debor054

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...

While making the simple bevelled wall board for my ' Ships Clocks ' a few days ago, it occurred to me that the very same design might make a good (albeit chunky) box lid.  My stock (scaffold board Pine - of which I have a lot of it! ) wood is around 1 1/2" thick, the simple design allows me to use what I have without having to waste most of the wood making it thinner. It also saves me a lot of sweat with a hand plane! It also occurred to me that I have never made a simple Rabbet jointed box... I completely forgot to take any pictures during the build as things progressed pretty quickly. A rough description of the steps I took are below: Box Carcass Cut four pieces (2 long , 2 short) of cheap (pre-planed) Pine to length on the bench hook. 'Shoot them' to exact lengths with square ends on the shooting board. Mark and cut the shoulder line of each rabbet on the short sides of the two long boards (the front and back of the box) again using the bench hook -...

Wow it's been nearly two months since my last blog post! Will anyone still be reading this? While I have been back home from my yacht delivery for a few weeks, I have been busy building a new wooden garden fence and spending my time with Bible study. Finally, the other day the lure of the tools enticed me back to my wood working room to build something. Nothing complicated, just something quick and dirty to get me started again. A simple bevel edged board to wall mount my beloved ships clock & barometer. These little treasures of mine have been with me on all my sailings, including three single handed Atlantic crossings, so they mean a lot to me. It will be nice to still enjoy them now I'm a 'land lubber'. Anyway, I'm back - I haven't forgotten the blog and there will be more small projects to come, I promise.

After attempting my first dovetails around November last year, I haven't built upon the experience or attempted any other dovetails since. The Small Pine Chest was (and still is) my favourite project so far and I think I got very lucky with some quite tidy joints for a beginner. I decided it was time to attempt to repeat the experience, almost knowing ahead of time that the first time was a fluke, and so to prepare for disappointment. The idea for this project came from a small piece of Oak I had which was an offcut from the first ever thing I made . I decided it would make a nice lid for a box, and this with a length of 6" wide Pine board formed my stock. I wont bore you too much with the starting process, needless to say that the bench hook, tenon saw and square, chisel and knife saw to cutting the pine to length, before using my no#4 plane and shooting board to shoot the ends clean. Having all my components to size, I started to get a feel for the finished box. After cutt...

We're almost done ... Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Ok so where are we ... Two stools, with all the joinery cut. Both are structurally complete with all the components dry fit in place. The next step   is to round over all the sharp edges and put some shape into the seat ends and the centre brace ends. I used my t(rusty) old Stanley 102 block plane to break the aris of all the edges and my no#4 to bevel the seat ends. I made sure to sharpen before starting as this is all end grain work. Sand paper and a file was also used to smooth the edges where appropriate. The final shaping isn't complete as there will have to be further 'clean up' after gluing to finish it. I also planed the components and done any final tweaking to make sure the joinery was tight. Time for Glue Up... I hate this stage! No matter how many times I do a dry run rehearsal and get everything ready, I always seem to get stressed and panic and it never goes smoothly. Regular readers may recall I had a nightmare ...