In thirty years of teaching, I’ve learned (and sometimes failed to remember) the value of preparation beforehand and flexibility once things get started. I’ve been doing a lot of preparation for my upcoming class. Materials, logistics, and many other things. Much of it involves thinking through processes in detail with the student point-of-view in mind. […]Gouge Thoughts: Sharpening, Sweep, Size
Have you ever wondered how shellac is made. Watch the video and see how shellac is made in India. https://youtu.be/iEkKwOWZS_E?si=UwwhKSRLv4QXIaVH
The ongoing saga of getting the shed set up. I'm just a month short of 2 years since we moved into our new house. During this time I put in a concrete floor in the shed and built a new rear wall. I've been slowly adding benches and storage. I think now the end is in sight. I'm gradually unpacking all my tools and I can now find things. I managed to get a steel frame to put my drill press on. It is an open frame and I've been able to make a set of drawers to fit underneath. I have used melamine covered chipboard as It's a relatively cheap material and strong and easy to cut up on the table saw. I have connected it all with confirmat screws which hold the drawer and cupboard together much more strongly than chipboard screws. I had also built a 600 mm wide cupboard to fill a space in the shed but much to my horror the drawers would never run properly. I just assembled the drawers and discovered that I'd cut the base out of square. I have a Bosch GTS contractor saw which for the most part works well. But when you go beyond 33 cm width in cutting you have to rely on a secondary fence. I seem to be in the habit of forgetting to lock that secondary fence which means that the fence drifts while I'm cutting. This explained why I hadn't cut the basis of the two drawers very accurately. I was able to reuse the material from these two drawers in making the above mentioned cover to fit under the drill press stand. Along with remaking the out of [...]
The never ending saga of my 3D printer. I have a Creality 3D v2 printer. I have modified it several times including changing the extruder, upgrading the z axis with an additional lead screw and stepper motor. I've also replaced the printing bed with a removable magnetic type. Additionally, I have added a probe which sets the level of the bed before each print. This creates a mesh which accounts for variations in the bed. You'd think this would have been enough to get me out of trouble and have smooth and easy printing time after time. However, recently I could hear a strange noise as I was printing. To my horror the wires to the secondary z axis stepper motor were rubbing against the bed levelling screws. This resulted in the bed screws unwinding. The result left the bed swinging side to side as it was printing. Started printing again and several times the filament got jammed. I then had a print that was running very smoothly. However, it stopped or seemed to stop about halfway through the print and the printer just kept running. The problem seemed to be the extruder I upgraded. It was actually grinding through the filament or it was catching. I left it overnight and then came back to it the next day. Sleep helps with problems. I then noticed that nearly all the screws on the extruder were loose. e. In fact, the two halves of the guide driver bushes were not lined up. This meant that the filament was being effectively ground as it was going through and then it would catch and just keep spinning until the filament was nearly broken. Preventing the filament from going into [...]
I have taken small steps into the world of flat pane carving. This is essentially relief carving on a flat surface and according to some this has been around since the times of the ancient Egyptians. I have been reading a book called A Norwegian Woodcarving Textbook by Odd Fauske. This is a translation of 1973 textbook from a course teaching traditional woodcarving in Norway. The book has been translated into English by Iain and Evaline Whittington. The layout of the book encompasses the original Norwegian text with English on the adjoining page. There are lots of plans that have been copied from the original which would require photocopying and the joining together. When looking for a link to the book I found that Iain Whittington has publishes another book on carving so I bought that as well. The other volume is called Amateur Woodcarving: A Guide. I decided to tackle a flat pane scene which dates back to teh 18th century. Unfortunately there is no photo of the original so some interpretation will be required. I have done this as part of a carving workshop I attended so I had some expert advice from a sculptor on how to proceed. I may do a post on the carving workshop at a later date. The plans in the book are for the most part spread over several pages. The design in the pictures below were spread over many pages and would have made a very large carving. Rather than trying to patch the various pages together I scanned the overview page and then imported it into photoshop elements and cleaned the image up. Following this the cleaned up image was imported into Inkscape a vector [...]
Welcome to my short journey on pickling or curing olives. I watched a YouTube video from a guy in Australia that was very helpful in setting me up to pickle olives. The ingredients are relatively simple, water, salt, and of course olives. The other key ingredient is time. This isn't an overnight job. You need a few weeks to produce your olives. I sourced the olives from a friend's place that has quite a few olive trees. However, she is not inclined to use them. So I went over with some buckets and a ladder and picked a couple of half buckets of olives. The aforementioned YouTube video made me an expert because some of the olives would appear from his description to be Kalamata olives. The other olives were round. Ladder and Bucket Olives that were pitted Olives in Brine Pitted olives in Brine Sterilised Flavouring , Salt, Mixed Herbs & White Wine Vinegar Packed Jars Sealed and Ready I decided for better or worse to stone the round olives. I did this manually and it took me about an hour or so to do about half a9 l bucket. They were then rinsed and then put in a bucket with about half a cup of salt. The other olives, the so-called Kalamata olives I just washed and then put them in another bucket with about the same amount of salt and waited. Judging when the olives have been soaking in the brine for long enough is a matter of taste. The YouTube guy recommended simply tasting them and when they are no longer bitter, they're ready to be put in jars. In the case of the pitted olives this took about 3 weeks. [...]
This article talks about the discovery of the oldest wood carving found in Britain, aged at around 6000 years old. The carving, which is believed to have been made by Neolithic or Early Bronze Age people, was found in a pile of rubble during construction work on a housing development in eastern England. The carving, which appears to represent an anthropomorphic figure, is a significant find as it sheds light on the life and beliefs of the people who lived in Britain during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/07/oldest-carved-piece-of-wood-to-be-found-in-britain-dates-back-6000-years
I've erected a new garden shed in the backyard. This is so that we can get rid of our paid storage.The shed we selected comes from a company called ABSCO and is fully engineered and ready to assemble. I've already assembled one of these sheds so a second one really wasn't a big challenge. I didn't even need to look at the videos on YouTube. When completed the shed measures 2.26 m by 1.52 m. It's 1.8 m at the front and slopes backwards. This means that if it is raining, at least water won't drip on your head as you open the door. The shed has one door which is hinged. We found a space in the backyard surrounded by some low retaining walls which fitted the shed perfectly. I had to raise the height of the retaining walls to ensure that leaf litter won't accumulate around the sides of the shed. Luckily, this was simply the matter of adding another permapine sleeper. The existing retaining walls uses a modular system which was easy to add more sleepers to. The area where the shed will go has pavers on the ground. I've actually used the supplied brackets and dynabolts (10x 50 mm ) to attach the shed to the pavers. To reduce water intrusion on the floor, I have decided to lay down some plastic sheeting on top of the pavers. I then paver over with some 40mm pavers and thereby raise the level of the floor. The shed is primarily to store stuff that we have in a storage unit currently and to do this I'm putting in some cheap metal shelving to store the stuff. Since I've erected the shed. The weather [...]
So yet another adventure in the world of 3D printing. This time I have coupled my woodturning hobby and 3D printing in one little item. This item is a cleaner for a Morse number two taper. Rather than designing one myself, I scoured the internet and eventually discovered some items on thingiverse.com. The details can be found here. The most type of cleaner that I settled on took about 2 1/2 hours to print. I was a little disappointed in the print this time as the handle had embossed writing. In the end, the writing appeared as an artefact on the handle. So what I'm missing is something that actually says Morse number two. I of course know what this item is for so it's not really a problem. Because of the artefacts on the handle, I had to spend some time cleaning the handle up with some sandpaper. The taper itself was fairly clean, although I did run a knife over it just to get some small bumps off. The cleaner works really well in the Morse taper. I've included a link to a short YouTube video of the Morse taper cleaner in action. Cleaning the taper is an ongoing issue with wood turning lathes because the Morse tapers tend to get clogged up with sawdust. So now I have a nice little tool that sits in the drawer under my lathe ready for the next time I need to quickly clean the Morse taper. The tool in the lathe handle sticking out The cleaning portion pf the tool being inserted in the tailstock https://youtu.be/1T7BCVlZGxI
The ongoing saga of me trying to establish a new workshop at the new house. I've written about it previously on this blog. It's been nearly 10 months since we moved into the house and I thought that I would have been up and running long before this. I finally finished the rear wall. The rear wall is now both insulated and painted. The interior wall is lined with plywood as I did with the sidewall. I will varnish the wall before starting to hang things on it. All the wiring has been run for an excessive amount of power outlets, one of the outlets will have USB charging inbuilt. I've also pre-wired for a light above the bench with a switch just inside the door. The next phase will be painting the wall with varnish or should I say varnishing the wall. then I will commence building a bench across the back wall. I am thinking about putting some drawers under the bench to store things but making sure that the bench top overhangs so I can clamp things to the edge. I will also be fitting a bench vice. I'm hoping that this will be a practical and useful space because I don't really feel like rebuilding it after this. As always there are some photos attached to this post showing the progress so far. I'm hoping when I get the workshop up and running that I will do a collage of all the photos I've taken through the build. It's been too hard to try to video the progress because I've got too much stuff in the way. Every time I work in the shop I have to play a massive game [...]