debor054

In the 'tradition' of my last birthday , Axminster Tools and their free next day delivery got the better of me - again! I treated myself to a few 'shiny things' ... as I've said 'It's an addiction!'. Firstly, a Lie Nielsen no#4 Iron bodied smoothing plane . I decided against the Bronze body as this more than meets my needs for a smoother. It has the standard A2 blade and I have the option of a high angle frog at a later date if needed. My 'beater' Stanley no#4 will be kept set rough, as that's all its capable of anyway to be honest.  Secondly, an imperial Lie Nielsen Dowel Plate . I have some riven Oak and Walnut  stock that will make nice draw bore pegs for Mortise & Tenon joints and dowels for boxes etc.. The other items include, a really posh Cap Iron screw driver which is lovely to hold and prevents scratching up your nice new premium planes as the brass collar captures the large screw head. A joiners Scratch Awl which unfortunatel...

Yesterday was my birthday, and it seems that my girlfriend has secretly been practising her dovetails ... in cake!

I decided to make use of my newly acquired antique oak mainly to see what it will look like when planed and finished. I also decided some more dovetails wouldn't do me any harm. So, in the same style as my last dovetailed box  I got started. I wont go into great detail as the build process has obviously been covered before. Usual drill - cut the four pieces to make the box sides and shoot them to exact length. Exact length being - two pairs, each pair being exactly the same size - I didn't bother to measure actual length. I also made the effort to avoid all knots and only used clear straight grained pieces of Pine. The next stage, mark out the dovetails, I'm still a tails first guy... and ... I got to try the new Poor Mans Moxon vice out properly. My brain obviously hadn't woken up yet ... Look at my 'waste marks' ... phew! Luckily, I realised what I had done, before grabbing the saw! I got the tails cut and chiselled out without any further mishap. Wow! ..What...

Just a quick gloat  post...  A member of my girlfriends family discovered these pieces of very old Oak while clearing out his garden shed and kindly 'donated' them to me. Apparently, it was an antique chest of drawers that originated from the very house I now live in.  While most of the pieces are a bit scarred, cracked and holed, with some careful trimming and planing and general TLC, I'm sure I can get some good use out of them. It's not every day I get work with woods other than Pine and this Oak already has built in 'character'.  

Up until now I have been struggling with work holding on my little bench and its poor excuse for a face vice, especially if I need to hold a wide board for dovetailing for example. My usual solution is to stand the end of the board on something below the vice and pinch one side of the board in the end of the vice and use an offcut to minimise the vice racking and hope it holds... Far from ideal! Therefore, with my last dry (it hasn't stopped raining over here in the UK) scaffold board, I decided to make a poor mans version of the Moxon Vice  (Utube). Life started out by rough cutting the board to length. Raised beds function really well as saw horses. While sawing the board the cross cut saw started to bind indicating that there seemed to be a lot of internal stresses inside the wood. I had to finish the cut from the opposite side, at least its only a rough cut.   The next step was to rip the board into two pieces using my 5 ppi rip saw.   Again the saw started to b...