Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

I'm working on a couple of tables in the shop at the moment and my wife came in to inspect. She was stood at the bench and I heard "Wow absolutely beautiful". I turned around to find her inspecting a piece of oak scrap with some self adhesive sand paper stuck to it. She meant it. She saw the grain - I saw a piece of scrap.
It goes to show everybody sees things in different ways.

Beautiful? - You decide :)

Wall mounted Plane and Tool Cabinet - Part 1 - Design

I have just started a personal project that I have just not had time for over the past view years. This is a wall mounted cabinet for storing planes and other hand tools. For a long time various tools have been kept in drawers, on open shelves, in tool boxes and in the storage module under my workbench, This has worked well but, like most shop improvement projects, the time has come to store them in a more pleasantly aesthetic manner.

Location

I have an ideal position for the cabinet fixed to the wall at the side of the main window behind my bench. The wall in this corner of the shop location is made from Accrington bricks and cement blocks so should easily hold the weight of the filled cabinet.

Freely available books (Not just woodworking) on the internet

I was tasked by my wife Elly recently to find a copy of Ernest Hemingway's "Farewall to Arms". I saw the Kindle edition on Amazon for a few £s. I then thought as this is a classic it may be free somewhere else.

It is :)

I found the scanned 1929 version on archive.org it was freely available to download on PDF, kindle and many other formats.
Looking around on the site I searched for "woodwork" or "woodworking" and there is a mountain of books in there, both old and new, that are freely available for everyone to download and read. I'm currently reading "Elementary Woodworking" by Edwin Foster a 1903 tome. Everything in there is just as relevant in 2014 as it was in 1903.

Here is a link to the book

Have a look at the archive as it is superb.

Removing an urban tree

My shop had my neighbours 80 year old ash tree towering over it less than 4 feet away. The tree was around 50 feet high and most of it leant over my side of the wall. Birds roosted in the tree and crapped on my car and driveway. The shop floor is a cast concrete slab and is one of the only remaining parts of the original garage. It is around 12" thick (not sure why so thick) but the previous owner of the house used to keep Ferraris in the garage. Anyway I digress and when I had the shop rebuilt I noticed one or two minor cracks. I also had an inspection pit filled in as that had evidence of tree root damage. Not good when you are under a car getting your eyes poked out by a tree root. The pit had to go and did.

I noticed that the driveway was being uplifted and it was coming from the tree. I notified my neighbour and he was kind enough to apply for planning permission to get approval to remove the tree. The local council came to have a look and the conclusion from them was that the tree was causing "nuisance" which is a legal term. Approval was granted and a tree surgeon was called November 23 and 24 of 2013.

The tree shown near to the shop (Nov 2012)
before the new fancy doors were fitted

The guys got kitted up with climbing gear and set about first of all removing the upper limbs. Then gradually working their way down taking slices across the trunk and dropping the chunks into a skip (dumpster) at it's base.

Climbing up the tree and
removing limbs
The shop is the building with the greeny/blue roof

It took them the best part of two days to remove the tree due to the laborious process involved. There just was very little space for them to drop it by conventional felling. They even came around to my house and cleaned the sawdust from the roof of the shop and pathway. They got seven wheel barrow loads of sawdust from the roof alone.

Next day slicing 3" thick chunks off
the trunk

When the surgeon had finished he said the tree had quite an amount of rot at the base so could have fallen anyway. Only a couple of months earlier the same neighbour had an adjacent tree blow over and block the road.

So now the tree is gone. I didn't manage to get any boards from it, the car can park on the drive without a mass of bird crap coating it and there are no more seeds populating ash weeds everywhere in the garden.

Veneering experimentation

I have a large amount of veneer that I have accumulated over the years. I have occasionally used my stocks in smallish projects doing edge-banding or fixing flaws. I'm currently working on a keepsake box for my nephew and his fiancée for their forthcoming marriage in June.

I had some sapele veneer in strips about 6 feet long 10" wide and also some oak burr veneer so decided to try flattening the veneer and veneering the top of the box. This is essentially a piece of 9mm MDF cut to the size of the rabbets I had cut in the box upper sections.

I enquired on Woodtalk Online forum if anybody had any recipes for a veneer softener as the commercial softeners are not available here in the UK. The commercial ones in use in the US are SuperSoft 2 Veneer Softener or the other one "Veneer Softener/Tamer". The mailing costs were prohibitively high or there were export restrictions.

Fire Screen to stop little cats going up the chimney

A few days ago I awoke early one morning at around 5AM. I went down stairs to make coffees and sat for a while in my living room watching breakfast TV. I was joined by Anna the cat who is a totally black cat. She sat on my lap awhile and then got off. I heard her mooching around opening cupboard doors and the like. Next minute she appeared standing on the fire (which wasn't lit) staring up the chimney. The next thing I knew she had disappeared up the chimney and bits of soot and brick dust were falling down. Now the fire is gas powered and there isn't a great deal of soot up there but I was dumbfounded. "What do I do if she gets stuck?" - I thought. I had visions of firemen dismantling the brickwork of the chimney to get her out. Fortunately she emerged a few minutes later none the worse for her experience. I had noticed in the past that there were occasional black foot prints on the carpet so it must have been a regular thing for her.

The Highland Woodworker TV Episode 11 - Christopher Schwarz

The latest episode of The Highland Woodworker TV show is out.

• Chris Schwarz welcomes you into his home shop for a fascinating insight into one of the most popular woodworkers on the planet
• Sculptor Larry Ridge and the people of his Chattanooga shop show how to carve carousel horses
• Chuck Bender shows his technique for using a screw head to scratch a bead in a board.

Head on over to the website
http://tinyurl.com/pstptv5

Ebay delay

I ordered some lutherie tools from a Chinese site on eBay in January to finish off the violin repair. These are a violin reamer and a violin peg shaver. Needless to say they have not arrived yet.
Hope they arrive soon as I need to get this violin out of my shop and back to my customer

Facebook tells employees, 'build something' -- with a table saw

Facebook has a woodshop for their employees. There is a video and a description of it at this link.
It seems that in order for the employees to be creative in their work they should also try to be creative making something with their hands.

I wish all employers were so forward thinking. Here is the video:

A faux door for an antique door knocker

My friends live in an 18th century cottage in South Glouceshireshire, England and they are having a new garden room/kitchen built upon it. The cottage is considerably larger now than it was in the 18th century due to various additions over the years. When they removed the ivy covering most of the external wall nearest the lane it revealed a blocked up doorway. This must have been the doorway from the roadway into the 2 room cottage when it was originally built. My friends have lived in the cottage for the best part of 30+ years and did not know of its existence.
Whilst on holiday in Cairo, Egypt a few years back they bought an antique door knocker and had never fitted it. This last weekend we went over to Westonbirt Arboretum a few miles away to visit TreeFest. This is an annual event and attracts people from far and wide to everything to do with wood. Norm decided he wanted a nice piece of wood to mount the knocker on.
He turned up a piece of brown English oak for about £2. It had wormy edges and a few straight saw cuts. It was about 16mm (5/8") thick.

I took it, complete with the knocker, back to my shop and set to making the straight saw edges into a more pleasing irregular pattern with the scroll saw.

Scroll sawing the sawn edges to an irregular shape

WoodFest at Westonbirt Arboretum England

Last weekend was the annual Woodfest at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, England. I went along with a few friends and bought some English Elm in the wood sale. One thing I thought you may be interested in was a demonstration of a steam driven "tablesaw". This thing was huge and was probably used to threaten James Bond in a movie. "I expect you to die Mr Bond"

This thing was very impressive and had an enormous blade that cut through lumber like a hot knife through butter. In fact the tree trunk shown in the picture was completed end to end in about 10 seconds. It was about 12 feet long and the board was about 12" deep. The blade still had plenty of capacity and had a riving knife.
When on load the drive belt was jumping about considerably but was in no danger of falling off. One thing did worry me though was the blade was constantly turning when the men were turning the log and manipulating it for the next cut. The spectators were behind metal fencing about 20 feet away.

The full rig

Wood dust - I hate it

I was doing some routing of the baritone guitar pickup routs last weekend and took the thickness of the slab down a little with the jointer.
I made the mistake of running the router for a couple of minutes doing the initial cut without my PPE on - the shop vac was connected and running on the router.
I could smell the embuya dust in the air so put on my PPE comprising a 3M respirator with twin filter cartridges on.
I did a little shaping of the curves with the oscillating spindle sander and some normal sanding with the random orbit sander. I had the shop vac going and the shop dust extractor connected to the OSS.

After finishing in the shop for the night I showered as normal and later in the evening went to bed. Whist in bed before I went to sleep I coughed something up and got the smell of embuya again. I looked into my handkerchief (not a pretty sight I know!) and saw quite a lot of black and brown dust in the "deposit".
Next day I decided enough is enough. I went to the trouble of equipping the shop with all the correct dust collection equipment, including a ceiling mounted shop filter, what I thought was decent face PPE - ok maybe I should have put it on before starting the cut - and still the dust got through. Sooooooo..... I ordered a Trend AirShield Pro

It was expensive and it arrived today. I thought what a price to pay for decent lungs.
There will be a full review on the blog as soon as I have tried it out for a while. Watch this space.

Kari closes her blog

In case you hadn't heard Kari Hultman, the person behind The Village Carpenter blog, has hung up her keyboard for the time being.
Kari has blogged about everything woodwork for the last 5 years or so and is always a very entertaining read.
Fortunately for us all she has left her blog complete with the archives for us to read.

Her comments and journeys through woodworking will be sadly missed from this blogger.
Have a look at villagecarpenter.blogspot.com for a good read.

Dates for your diary

Lie Nielson event at Axminster Tool Centres, Warrington in the UK

Axminster are always hosting woodworking events in the UK. One local to me at the Warrington store has a Lie-Nielsen hand tools event with Deneb Puchalski. Dates/times are Friday 15th (12 noon - 4.30pm) & Saturday 16th March (10am - 4pm) 2013.
I hopefully will be attending as I have a question that I need to pose to him about sharpening my cabinet makers router plane (it's not easy!).

For more details have a look at Axminsters website

Highland Woodworking Episode 5 - Alf Sharp

In this episode Popular Woodworking helmsman Matthew Teague (he steps down quite soon) shows you how to sharpen using the scary sharp method. It isn't mentioned by name but that's what it is.
Also have a look at Alf Sharp the furniture maker who makes museum quality furniture out of his Tennessee shop. He was awarded the 2008 Cartouche Award from the Society of American Period Furnituremakers.

The video concentrates on the Lie Nielsen event at HWW in Georgia showing bits with Chris Swartz and the brilliant Scott Meeks.
Scott makes fantastic custom wood bodied hand planes http://www.scottmeekwoodworks.com/wood-body-planes . I can't afford them but when I win the lottery I might buy one!

If you don't mind the commercials and adverts it's worthwhile watching the video just for Alf. Charles Brock is superb too as host. His flat caps have a life of their own.

Highland Woodworker Episode 4 - Craig Nutt

Have a look at this video:
Particularly at the work of master designer, artist and furniture maker Craig Nutt with his organic furniture from 24:00 onward.
His stuff is not every-bodies taste but it is very unique. I like it.

Fine Woodworking Archive 1975 to 2012

I ordered this on DVD from Highland Woodworking back in December 2012 and it came early January 2013. All 230 issues from the first one back in 1975 to the Tools and Shops Winter Edition 2012/2013 are included.
It also came with a collectors edition reprint of the first edition including all the advertisements of the time.

The cover is black and white as is everything inside. I forgot that colour was a recent addition to magazines due to technology changes. Back in those days everything was shades of grey and everybody walked in a strange fast, jerky manner (at least they did on old B&W movies). You would sometimes see colour on the cover, albeit a few colours, and everything else was black and white. How times have changed!

I haven't had chance to read any of the magazines yet but they are installed on the computer and I'll transfer them to my iPad, all 2.8 GB of them, when I get chance.

That'll keep me busy for quite some time.

Merry Christmas from all at TMc Woodworks

This is a whole load of woodworkers who may have been sniffing too many noxious fumes without their respirators on!