The Three Bears

This will be the last entry on the Blog as I'm off on my hols for a couple of weeks.
We have three matching suitcases, a tiny one, a medium sized one and a huge one. Always prudent to let SWIMBO have the biggest one...'nuff said.

Incinerated nasturtiums

Having finished off the Teak table the other day, I'm at a bit of a loose end at the moment in the 'shop. I don't really want to start another major project 'till after I come back from my hols, but I did manage to earn a few quid by doing another water colour drawing (this time on dowel joints) for Michael that'll go into the mag in due course.

I also made myself an up-market bench hook, as the old one was getting a bit chewed up. This one though, was made with a replaceable slidy bit underneath the saw teeth, so that it can be made as 'good as new' when it gets munched away, simply by slotting in another length of timber.

Anyone who's been in this sort of situation will know how it is...one half of the 'grey matter' is starting to anticipate going away, whilst the other bit is casting an appraising look over the 'shop, with nothing really in mind, but trying to find something to do.

So there I am, scuffling through the shavings, hands in pockets, with an occasional 'oooing' or 'aarring' and much sucking of teeth, feeling a bit like Compo really... not finding anything useful to do, but hoping that with enough prodding and poking in odd corners, something will turn up.

Then I spotted something...something crucial.

Now I'm not incinerating anything, far be it from it from me to cast nasturtiums, but... my plane cleaning brush that was given to me by a pal is no longer residing it the Trekky pot on my bench...it's gorn, disappeared, shuffled and I've spent the last few days as Compo trying to find it!

I'm bereft of my brush, so if anyone knows where it is, answers on a postcard please.

There's usually always a silver lining though. SWIMBO's just rung up to say that my new shoulder plane has just been delivered, so I've got a new toy to play with tonight!

Parcel of Lumpyness

The table was finally completed last night, so herewith a couple of pics. It's not the most impressive thing I've ever done but it keeps SWIMBO happy and that's the most important thing.
The more I look at the top though, the more I come to dislike it...it's a lumpy, mis-shapen thing that's been crudely churned out in some flea bitten, rat infested ally in the back streets of Tripoli (or somewhere similar) I found out last night that it's not even level, the thing is in 'wind' and it's also not a constant thickness all the way across...some bits of it are 2mm thinner than others. The only way that it can be secured to the top is by a copious application of Blu-tack which can then be squashed down by the offending 'sticky up' bits, so that it at least appears to be flat...ish.
However, it's all done and dusted now, so I'll be able to move onto the next project after I return from my wanderings in Cyprus, which I have to say, I'm rather looking forward to...

Brownie points...don't you love 'em?

A few pics of the on-going progress on this table. It's almost complete now and I'm just applying the final coats of Osmo Poly-X oil to the exterior. This one has been quite a 'journey', not least because there's been nothing square or regular about the top, which has compounded the difficulty in making it, not that it's a particularly difficult piece to make...just plain bloody awkward.
The first couple of pics show how the rounded tenons are made using firstly a skew chisel for the ends and then a small shoulder plane used very carefully to shape the sides, after which it's a bit of detail sanding. Next down shows the Mirka Abranet hand sander in use, which is really effective with the following shot showing how the cross-halving joint (at least the second half of it) had to be marked out...not easy!
The final two pics show the Lamello C2 in action to make the biscuit slots to hold the wide top 'X' in place and the last shot is a pic of the gluing of one of the four end frames.
This has been a tricky one and I'm glad that it's gone reasonably well...there are always some faults in any project and this one's no exception, the main one being that on the first main assembly glue up, it went together like a dog's hind leg and like an eejit newbie, I forgot to check for squareness with the result by the time I'd realised that the thing was about a mile out of square, the glue had long set. I guess it's one of those things that I'm going to have to live with, but I'll still find it intensely bloody annoying whenever I see it...but it's not going through the bandsaw.
The main and overiding thing is though, I've collected a barrow load of Brownie points from SWIMBO, who as it happens, is in a remarkably good mood at the moment 'cos she's booked a holiday in Cyprus so as of next weekend, I'm being dragged off to warmer climes.
It's a tough life, but sometimes a bloke's gota do what a blokes gota do...

Numeracy?..pah!!

The most simple and logical things seem to utterly defeat me sometimes, things which as a maker I ought to be able to do with relative ease. The problem is that I get myself immersed in the 'nitty gritty' of the build and forget that the smallest, tiniest detail like marking what goes where ought to be stamped indelibly on the wood and more importantly, on my forehead! You'd think that it's a pretty straight forward thing to number the pieces on a project as it's made, and probably more important on this one as each individual bit will only fit in one place.

Did I do that?...did I work in a logical, sequential, orderly manner? Sort of... in a roundabout manner of speaking as I did number all the bits at the beginning in some kind of ramshackle order. The trouble is I re-numbered them again and got myself totally confused as to which bit goes where. Then just to get myself into total meltdown, I re-numbered the bits again last night for the third bloody time. What I'd done was to erase all the pencil markings when I was cleaning up the frames, so last night, just to make absolutely sure that they're not going to come for me before this job is completed, I assembled it again and marked all the joints. I usually do this using a 6mm chisel and mark them using Roman numerals in parts that will eventually be covered, say the tenons.


In that way there's no danger of erasing important details with the untimely application of a bit of sandpaper, unlike the application here of a bit of sensible logic, which in this particular case, got completely wiped out!

Nummeracy?...pah!!...more like brain ache.

Mufflers

Things went very well this weekend in the 'shop, so that by COP last night I'd managed to get the first coat of finish on one of the frames, so there's light as they say, at the end of the tunnel. Gluing the four frames was straight forward as it usually always is with a bridled joint...it's just arranging the cramps so that you can get one directly over the faces of the joint to get a good fit that sometimes requires a bit of juggling. I use Titebond III for the first time on the teak (remembering to de-grease with some meths) and I found it really very good...I like the viscosity of it as it allows you to spread it thinly and it has a slightly longer open time which is always a 'good thing' at glue up time.

The technique of picking up angles directly from the drawing worked well for both of the crosses, which were made without too much bother. The only slightly tricky moment was when I had to mark out the the halving joint on the lower cross, as the whole table had to be assembled and the two pieces lined up with a variety of squares but once that was done it was easy to route out each section, chop the shoulders and then glue.

Teak is strange stuff...some boards are dead true and easy to plane, other bits can be rowed and interlocked. Just by the merest chance, some parts of the frames have this interlocked figuring which defy a plane blade and need to be scraped to a decent finish. Not only that, a couple of bits are 'pippy' which means its really difficult to finish...unless the plane blade is razor sharp (which lasts about 10 seconds on teak) it just tends to slide across the surface without cutting. However despite the cussedness of the material, all frames were planed and scraped to a reasonable finish, after which I sanded them using my Abranet abrasives and pad connected to the 'shop vac. These are a bit of a revelation as all the dust is sucked up through the open coat paper so that it appears as if the surface isn't being sanded...there's absolutely no dust left on the surface of the timber, which is very odd. The only disadvantage is the high pitched whine from the small bore hose connected to the 'vac, but I suppose it's the lesser of two evils...at least you can cut down the noise with ear muffs!

Ponderings of a deeper kind

Sometimes things go well...and sometimes they
don't. No matter what you do, or how carefully you work, it can't be avoided, it's as if there's a little workshop gremlin sitting on your shoulder whispering evil nothings in your ear...you know the feeling! Whatever you try and do, everything seems to go pear shaped, one annoying little thing after another in a never ending procession, so that by even part way through, you just know that it's going to be a complete and unmitigated bloody disaster.

Such might have been the case with this top 'cross' arrangement, but I spent quite a while deeply pondering the best way to tackle it and so far, things have not gone awry but instead it's started to take shape quite well. The lipping and veneering went together in the normal way as it's a fairly straight forward process and one which I've done many times before.

Ultimately, I decided to cramp the main section directly on top of the drawing to mark off the angles at each end. These were then knifed and shot in with the LN No9, using a series of packers against the fence to ensure the correct angle was produced. The other advantage is of course that each end was square...always helpful. It was then merely a case of re-cramping to the drawing and marking out the two smaller pieces in much the same way, firstly to make the correct angle and then to plane the sides to the appropriate width to fit the particular end frame. The next stage is to mark out the position of the biscuits after which I should be able to cut them. I'd considered getting hold of a Domino at some point as at the moment they're quite a good deal at Axminster, but for this particular application a biscuiting is probably the better option.