Compression

Some progress was made yesterday evening on the Media Unit...that was after I'd spent most of the day finishing off the last of the Japanese chisels from Matthew at Workshop Heaven. Some more work is still needed on them, but that can be done in 'slow time' as there's no desperate urgency for them to be finished. It would be great if they were done and dusted, but I need to get hold of a few more sheets of coarser 3M papers to prep the backs.














You can see from the first pic that the veneers have gone into the shute to plane each adjacent bookmatched pair. This really is the only way to give yourself a fighting chance of a decent join...planing them freehand in the vice is a bit of a non-starter! The 'lay-up' was then produced (in the second pic) and shows one complete and the other yet to be made. If you look carefully at the one with the roll of veneer tape on it, you can see that as the tape has dried out, it's pulled the veneer into that curved shape...a good sign that the joints are mating.














Finally, once both were done, they were glued with TBIII, popped into the AirPress vacuum bag for a bit of concentrated suction and left for around three hours. Although the pump itself is a great piece of kit, the welds on the bag, especially at the open end are utter rubbish...hence the blocks and crampage to get it air tight. In case you're wondering, I always cover the sharp corners with thick pieces of paper from magazines just to relieve the stress.

Discussing stress, Gareth, my No1 son is home for the weekend and yesterday morning succeeded in munching his way through a whole, unopened bag of dried apricots.

I'll wager you a £1 to a pinch of something unpleasant that his insides this morning are under considerably less stress than the contents of my vacuum bag...