Bird House - Tea Pot

 Having written 1128 posts over nearly a decade I have never really broken into the "Big Time". I am not surprised, I chose not to get involved in Video Blogging six or seven years ago when that was the coming thing, and I know that I am not so skilled a craftsman that the internet hangs on my every word.

  Today's blog is a clear example of why I am still here, but not a big noise on the net.

   A coupe of weeks ago I picked up an armful of discarded cedar deck boards. Cedar is nice to work with, especially with hand tools. I used some of the boards to knock out a planter for our back deck and now I am making a bird house.

  This bird house has been put together with glue and finishing nails and soaked with 1/1/1 finish.($). I enjoyed making this bird house which I will have my grand daughter paint when she is here for Christmas holidays. Why was the such an enjoyable project? I only used hand tools.  Cedar is wonderful to cut and plane. While making this project my shop smelled of cedar and the floor was covered with sweet smelling shavings. My shop looked like something from a children's story where a white haired Grampa is making something for someone special. Well....I am a white haired Grampa (Opa) and I was making it for my oldest grand daughter. 

  I have a shop filled with tools, some good, others excellent, both modern and traditional. With my full 'power tools' shop I could have knocked dozens of bird houses out in time it took to make this one.  All the saw dust would be collected in my shop vac system from my table saw and random orbital sanders and the product would be excellent. It would be efficient and praise worthy,  every yard has room for another bird house.

  Instead the process became the goal, not the product.  As long as a bird house emerged from the time in the shop, how fast it happened did not matter.

  So, I began rough cutting out the wood to length with a hand saw from my Grandfather's work shop, I'm 63 and I'm sure the saw is 25 years older than I am.  That saw built houses and boats, boxes and furniture when my Father was a little boy.  Once I got the boards roughed to length I used my Jack Plane to flatten then.  I created mounds of feather-like shavings and filled my shop with the aroma of  dry cedar. After I got the wood splinter free I cut everything to size. I have a rip saw from my Father's shop that is a joy to use and in dry soft wood, quite effortless.

I drilled some holes, drove some nails and used a nail set to sink the heads.  And voila a bird house is born.

  When you make a bird house don't just drill a random hole, find out what birds are in your area and drill an appropriate opening.  

 ***Also don't put a peg below the hole.  The birds that live there fly in and so don't need a peg, that don't climb into their homes. All the peg does is provide a place for a predator bird to perch while attacking eggs or baby birds.***

 The other thing I did was put a good, useful handle onto my lovely new tea pot.

  I have a copper wire core surrounded by small branches from our Mulberry bush wrapped in hemp cord. I'm not 100% convinced that this the the best look, I think the handle is too heavy for a delicate little pot but...it will do from now.

  The more I work in my shop lately the more and am moving away from noise and dust. It don't know if this is a fad or evolution.

cheers ianw

($) 1-1-1 finish is one part varnish,one part linseed oil and one part turpentine. It dries slowly but soaks in really well.

Flattening, Planing, Scrapping and Sanding

  The current project is a three legged stool using an ash round as the seat.

the half round marble table top is used as my 'flat' reference surface in the shop.
I found it put out as garbage by a neighbour one day, a real find.

  My Brother in Law cut down an ash tree a couple of seasons ago and generously gave me a dozen rounds of various sizes. The wood is  gradually getting turned in to cheese boards, clocks etc. This round will have three legs set in as a small side table/stool, plant stand.  The rounds were cut from the tree trunk with a chain saw and so are pretty rough. Even with skill and care a chain saw leaves plenty of marks on the wood.

   The  challenge is making the flat face smooth using a reasonable amount of time and effort.  Having now flattened several rounds I think I have arrived at the most efficient method.  

electric power planer.

 I bought this planer on clearance from a booth at a wood show a few years ago. It is fairly short and somewhat awkward to use but...it cost $10.00.  As a rule I don't use a power planer but for hacking away at end grain like this it works very well.  Once the face of the round is flattened somewhat,  hand scrappers are the next step.  Again the scrapper can be used aggressively but still controlled.  The final stage is random orbital sander time, 80 grit and up.

  The end grain planing leaves a pile of rough saw dust, not nice shavings.

   The legs are poplar 2 x 2's 14 inches long.  Initially, since the power planer was on the bench I used it to knock the corners off the legs before turning them on the lathe. Funnily enough the power planer was not the best tool for the job.

  Quickly I turned to using my jack plane to ease the  corners, and the result is much better for the shop's air, and as quick, in my opinion.  My Grand kids used to call the shavings feathers. They liked cedar feathers best, don't we all!

  It is quick, easy and quiet using a hand plane.

  It took about 20 minutes a leg to turn on the mini lathe, and sand ready to be set into the seat/top of the stool/table.

   Next, decide the leg angle, make a jig and drill the holes using my drill press. 

   Planning and set up will take longer than the job. 

cheers, ianw

  

A barrel making video and a Hand Plan Project

Barrel making video. 

   As I was relaxing last evening this video came up in mail box.  I think barrels are one of the most beautiful and useful wooden vessels.  I've seen them being made by hand in Colonial Williamsburg and seen various demonstrations at wineries and distilleries. There are many videos showing the special skills, tools and machines that make oak barrels and 'We Know Barrels' is long enough for one relaxed coffee.

  The part of the blog relating to my actual wood working is all about hand planing.  A while ago I made a bench top work table  (June 2016)  actually.  I used the portable top for rough work, carving and some clamping tasks.  It was only good for rough clamping as it was left rough and not very flat, until now.

 I decided I wanted this portable clamping top for more small assembly work and so I needed to get serious and flatten its surface.

work top with winding stick 

The final result is smooth with the  T-track mounted flush on two sides. With six 3/4 inch dog holes I'm able to cover all the angles when clamping on it or clamping it to my large work top.

  Initially the top of these boards was so rough I thought about using my belt sander but didn't want to deal with the noise or the dust so I opted to use my Veritas Scrub plane to knock down the really high spots. This panel is made from 2 x 4 soft wood and the scrub plane drove through it without any problems, it even flattens knots. I flatten both sides, but didn't bother smoothing the underside, flat was enough.

  Next  plane I used to flatten the top was my Anant Jack Plane.  I was for a time the Canadian Importer of Anant planes.  I found their planes to be good value and adequate for most carpenter's needs.  For my purpose the plane worked fine.  The blade is okay but would have to be upgraded if I used this plane by the hour.

  Both the scrub and jack planes are narrow.  The scrub plane is a modern design and the jack plane is a copy of an old Stanley model 5 but with a narrower blade.  

  

   Beside the Jack plane is my favourite plane, my low angle smoother. My Mom gave it to me for Christmas a few years ago and it is my 'go to' plane for anything requiring fine finish work. 

  The rabbets had been cut first on the table saw but now needed to be levelled and smoothed out.  For that I used my 1/2 inch  Varitas shoulder plane and my old flea market Stanley 192.

  The 1/2 inch shoulder plane is a must for a small shop. It is quicker and easier than setting up a router table for one of a kind operations or cleaning up a channel or shoulder.    The Stanley cost $10.00 at a flea market in Mennonite country, it had been broken and welded back together.  I checked it out carefully and measured to see that it was repaired square and decided to risk ten bucks.  It was money well spent.  Using those two planes I grooved and smoothed the shoulders for the T-track.

  End end result is awaiting a coat of wood sealer and I will be using it shortly. I have a couple of small boxes to make and the portable work top will give me a good surface to work on and let me move the whole project out of the way if I want to do something else.

Three very useful planes for a shop.

  The Stanley 192

and its little friend 

the 1/2 inch should plane.

cheers, ianw

Proportional Dividers - A Design Tool

  Lately I seem to have been taking on projects that required me to draw or at least design the object from a photo, a sketch or just an idea.  For my Grand daughters I drew some garden ornaments.

  The three year old and the five year old have different artistic styles, as you can see.  

    I am also working on the train planter and I have to design it from scratch.  For that project   I did sketches in 1/2 scale and then made full sized plans so I could see the spacing of the wheels particularly.  Doubling the size of a plan requires simple arithmetic.  Taking a design from a photograph and making it 20% larger involves more number crunching, or having the correct special tool.

 

Proportional Dividers 

  I made a set of Proportional Divider  from a piece of roasted maple.  With these dividers I can scale up or down by 4 times.  

  This video shows how to use Proportional Dividers beginning at ten minutes in.  If you have to scale drawings and don't have ready access to a photocopier there are other methods explained in the rest of the video.

Realistic Drawing Tutorial 

  When I watched this and a couple of other related videos I went on line to see what it cost to acquire my own Dividers.  Everything from a little to a whole bunch. Since I am thrifty, resourceful and have a basement full of tools, I made my own. I also plan to make a larger set for bigger projects.

 Making the dividers was a hand tool job.  I used my low cost jack plane and planing jig to shape the project,  then my finish plane to add the final touch. I cut the angles with a fine tooth saw and drilled the holes using the drill press.  Before I drilled the holes I taped the two pieces together to insure the alignment was exact.  My D.I.Y.  dividers  are not  a precision instrument but will provide consistent enough information for my uses.

   As well as wood working things for Tova and Rowan to paint I drew a couple of things for them to colour. 

  Dividers make it easier to move drawings like these from a book to an art paper suitable for colouring.  

cheers ianw

Plane Work

 I have a couple of hand planes that I use regularly in my shop.

  I am not a hardcore hand tool woodworker but I recognize when a hand tool is the best tool for the job.  I recently had to flatten a wide cutting board for our kitchen.

  

  The photo on the left shows the cutting board after I used my scrub plane on it.  A scrub plane will remove plenty of material is a short time, and the cuts are smooth enough that you sometimes see this pattern on undersides and backs of older furniture. For a cutting board that is not smooth enough. Stage two is the jack plane or another smaller smoothing plane.  Since I am not accomplished enough to fully exploit a hand plane finish I usually end the process with 220 sand paper on a sander, random orbital or finishing. 

  Another project upon which I am working is a bench.  Years ago I bought a church pew from a junk yard, the bench is ash, I think, and comes complete with petrified chewing gum stuck to the underside. The bench is for the one side of our dinning room table. On large family occasions we are running out of chairs for guests and this bench will accommodate several children at the dinner table.

  The first job is to flatten some sections on the bottom of the pew to enable me to attach rails and legs.  This old pew's bottom has developed a bit of an arch, but it isn't necessary to flatten the whole thing, just the contact sections.

  I knocked off the biggest part of the bump with the scrub plane and then used to Jack plane to finished the flattening process.

  The top side of the pew is a different story, and needs different tools.

   You can see the random orbital sanding, with 60 grit paper attached to my shop vacuum. Since the top of the bench has some contour I decided to sand instead of scrape.  The old vanish came off in sticky little balls and revelled a pretty nice grain and one huge scratch. 

  The scratch is deep and will require filling but once the bench is sanded to 220 grit and finished with 3 or 4 coats of shellac it is going to look good.

  I'll keep you posted.

cheers, ian