Not that there is anything in particular going on — I’ve been puttering around but haven’t been updating the blog simply due to time restrictions due to work. I’m traveling again, but may be done for the remainder of the year now.
I have more beer openers to do, the book case for kindergarten is still waiting on the sewing portion to get done and I am lining up a bunch of pen gifts for the holidays. I have not started design of the cabinetry my daughter has asked for specifically for her dining area (she want’s a coffee bar type set up). I will be using sketch-up in detail there again and hope to get into that very soon.
Oh, and we (I) may be setting up a hand tool club at the Leesburg Va Woodcraft. I expect that will happen after the start of the year. A bunch of things will happen then – including bench and toolbox construction classes as part of the change to the class line-ups. I’m going to spread out classes, I hope, to let folks expand across the year, rather than just having me repeat the same intro classes all the time…
found a solution for use of the plane stop on my Nicholson workbench. Since the plane stop is a 3×3″ block of maple that just protrudes above the surface, I can basically hold a piece of wood against the stop, and plane directly into the stop. All the pressure (like with bench dogs on my Roubo, etc.) holds the wood in place. What I found was that if I used the doe foot to brace a piece of wood against the wooden plane stop, the width is too wide to help trap that end in place. So, after several months of looking around, and reading Chris S. I found that the next part I wanted to try was a metal edge that would mount flush to the top of the stop, and just protrued a few teeth forward to brace the wood when working it with the does foot. Now keep in mind, that when I use the does foot, I’m really using it to help with traverse planing activity. This pushes across the grain, and is what allowed the stop end to slip a bit. I just received an insert that I picked up on eBay, so I’ve not yet tried it. I will be drilling a vertical hole in the top of one end of the stop (it’s a 5/8″ diameter post) to try this out. Really looking forward to this working and me not having to try to buy and shape a piece of steel!
a mantle for my niece, that I’ve waited to get started until I could get back into the shop. However, when I went down I was shop-blocked by the shop — it’s just full of stuff from the other projects, lots of cut-offs (which I finally started weeding out!) and I’ve got boxes and buckets of stuff that has been acquired over the past couple years that need gone through. And finally, I’ve been collecting stuff for the past decade(s) and haven’t really gone through and weeded out.
Since I built the bench last fall, I’ve used it a few times for demonstrations, and am starting to use it for projects at home as well (in addition to my Roubo bench). There were a couple of construction details that I needed to clean up that I finally took care of yesterday.
Brian's Workbench 