And now for something …

Posted on 14. February 2018 by fuzzy

completely different: A wedding signature board!

My wife’s niece (would that be me niece-in-law???) is about to get married. Third time around, at ca. 40 years. The lucky guy is called Tommy and sports a mohican haircut. Nice guy, though. And before I forget it: my niece-in-law is a certified witch. So: not your average couple.

Unsurprisingly, the motto of the wedding is also a little different: Steam Punk.

Since I sent her a handmade tealight holder for Christmas some time ago, she knows I do woodwork. So she asked me to make them a wooden signature board, with an engraved text and ready to be hung up over the sofa in the lounge once the wedding is over. I told her that’s corny, but she wants it anyway.

So I made up around 20-30 design sketches, and we worked our way from there. The wedding is next week Friday, and I’m almost done. Here’s what we have so far:

The whole thing is made from a bookmatched pair of maple boards, cut from a single big slab. This is not your average sycamore, it’s proper hard maple. And heavy. After cleaning up the sides and gluing the whole thing together, I had one hell of a time getting it flat and cleaned up. It’s too wide for my thicknesser, so had to be done by hand. And even then, with a freshly sharpened blade in my No. 4 plane, there were plenty of places where the grain just lifted up, leaving me with an uneven surface. In the end the only thing that really worked was a furniture scraper. And loads of sanding. Followed by more sanding. And finally, you guessed it, more sanding.

The idea here is to have something looking a bit like a steam pressure vessel. The veneer bands represent brass binders, and will have decorative round studs glued to them, so that they look like the heads of rivets. I even made two short bolts with washers and nuts to be glued into the rounded ends, as if there was a steel rod running through the centre.

The picture above shows the board after the initial carving was completed. Some glitches are clearly visible, and these have by now been cleaned up. Now I need to clean up the corners of the banding, then apply sanding sealer and a few layers of satin varnish, glue in the bolt ends and glue on the studs and we’re there.

It’s a lot more work than I thought it would be, but then, she’s family and I like her.

Update: Here’s the finished article:

 

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The bear paw

Posted on 30. January 2018 by fuzzy

During my cruising for inspiration I have come across the work of a certain Douglas J Fisher, and I am quite besotted with it. For those not familiar with him, he makes predominantly (but not exclusively) large decorative wall hangings. Mostly maple, often rippled, with off-centre rim decorations and pacific native american motives engraved, and coloured with ink a variety of muted dyes. If I had the money, and lived a little closer, I would probably buy one for my home.

So, the next best thing really is to imitate the man. As they say: imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. I’d love to do some work in a similar direction, but obviously with my own style (yet to be developed). Clearly it cannot include any native american motives, since I don’t live there. And the off-centre turning is tricky without a vacuum chuck (which I don’t have (yet)). So, simple steps to start with and then we’ll see.

This is my first attempt. Not bad, methinks, but there are improvements to be had.

The definition of the motive is good, but could be better. The colouring is almost where I want it. The biggest issue really is that the black stain used for the carved areas has seeped across the nicely carved boundaries and edges and that has blurred the entire image. I have already bought a variety of other inks to see whether this can be improved.

There are also issues with the texturing, but they all stem from inexperience and too much sanding. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Oh, by the way, this is about 9″ diameter and is made from rippled olive ash.

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Sing!

Posted on 31. December 2017 by fuzzy

To all my blog readers I wish a happy and prosperous year 2018!

I haven’t posted in a while, mostly because I have been busy in the workshop creating new things. And I have a success story to report: This piece was chosen as the turning of the week on the forum of the Woodturners Unlimited (an American forum):

Made from a sycamore crotch, which was initially intended to be a bowl. However, on closer inspection I found that the crotch figure was only really present on the inside, and therefore it would have had to be a natural edge bowl, but the growth of the branches coming out of the crotch was so odd that it would have looked funny. So I decided to turn it into a shallow hollow form. The crotch figure produced some cracks which I decided to carve away, and ended up with this “singing mouth” almost by accident (it certainly was not any deliberate design). Serendipity in action, if you want. I am certainly more than happy with it.

Here’s a link to the post on the forum

Here’s a side view of the same piece:

See you all in 2018 and keep the shavings flying!

 

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That moment when…

Posted on 5. December 2017 by fuzzy

…it seems that all the bad stuff happens precisely at the same time. Yep, I had one of them not too long ago.

I am currently working on a little coffee or side table for the lounge. The top will be made from a solid piece of curly maple, and the legs (5 of them, plus 5 half-legs) are made from the old window sill of the lounge bay window, which was replaced with a new one earlier this year. It should be quite spectacular when finished.

The legs are basically there, and so are the two rings holding them together. I rough turned the top quite some time ago and then left it in the workshop. Took it out about 3 weeks ago and it was warped. So I thought, not a problem, I’ll take it to the lounge and then only bring it back to the workshop to finish it off. Except it was still warped. Maybe even more so. Looking at it, I probably should have realize this. Two thirds of it are nicely quarter sawn timber, but the remaining third shows the grain of a branch coming out of the tree. No chance of any stability there.

So I let go of a deep sigh, and fetched myself another nice big slab from my stash of sycamore at the yard. Back home, marked out the diameter of the table top, and used my circular saw to separate that part of the blank from the rest (my bandsaw isn’t quite big enough to make these cuts).

Then off to the bandsaw to cut the corners round. That’s where things started to go wrong. I went into one cut, but couldn’t quite finish it. In order to just cut the corner off a little more, I need to reverse out of it. However, the wood had decided to close the kerf after the blade, so it would not move forward or backward more than an inch. Now, this piece of wood is still about 15kg, and a lot bigger than the little table of my bandsaw, so I couldn’t just leave it hanging there. I found myself a piece of oak to support the free side of it. Then I got a chisel and a mallet, sat down on the bandsaw (see the pictures of my workshop and you will understand) and whopped the chisel into the kerf behind the blade.

So now picture this: the chisel goes in. This frees up the bandsaw blade, and at the same time the blank bounces a little on the table of the bandsaw. Just enough so that the oak support underneath loses its grip and falls away. It hits me on the leg, and I get startled, and try to stand up. In this movement somehow get tangled up in the power cable and end up ripping it straight out of the bandsaw. This in turn produces a few sparks, the circuit breaker goes off and and I stand in complete darkness, with a 15kg sycamore blank in my hands, in the knowledge that if I just let go of it, it will surely make a complete mess of the saw blade, and possible of my leg, too.

Proper Mr. Bean moment. It all comes together in on critical moment. Anyways, I managed to fumble around in the dark for the oak piece, wedged it under again, carefully untangled myself, unplugged the bandsaw and got the circuit breaker going again. Then I spend 10 minutes getting the blank and the blade out of the saw, and another 30 minutes fixing the wiring for good. One hour later, it was all done.

 

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Holly galore!

Posted on 29. November 2017 by fuzzy

Friends of ours have recently remodelled their back garden, and decided that their big holly tree was just getting in the way and needed to go. Luckily they mentioned this to me at the time (about 6 months ago), and I said that I would be interested in it, but only if it is cut down in winter.

About 4 weeks ago they had all the branches trimmed off the tree, and yesterday their gardener Andy and myself brought down the rest. It was still about 7m tall, but we had some long ladders and plenty of rope. Since the trunk divided into two about 8ft from the ground, we could use on half to provide a fulcrum for the rope when cutting off the top of the other half. This work exceedingly well, until there was only the bottom piece of the one trunk left, and that was felled with precision by cutting nice wedge out of it and then sawing through the back. It bounced off the garden well, but only because Andy had his wedge direction slightly off. The trunk itself was felled with the same method.

This picture shows (from left to right) 4 crotch pieces cut from the top of the trunk, 2 upper trunk pieces (with loads of branches cut off), the two long trunk sections on top of the crotch and another two upper trunk pieces with branches cut off. The crotch pieces are about 14″ across and up to 6″ thick, and already they show some very promising figure.

I also managed to cut the trunk in halves, firstly because otherwise it would have been night impossible to get into (and out of) the car due to weight, but also secondly to prevent checking. All end grain has been treated with PVA, so now we just have to wait.

This picture of the trunk is very grainy, due to the comparative darkness in the store room. The bottom two pieces are a trunk of a cherry, which I recently had from another gardener named Andy, and then we have the two halves of the holly trunk on top. 14″ wide, up to 7″ thick, no branches, and towards the top with the figure that indicates the start of the crotch.

If anybody is interested, contact me and I am sure we can find a piece for your needs, but please remember that this is at the moment all very green wood.

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