Workshop

The Shed Saga

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 Ongoing Saga of the Workshop

 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 [...]

A Small Welding Porject

This is the start of a laorgely non-woodworking project. I am building a chook house which will a welding project. I am recycling steel from a railing which once adorned the front of a house. The railing was over engineered and made form good quailty steel. The first part has been joing some 2inch square tube to make uprights for the chook enclosure. I made a jig so that i could join the lengths  and keep then straight.

A grinding bench in Sketchup

I keep fiddling about with designing things in Sketchup. Its a steep learning curve to start with particularly as I tend to conceive and design in my head. The attached images are from a grinding that I made for my shed. I have limited space so I try where possible to make things mobile. The idea for this was to keep my bench grinder, wet sharpener and slow speed grinder all in the one place. I set about designing this all in Sketchup. The final design did of course alter as I built it. The main difference is the middle shelf isn't full width. I made a space to accommodate a thickness planer that I own. The Sketchup model  did help me visualise the project and helped with material sizes. I'm currently working on a base for my new table saw which I hoping will be more detailed.  

By |April 29th, 2016|Categories: Tools and Jigs|Tags: |0 Comments

Woodworking from Sweden in 1923!

The attached video from YouTube features woodworking from 1923. Filmed in Sweden it captures clog and spoon making in addition to the construction of a chair. All the men shown are old in this video so they all would have been born in the mid to late nineteenth century. Whilst I don't read Swedish it looks as though the film was made to capture fading trades. It really is a fantastic glimpse into the recent past. I don't know the origin of the video I have embedded the YouTube for interest.

New Triton Workcentre MK7

Hi I was cruising assorted woodworking videos on youtube and came across a review of of the New Triton work centre MK7. Besides being surprised to see a new workcentre I was also interested to hear the man from Triton talk about the company. Bearing in mind this  is an English video.He talks about their research and development headquarters being in York. He acknowledges the origins of the company as Australian. He also talked about their sister brand GMC thats a blast from the past. I have seen a few Triton reviews from the UK and it seems as though they are positioned as a premium brand. The workcentre seems interesting although they are like other tool brands trying to lock you into their ecosystem. The basic workcentre is little more than a portable table. There are drop on tables one that turns it into a router table and  another making it  saw for cutting flooring or smaller pieces. The table saw is better than the series 2000 that I have as it has a tiltable blade. However they are still using a variation of the fence similar to the series 2000. I think that is a bit dated. There was also talk of more tools to come. Any way judge for yourself have a look at the video

A long absence

Just noticed that I haven't posted anything here for quite a while, since January 1st. I have been too busy working and doing things in the shed to find time for posting. I have made some benches and a whole lot of drawers to better organise my tools and stuff. I watch quite a few YouTube channels that feature a variety of woodworkers. Many of theses content creators, love the jargon, spend quite a bit of time on projects for their workshops. I must be guilty of the same except that I never seem to have the time to make a video or even compile the few photos that I take on my mobile phone. I keep promising myself that I will get around to creating some content. Perhaps I am just too busy to have time to edit and bung the stuff up on YouTube or whatever. The Bench pictured in this post was created in Sketchup. It been useful creating specfic projects using Sketchup. In the case of the bench it did speed up the build. Mostly because I used the dimensions from the scale model which took some of the guess work and on the fly  calculations out. The internal shelf was modified so this is in fact version 2.0. I then took the time to revise the sketchup model to reflect the changes. Grinder Bench

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