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

Astronomy Observation Chair

As the nights get longer at my latitude (North West England) thoughts can now go back to observing the universe. Last year my wife bought me a brilliant present of a 8" reflecting telescope for a significant birthday.
I have been using it whenever there were clear skies last year and during the winter of this year.
One of the problems I found though was I just couldn't find a chair that was comfortable enough to cope with the varying angles possible with the telescope. When it was pointing upwards I had to stand, when it was pointing at around 45 degrees I had difficulty sitting or standing. When it was a low angles I just couldn't get a chair or stool down low enough.

I saw an article in last August's (2012) Sky At Night Magazine about building a suitable chair. Unfortunately the iPad version of the magazine didn't contain the plans. Undeterred I decided to google it. I mean everything is on the internet - right?

Baritone Guitar Build Part 9 - Completion

So the wiring was completed and the two active Seymour Duncan Blackouts are wired in conventional Neck-Neck/Bridge-Neck mode. I have only used single volume and tone controls too. The wiring diagram is here but as it is on the Seymour Duncan website the location may change in time. Look for 2 blackout, 1 vol, 1 tone, 3 way.

I fitted this wiring into the cavity

And ended up with this

All the remaining hardware was fitted including the nut and the guitar had the Elixir Baritone strings added.

The thickest string, a low B, was 0.068" or 1.73 in diameter and would not fit through the machine head hole. I had to carefully open it up with a 2 mm drill. Fortunately the metal was just brass so was easy to drill. Also the locking anvil mechanism had to be opened in the same process.

The strings were all tightened and then I had to carefully adjust the depth of each of the nut slots with nut files. I ended up with each string clearing the 1st fret by 0.5mm or 0.020". This is as a starting point because I will see how over the next few weeks it reacts. The intonation of the Schaller Hannes bridge was set and the truss rod tightened very slightly.

The clearance at at the 8th fret when fretted at the 1st and 17th frets is about .75mm on the bass side and .25 on the treble side. The string action at the 12th fret when the strings are unfretted is around 3mm on the bass side and about 1.75mm on the treble side. This seems to be ideal for a baritone guitar. I didn't have any frame of reference to refer to for this one so just using my experience building others.

Front view

So here it is in all its glory. The Dunluce IIIB Baritone.

Rear view
That red stain is glorious over
the mahogany.

Making my bench lighter

Yes I know we always strive to make workbenches as heavy as we can but just have a think about this:
Everytime we flatten our benches we remove stock to do so. Stock in the form of shavings has mass. Hence we make the bench have less mass!
Anyway in my email inbox today was one from Megan Fitzpatrick from Popular Woodworking. Apparently they were having problems with the electronic distribution of Oct 2013 edition so she sent me the url of where I could download it.
In the magazine was an interesting letter from a reader and a reply from Megan asking how to flatten a workbench. This set me thinking:

• How long have I had my commercially bought workbench? - 5 years or so
• When did you last flatten it? - Er never!

I looked at it and the front and rear aprons had warped slightly making the bench concave from edge to edge. End to end was still relatively straight and there wasn't any twist (using my winding sticks to make sure). The storing of it outside in the yard last autumn (in a tent) while my shop was being rebuilt had soaked up humidity from the air and it hadn't been too kind to the bench.

As I'm nearing completion of the baritone guitar and it has now left the shop to go inside to my studio for tweaking I thought I would spend 10 to 20 minutes flattening my bench with the Veritas bevel up jointer.
Sure enough it did only take 20 minutes with a final light cleaning pass followed by a very light pass of my #4.

The bench being flattened
with a Veritas BU Jointer

A big pile of shavings.
This probably weighs about
1 pound

Flattened benchtop awaiting Danish Oil

I was rewarded with a flat bench. The question now is - why didn't I do it before? It really was quick to do the jointer making light work of the beech top. Two coats of an exterior Danish oil and I'll be all set to go for the next project. But that's another story.