25 January 2009

A Clean Sweep

It's been one of those days, you know, the sort when things go OKish but not quite as good as you'd hoped...anyway that's what it's been like today. I'm making this small box for my new 'driver and progress today has been a bit slow, lots of seemingly quirky little things that add up cumulativly throughout the day so that by the end of it, you know you've had a crap session in the 'shop. Nothing that's gone absolutely astray, but I was doing things in not quite the 'right' way so that the result I wanted didn't happen. F'r'instance, yesterday I was doing a little bit of turning in rosewood...I had to repeat it three times before I got it right. I glued the box together as well and hoping to cut corners, I put it on a radiator in the house to speed things along and guess what...the mitres opened, so they had to be reglued with some epoxy and left overnight. Today I was making the sliding lid. Again, I had to do it three times before I got the bloody thing right. The base didn't go according to plan either. Because of the internal fitting on this box I'd forgotten to make the rebate for the base, so I had to modify a bearing cutter to sort it out, with the result that I'd finished up with a rebate only 3mm deep...fine you might say, but not when I'd veneered a 6mm bit of ply last night. Stuff it through the bandsaw to chop it down a bit?...wrong! 'Cos the blade needs replacing, it came out skewed, so that got chopped into little bits. Nothing for it then but to make up a new base, which I did from Rosewood and Mahogany veneers, 'cept the AirPress bad had a tiny leak (easy enough to fix with tape) so it didn't pull enough vacuum and the glue didn't take.
Buggeration!
All in all, not the happiest of times in the 'shop this weekend, so things can only get better. One thing I know for absolute certain though and that's as the mess in 'shop gets worse, the standard of my work takes a nose dive...I can't seem to work well surrounded by crap, clutter and being knee deep in shavings, so I'll be out later on with the dustpan and brush.

1 comment:

Kari Hultman said...

Sounds like the type of shop day I know all too well.

My day's going pretty well, though. I got to add a new word to my vocabulary: buggeration. ; )