schools for a week. I’ve been to several of them, and Arrowmont is my favorite so far.

By the way, I’ve got a Bandsaw class coming up this Saturday, and there are only a couple folks signed up so far. That means it’s almost like a private lesson. There’s still time to get a spot in the class.

Arrowmont

Published on July 20, 2010 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

It’s been a while between posts. Not because I’m a slacker, mind you, but because I’ve been on the road with no time for writing.

Entry sign

This is the entry to Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN.

I just spent a week at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. My particular interest was jewelry forging, but I shot lots of pics of the grounds and woodworking studio as well. I’ve posted the first part of  a public album on Facebook at Arrowmont, where you’ll see some of the grounds, the gallery, and the woodworking studio. As I have time, I’ll post a description of the week and more pictures.

Some setbacks

Published on June 14, 2010 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

Well, progress has slowed for a couple reasons.

One, the top of the wallboard recess was just too pointy—too far from an arc of a circle to make the lining look right the way I was pursuing it. Fortunately, we have some contractors working on our house, and they gave me good advice. They said to build the cabinet in the shop, a half-inch shy of the recess measurements all around, then just plug it into the opening, secure it with acrylic latex caulk (glue) and a few nails, and cover the gaps with moulding. That way the top arch could be a semicircle, and all the sides could be cut true and joined to the back at 90º. So that’s what I’m doing now.

Second, the contractors are here for a reason.

Hole in the floor

These are 20" square limestone tiles we had to break up to get to the leaking pipe and repair it.

We have hydronic heating—hot water circulating through pipes buried in a concrete floor and covered with stone or wood. It’s a wonderful heating system, quiet, reliable, and dust-free; and the floors are warm. But when it leaks, time to break out the jackhammers!

We found and fixed the leaking pipe, but water wicked into the mortar below the tiles, and into a room below. We’re repairing the damage, along with a roof leak in another area. So I’ve been busy with all this. Plus, I taught a router class last Saturday. We had a great bunch of people, and it seemed like everybody enjoyed it. Still, it took project time.

Anyway, I’m back working on things now. I’ve recut the sides of the lining to be longer, recut the top arch to be shorter, and done the lap joints.

Hopefully, more progress tomorrow. Meanwhile,