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.

Corner Caddy

  In the corner of our living room sits my big chair.  For a long time my chair has been surrounded with books, magazines and miscellaneous electronic devises.  Like everyone else I have a phone, a tablet, a lap top computer and an e-reader plus books and magazines.  Often those things drift into the corner and settle in  small piles around my chair. The television remotes and all that stuff is up stairs in the family room.
  
  Yesterday I looked at the collected chaos, considered the coming month with all the traditional comings and goings and decided it was time to bring the 'stuff' * under control.

  Again this is when a workshop in the basement is wonderful.  I designed this caddy to hold my phone and tablet/e-reader a pen or reading glasses in the narrow front slot. The larger compartment is for books and magazines. The handle means it is easy to move around the room and can be easily stashed behind the chair when there is a crowd of folks hanging out.

   The first stage of this project was decided its over all size.  I opted for 6 1/4 by 13 by 5 in front 8 inches in back.  I made the box so it would fit on the window sill if I wanted it handy while sitting and reading. 

  I had some Baltic birch plywood in the bin down stairs but made the front panel from thinly planed pine.  I stained the bulk of the box but left the front unfinished as I plan a wood burned pattern for later.

  Making this type of project is interesting because when I am making for myself I often use nails to put things together.  Had I been making something like this for someone else I probably would have glued it together or made an effort to hide the fasteners, thereby taking twice as long.  I like my projects to get going and get finished in a hurry, I'm afraid. 

  Here is the box sitting on the arm of my chair.  I can throw all my corner stuff into the box and find it  quickly and easily.  

  A project like this is really an apartment workshop style project.  Sheet stock can be bought in bite sized pieces at building supply stores and the tools necessary to make a nice job of this project are limited.

  I used a saw, if you have only one get a jig saw. Hammer and a few nails. Wood glue. Then I sanded everything and stained it.  You can sand a small project like this by hand or spend a few dollars and get a reasonably priced random orbital sander  to make finishing easier.   In fact a project like this could be covered in wall paper or stickers or if that  suits your style and taste. 

  The reason  to make this is simple.  It is wood, it will last.  Some  cheap plastic thing from a $ store won't look as good, last as long or provide the satisfaction you get from making your own thing.  Also since it is wood it can be refinished to match evolving decor in a way that a plastic thing can't.

  Wood is Good.

cheers, ianw

* there are other names for stuff, but this is a family show.

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

Why Wood ? Check this out.

   It has been a couple of pretty rough weeks and I finally broke down and made a trip to the Doctor.  The Doctor's best guess is I have Piriformis Syndrome  sort of sciatica with a slightly different cause.  Whatever it turns out to be he prescribed some serious drugs and now I am not driving or working around whirling blades for a few days.  That doesn't make much difference since I have been so miserable the last five days that I've not really wanted to do much.

   Anyway, the prohibition against machines and the idea of not getting my fingers removed from my hands made me think for a bit this afternoon about some past woodworking projects and so I went looking,

   I found this:

    This is a trivet/hot-pad that I made for Eva years ago, it clearly has gathered lots of real life experience. It was one of the Christmas gifts the year that I went crazy and did the 12 days of Christmas.  My best guess is that this woodworking project is 8 or 9 years old.  You can see the patina (!) that has developed with age.  Actually patina is in this case a grand way of saying, it is looking pretty tired and just a little gross.

   This is the hot-pad after a short trip to my workshop.  It is clean enough to see that I wasn't a very good craftsman when I made it, the palm tree's board is not that square, but that is OK,  the hole that it sits in isn't all that square either. 

     This was an early scroll saw  project, and it has lasted because we don't have a fire place.  There are at least a couple more trips to the shop for a cleaning before it has been sanded away to nothing.  Try doing that with plastic....

   A while ago I was writing blogs talking about the basic tools that a person/home owner should have. This is a good time to remind folks that a 5 inch random orbital sander with a selection of disks ( 80, 120, 220, 320) had lots of uses in a homework shop.  Here is a whole page of sanders, everything from a Chevy to a Lincoln.  Buy the best that you can afford, that way the tool is an aid, not an obstacle.