ROMANUS NUMERI

It has to be said, I'm a bit of a history nerd, period. It doesn't really matter what sort of history; I'd probably draw the line at something really esoteric like the role of Confucius in ancient China or whatever it was called then, but you get the drift. I like noodling around in the past and trying to imagine what it was really like 'back in the day' to use an oft quoted phrase.

I'm a sucker for a decent history series on the TV and there are some particularly good presenters such as Dan Snow and Lucy Worsley. Bettany Hughes does some excellent stuff as well:

...and great though she is, she does have a couple of outstanding attributes that make it very difficult for a chap to concentrate on the program for any sustained time. Another particular favourite is Professor Mary Beard:




.......who may not be quite so outwardly forthcoming as our Bettany, but this is what Wiki has to say about her:

'Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA, FRSL is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge'.

The Prof. has a very engaging style as she merrily cycles along the ancient Appian Way, stopping her red bike now and again at some obscure Roman tomb to read the Latin text, some 2000 or so years old. The salient point though, in case you missed it, is that she can read the inscriptions and tell us what that long dead Roman is saying to us in the present day.

Strangely, I'm in awe of her ability to decode those old texts; it's something that I would love to be able to do. Some people of my generation yearned to play the guitar and blast out all the Stones and Beatles riffs; I wanted to learn Latin and read the ancient inscriptions in Rome.

What though, (and you're right to wonder) has all this meandering got to do with wood mangling? Most of the time, I scribble all over the work in pencil to mark stuff (face side, edge etc) and it's especially useful to use sticky dots:




...to identify the corners of a drawer say, when cutting dovetail joints, but at some point the dots and pencil scrbblings have to be removed; then you're stuck! A really elegant way to mark which bit goes with what is to use a 3mm chisel:







...to inscribe some ROMANUS NUMERI, remembering that '9' is IX not VIIII as I once did!

I think Professor Beard would approve.

The Last Retort

Many years ago, when I built the current workshop I didn't really commit too many brain cells to the placement of the workbench once the build had been completed and it was ready to install.  I naturally thought, as you do, that in front of a South or East facing window would give oodles of natural light.

And it did! 

So much so that that there was far too much sunlight falling onto the bench surface and I almost needed dark anti-glare snow goggles to see anything. Within the hour it had been hoiked over to the other side of the 'shop where it now happily remains. The upshot of this epic removals episode (the bench is a bit 'heavy') was to ensure that I had enough artificial light to see what I was doing which for the most part was easy enough to sort out, but on some specific occasions shadows were created which caused difficulties. 

Standard twin fluorescent lights provide the 'shop lighting, though these 'ye oldy' fashioned tubes are no longer available in the DIY stores and have been replaced with LED equivalents that just slot into place in the original fitting. An old 4' tube is also mounted directly over the bench and gives a general pool of light over the top but it's not enough so some time ago I purchased a couple of these lamps from Axminster:

 These little jobbies are quite superb, having six LEDs within the housing and provide enough light for them to be used in an operating theatre.

But they're still not enough!

Cutting 'shovetails' is a specific job where a beam of light needs to be directed in front of the saw; the lights shown wouldn't provide such a beam so I was a bit stuffed, to put it mildly. I'd used all sorts of lights in the past to shine light on the saw blade with little success.  Then the little grey cells, or what's left of them, aligned and I suddenly remembered that just before I left a past life donkeys years ago, I happened, by the purest off chance😁, to 'acquire' a test tube holder and widget from one of the labs.

As last resort, I used a chrome steel bar from an old printer and fitted it to a heavy oak block onto which went the fully adjustable 'widget' to hold a rather excellent little clip on light from Ikea.

The light is now directed to exactly where it's need; it doesn't prevent me from cutting on the wrong side of the line (it has been known), but it helps.

 

Notes of white spirt with a linseed oil finish...

 A blog hasn't been forthcoming recently and is probably a little overdue, so apologies to those unfortunate enough to have been biding time with imminent anticipation over the last few days, but there's been 'stuff' to do which is outside the remit of The Blokeblog...such as painting and gardening.

These days t'interweb and especially places like Instagram seem to have no end of snippets of handy (or otherwise) information for the aspiring woodmangler or not as the case may be.  They're all intended to be short cuts; interesting, quirky techniques designed to save time, money or both.

Sometimes they're clever, ingenious almost and worth committing to memory, that's provided of course that you or I (in this case) have got a few spare functioning brain cells left. In many instances though, what's shown in the clip is bloody dangerous, especially when it shows large lumps of spinning steel perilously close to pink, fleshy digits.

When I was a callow 'youf' these little snippets were called 'tips n'tricks'; modern, savvy parlance refers to them as a 'hack' but the only time I've ever had a so called 'hack' is when I've had a stinking cough and felt like death warmed up.

Here's a question though.  How many times have you opened a tin of varnish or Osmo PolyX (which skins over at the drop a proverbial hat) and found that there's a thick, armour plated skin on the surface that requires a sharp knife to remove? Once you've removed it there's a better than even chance that it'll drop back into the now gloopy liquid and then you've got to fish it out with a stick, not to mention all the usable stuff that you've got to try and recover back into the tin. Being a tad parsimonious, it used to irk me beyond belief!

Recently though, I came across a really good 'hack' and for what it's worth, all you need is an empty wine bottle, a plastic funnel and one of those clever little jobbies that suck most of the air out of the bottle. Being partial to a glass or three of the 'vino collapso' a half empty bottle of wine is a thing that simply doesn't exist; a snowball would have a better chance in Hell.

 

It's the air that causes the contents to skin over; remove most of the air and the contents will stay pristine! The stuff in the bottle is a rubbing polish and consists of equal parts of white spirit, boiled linseed oil, polyurethane varnish and Osmo PolyX. It's been in there for around three months and shows no sign of deteriorating.

It's not though, recommended to decant a glass to accompany a thick, juicy steak.