gchpaco

The table is nearly complete; doing smoothing on the top now. It's cold out there, but it never hits me until I stop working. Tired.

Here are the promised handle pictures.

This is my grandfather's chisel, which my dad inherited sans handle. I decided to make a quickie out of some oak I had around, and it came out pretty well. I really need a lathe, though.

Note the lack of a ferrule. Carving a cylinder out of a block of wood was hard enough once. It means that this chisel, while fine for paring (hand pushing) is unsuitable for being hit with a mallet.

Today, because I was at a loss for something useful to do, I started working on some handles for some of my Dad's socketed chisels; these have been without handles at least since my grandfather died and Dad inherited them. Making octagonal chisel handles is not that difficult; my hand tools mailing list has been talking about them recently, with several web pages up on the subject. Due to dinner I haven't gotten any further than cutting some of the blanks out of the hunk of red oak I'm making them out of. That, however, was the first time I had to use Dad's newly sharpened panel saw in anger, and on something that he said would probably cause his chop saw or radial arm saw to choke. It turns out, much to my joy, that cutting 2" × 8" hunks of hard oak is not that difficult if the saw is sharp.

Incidentally, the reason I'm going for octagonal rather than some of the turned handles you see on some of those pages is pretty simple; I am presently lathe-less and turning a square block of wood into an octagonal block of wood is as easy as planing the corners.

Today I picked up a Black & Decker Workmate of my very own, as a stopgap until I have room and resources to build my own workbench.

This post is not about the Workmate.

I got home and set it up and wanted to go out to my (ha ha) back yard and try it out. I was stymied on the way out by the discovery that one of my exterior doors had managed to jam itself in an extremely firm way. Shoving led to opening the lock led to taking the lock apart led to finally hammering the pins out of the hinges, and I discovered that said door had managed to go out of true (i.e. flat and with all the sides perpendicular to each other) in every single way a piece of wood can warp. I was quite impressed.

So I took the door out back and shot it set it up on the Workmate and started looking at what to do about it. I got the Big Box of Planes out and decided that the cupping in the face, while obnoxious, was beyond my ability to really fix assuming the door was even solid. I was pretty sure it was solid because it weighed a fucking ton, but I wasn't totally sure what it made out of, and in any case that would have been a whole lot of work. I did figure I could do something about the sides being way out of whack and that it would solve my immediate problem, and started planing away.

That jointer, the #6 rustbucket? It's big and heavy and ugly and worth every penny.

Long story short, I have a functional exterior door again, significantly more experience planing things, a newfound affection for my #71 router plane, and a big-ass pile of wood shavings (foot inserted for scale). I'm calling it a qualified success because, hey, I have a door that opens and closes again. Qualified because the door is still out of true, causing issues, and the lock mechanism is all funky.

Dear #5 plane,

I'm sorry I ever impugned the quality of your steel, calling you a rustbucket. Because I just took possession of a #6 that apparently hung out underwater in some guy's shed for about thirty years, or something. I think the only reason the rust is only surface deep is because the other rust protected the rest of the iron. It is ... really something to behold. You are a marvel of survivability in contrast.

Graham

In other news, I fail at dovetailing. I cut the tails and pins out fine, but they didn't mesh right and the fact that I cut both way too thin became apparent. Oh well, better luck next time, and I think I know what I did wrong. And it wasn't a bad show for the first time I've ever done it.

Edit: when I tried it a second time, it worked much better and faster, although it was a looser fit, right up until I attacked it with a jack plane trying to remove the bits that stuck out. If I'd glued it even that would have been fine. I've not mastered dovetailing by any means but I can do it now.

I still have all my fingers and didn't make any gratuitous errors during the cutting phase, so I can only regard this as an unqualified success.