Project Wood Working: i

Showing posts with label i. Show all posts

Thursday, February 12, 2015

How do i learn woodworking

How do i travel to the south rim ? - grand canyon national, Jump to: driving distances and directions---road condition links grand canyon national park's south rim (open all year) is located 60 miles north of. How do i build a power hammer - d robertson on hubpages, How do i build a power hammer? i am sure this question keeps you awake at night. if you work as a blacksmith, even part time you probably wish you had a way of using. How to learn carpentry at home | ehow, How to learn carpentry at home. whether you're interested in the field of carpentry simply to renovate your own home's flooring, cabinets, panels or. Heather mosby - how i met your mother wiki, Heather mosby is ted's younger sister and daughter of alfred and virginia mosby. ted describes. How to say i love you & use loving romantic words, How do you say "i love you" for the first time or the millionth time? here are lots of ideas for saying "i love you," with loving quotes, love poems, & love notes. Learn woodworking | howcast, Learn carpentry and how to do simple woodworking projects from furniture maker robin mierzwa in these howcast videos..

How do i know which band saw to use? (woodworking), When looking to cut precise curves in wood, in most cases there is no better tool to choose than the band saw. that being said, a quality band saw will do a lot more. How to learn to trust again | ehow, Part of healing and learning to trust others is first learning to trust yourself, according to the huffington post article “learning to trust again” by. I have alot of woodworking equipment and tools in my, Askville question: i have alot of woodworking equipment and tools in my garage i want to sell. how do i find a web site and : sewing, craft & hobby.

North America – Florida, Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean

Wall Framing Details

CUFFLINKS | Clones N Clowns by Aimee WoodClones N Clowns by Aimee Wood

The Editor’s Gas-Bag(with a wink at Philip Shreffler, Donald Pollock

Heather mosby - how i met your mother wiki, Heather mosby is ted's younger sister and daughter of alfred and virginia mosby. ted describes. How to say i love you & use loving romantic words, How do you say "i love you" for the first time or the millionth time? here are lots of ideas for saying "i love you," with loving quotes, love poems, & love notes. Learn woodworking | howcast, Learn carpentry and how to do simple woodworking projects from furniture maker robin mierzwa in these howcast videos..

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

So What Does An Old French Guy Know That I Dont

So with my last two posts, you must know by now that I am trying to define a vice that will adapt to the type of work I do, and plan to do. As I plan to make boxes, everything from jewellery to writing boxes, I expect they will be built in an array of sizes and shapes, not all necessarily square. I also have found a new interest; kinetic sculptures. This is a very fancy name for folk art that has moving parts. A more recognizable term for them is "whirligigs". Some of the more complex ones I have looked at lately absolutely fascinate me. I will leave the topic of kinetic sculptures for another day, but I mention them because they explain why I want a vice that will work out of parallel.
So far, my trip into the physics of applied forces hasnt been met with anything that even slightly resembles a, "I say there, Mitchell, I think you might have it, sir". In truth, my plans have pretty much garnered a, "Cute, but it wont bloody work you moron."
So I do what I do best...I do more research.
For my vice idea, I only had to cruise as far as the Popular Woodworking site to discover one of Christopher Schwarzs articles on vices, one of many, an article entitled, "Meet the Etaux from Old Salems Shop".
An "Etaux" is an add-on to a vice and is used for specialty work, much like Moxons Twin Screw Bench Vice. The one Chris was discussing is basically a miniature leg vice.
Chris had a couple of images of this vice that were small and showed less than ideal detail. I went off and searched for better ones, but couldnt come up with any, so I did a little work with Chris to get some of the detail between the uprights to display. If nothing else, these adjusted images will show you why you cant enlarge digital image files - they fall apart.
Bad images aside, the design of this vice results in the question..."Why the hell will this old French guys design work and mine wont?"

The inset is the original in its original size and the black and white image
is the adjusted one, like I had to explain that one to you :0)

There is no glide connecting these two uprights to keep them
parallel. None, nada, zip. The only parts are a large screw at
the top, and a smaller one at the bottom. Now where did
I see that design before?
Oh ya. It was mine!

Two examples from an early 20th-century tool catalogue, La Forge Royale.

While I have never seen this vice before, I couldnt help but notice that even the bottom, lighter screw comes at things from the back.

While I cant see it in the photos, the bottom screw may be connected to the front upright in some way. I have emailed Chris and asked him about this. Ill let you know his answer once I receive it.

Peace,

Mitchell

Monday, February 10, 2014

The Village Carpenter Part I

Recently I has the good fortune to meet with Kari Hultman and take a tour of her Pennsylvania woodworking shop. For anyone who doesn’t know who Kari Hultman is (and if youre reading this I find that near impossible to believe), shes the woman behind The Village Carpenter, one of the absolute best woodworking bogs out there.

The Room

The Village Carpenter

Karis shop is a purpose Built room attached to her house. While site logistics may have determined its placement, I feel its coolest feature is its location. Karis shop is located right off her bedroom. Isnt that what we all dream of? Who wouldnt like to wake up and walk right into the shop? In Karis own words "I planned it that way, so that I could work out there in my jammies in the middle of the night if I felt compelled to do so."

Karis shop is 17 1/2 by 36. It has windows along 3 sides (between the shop and bedroom, along the side wall and on the back wall). One of the windows even lines up with Karis band saw so that she can feed it extra long pieces. The shop is well lit with florescent lighting which is helped by white walls and ceiling. There is a detail light which lives in the dog holes of Karis main bench.

Karis shop, as viewed from the door to the bedroom.

When I visited in July the shop was comfortable due to a standard window mounted air conditioning unit. A standard entry door allows access to the back yard and its popularity is evidenced by the trail Karis dogs have worn in the floor leading up to the back door. A pair of French doors exit the side of the shop and allow easy transport of bulky items to the adjoining driveway and garage that serves as a lumber storage shed. There is also small lumber storage area in the back corner. The opposite corner houses a sink, which adds further functionality to the shop.

Coming next week, the tools and bench layout of the Village Carpenter. In the mean time, does your shop let you get there from bed?

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

I See Said The Blind Man

As I have mentioned here before, I have a little eyesight problem that keeps me out of the pool halls. I can see pretty well from about 4” to 10”, a little blurred from 10” to about 30”, and progressively on to a melding of colours from there, but often, I can recognize something from its blurred shape.

When I’m playing navigator for my wife, I can’t read the writing on a sign, but I can see the shape of it and by judging their length and calculating whether or not the street’s name would fit in that length of sign, I can tell my wife it is the one we are looking for so she will drive accordingly. I’m silently proud of myself for being right most of the time, although she gives me shit every time I miss one.

When it comes to people, I have learned to pay special attention to their body language as it helps me recognize someone at a distance. I cant see who they are, but I can see who they act like, which allows me to react to them "normally".

When this first came up, back in 1988, my wife and I were sitting at a stoplight and a blind guy was being lead across the road. Of course, this got my wife all choked up, as she is prone to overreactions. For me, I was just upset about how this guy was dressed as he was wearing a plaid pair of pants and a stripped shirt, both in the gaudiest colours you could ever imagine. I looked at my wife and said, “If you ever dress me like that when I can’t see any more I’ll kill you.” She answered me with, “Ya, and how will you know?”

All in all, it is one of those – deal the hand your dealt - sort of things, and as I won’t lay down and play dead, I insist it is absolutely no issue for me at all. I am not trying to pretend I can see normally, I just dont think about it much. Sometimes, though, not thinking gets me into trouble, like what happened a few months ago. I needed paint to paint my office so one evening I went off by bus and subway to the paint store. By the time I got to the street it was on, it was well into dusk, and by the time I got out with my purchases, it was night. I found myself on the darkest street I could ever imagine, and given I cant see squat in the dark, that was a problem. As I headed back to the subway, I walked into two A-frame signs on the sidewalk and tripped and fell on two unexpected curbs. It scared me so badly, I now make a mental note of where things are on any street I walk on, just in case I find myself on it after dark.

Overall, there is only one minus with the whole thing, that being that I can’t drive, which I truly miss as I have always loved getting behind the wheel. There is, however, one very strong item on the plus side. Since my vision went down the tubes, I have noticed that there is a hell of a lot more beautiful women in the world than there used to be.

For many, sight follows waistline as we get older, both dropping to shocking levels, so with this theme in mind, I’d like to give those of you a quick run-down on how I have started to do cuts, such as making mortises for my never-ending plant shelf unit project.

Here is a quick render of how I made up the crown moulding that I am using as the top rail for the lower cabinet’s face frame…

Because of the weight this thing will carry, the top requires multiple cross-braces, so the rail was made extra deep to allow those braces to be tied into it.

Lighting is a major necessity of life in a shop and it angers me when I view someone else’s workshop that has less than adequate lighting. If yours is like that, skip the next project or tool purchase and buy yourself some damned lights.

I have two lights on my bench; one that is movable and low, and another that has it’s swing arm clamped to the edge of the bench. I use the swing arm for general lighting and when I am working on something small and critical, I bring the little table lamp into play. I bought these both from Lee Valley when they were on sale. Looking this morning I found they do not have the swing arm listed, but this little guy is still available. Because you will constantly whack these things, I would suggest spending too much money on them.

Back when I wrote about creating dovetails, many of you were kind enough to give me advice and by combining what all of you suggested and modifying things slightly to fit my situation, I came up with a fairly solid way to cut some pretty good dovetails and I thank you for it. If any of you have any more suggestions to offer on this process, believe me, I’m all ears and eager to hear what you have to say.

Mike Siemsen commented about the scribe line when that dovetail article was posted. He told me to trust it, letting the chisel grab and hold it, as it will, “lock in there like a screwdriver in a slot”. I have been following his advice ever since.

Following Mike’s advice over the course of time, I have tried a number of different marking knives to try to improve my scribe lines. Frankly, I found them all a waste of time and money. For me, the cheap, basic, blade-replaceable box-cutter knives are the way to go. I have knives in my cutlery drawer that I sharpen often and I have become so accustomed to sharpening knives, my wife won’t use them because they are too sharp. I will do the same with a marking knife, and while they cut well, they don’t cut deep enough for me as their blades are always too thick and wood, unlike a good prime rib, won’t fold away to give the blade room.

I need a good, strong guideline to start. Once I have it, I run a pencil along it so I can see it easier. A pencil seems, for some reason, to follow the deeper cut made with a box-cutter better than it will a shallower cut made by a marking knife. I use a soft graphite black pencil for lighter woods, and a white or light coloured Derwent

ColourSoft pencil for darker.

Once I have the deep scribe line marked to stand out more, I then use a chisel to chop away a V-groove inside it, keeping the outer walls square to the top surface. This is an expansion of a concept explained by Chris Schwarz when he was on the Woodwright Shop last year. The deeper scribe line makes registering that chisel easier and holds it there better. With a shallow cut, the chisel is sitting on the wood and the blow to it has to immediately be transferred to the wood. With a deeper cut, the chisel sits above the bottom of the cut, so the blow tends to allow the chisel to follow the cut’s wall, minimizing its deflection. This is a very small benefit, but I will take all I can get.

My issue is a bit extreme as I was born with lousy eyes to begin with, and angle-closure glaucoma, retina tears and detachments, scar tissue from operations and injuries incurred when I was young have all served to make things go as they have gone, leaving me with a pretty narrow angle of view. The result of all of this is, when I focus on the closest edge of even a ½” chisel, I can’t register the furthest edge. I bring this point up because while I hate to be the barer of bad news, I have to tell you that as you age, you will find this issue will rear its ugly head with your vision as well, although definitely not in this extreme.

Ready to make the cuts with a couple of the
marking knives I have collected over time.

That is what this V-groove is for; to allow me a better chance at following the line. When I am drawing the saw, I can only check if it is following the line one end of the cut at a time. By adding these grooves, the saw blade is less likely to move off the line as its blade runs against the flat outside wall while the angle tends to make the blade slope towards that wall. Since I watched Chris explain this in that movie, I have improved my cuts 200% as I can now get them started properly, and that is half the battle.

After cutting the outside edges of the mortise, I then make cuts between them, every ¼” or so. Because I have the heavy pencil lines on both sides of the stock, I tend to see when to stop better, finding it best to shoot for stopping just above the lines.

Using a ½” chisel, I then knock out the narrow strips…

With a wider chisel, the one shown below being 1¼”, I then clean up the bottom of the mortise, checking it with a little square every so often to ensure it is staying square with the edges and consistent in depth…

Using this process, I end up with some pretty tight mortises that require very little clean up afterwards…

Where there is a will, there is a way, and while many of those ways redefine the word “patience”, workin’ wood is still a blast and something I never want to give up.

Peace,

Mitchell

P.S.: The title of this post is from one of my old mans favourite expressions...

"I see", said the blind man.
"Bullshit" said the deaf-mute.
And the man with no legs walked away in disgust.