6 feet in 1/16ths of an inch

Posted on 7 July 2015 by Flying Shavings

I’ve been making informal seating from ash cheeses for a client. I started with a sample one in the bodgery.

Bodgery cheese

I’m using a 1 1/2 inch auger to get some beef into the joints. I don’t usually work with cheeses as they have a good chance of splitting and ash splits in spades (they don’t call it most excellent splitter for nothing). However, the client wants it this way, the cheeses were there and I’ve explained about the splitting, and they are partly dry.

I’ve been having to use heavy smoke methods to deter midges, which have been a real nuisance recently. It does give a moody tone to photos though.

Veritas, Veritas semper Veritas.

I use a tenon cutter for the tenons from those excellent folk in Canada, you know the one I mean.

Well the sample went down well, so yesterday and today I’ve been making the other 5 seats and a table. Made the legs in Strid Wood, then moved to the client’s house today for mortising.

Hobbit stools

I had to rig up a temporary vice as there is a lot of torque involved in turning that auger 3″ deep.

Ratchet vice

I strapped each seat in turn to the underside of what would become the table top which is the biggest heaviest cheese. Worked pretty well.

Done.

Notice the tiny one sitting atop a full-sized stool? It for the toddler in the family.

I managed to avoid a few potential problems – nails

Hidden steel.

The tree was a couple of years older than I am.

67, born from an ash key in 1948.

So … today 5 seats and a table, four 3 inch holes each, 5 foot of hole, each shaving from the auger is 1/16th of an inch, guess what’s coming … 60 times 16 is 960 turns – very good for the pecs, but also rather tiring, especially as the seats and table had to be leveled and the edges chamfered.

Freehand draw-knife work.

No wonder then that I managed to cut a hole in my new work trousers (and my knee) with the drawknife. Well I was about finished and found a handy bandage in the ~~ambulance~~ Land Rover, could have used a couple of Steristrips though.

Meanwhile, back in the woods.

That’s no dog’s bark

Someone had been eating the beech bark, well stripping it actually and not eating any at all.

Send them back home

Grey squirrels, they are no match for a 410 shotgun.

A Nature Walk

Posted on 28 February 2014 by Flying Shavings

When I was a lad at school (this is before the Beatles were invented) we used to go on nature walks from school along the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool canal. We picked wild flowers (imagine that) and brought them back to school to identify and draw.

At work I sometimes treat myself to a post prandial stroll through Strid Wood to see what’s going on. On Thursday it was get your boots on Spring.

Not very much in the way of colour (other than green) but then the ramsons are back! Wild garlic, a delight to the palette and an intense green. Here be green flowers.

This is dogs mercury. The mercury bit gives a clue to its toxicity. But it is about the first flower to bloom in these woods, and it blows for many months – in fact some of last year’s stalks are still standing with a few dishevelled leaves (mainly through the absence of any snow).

This isn’t wild garlic, Lords and Ladies methinks, not palatable, but also very green.

Look at this – wild strawberry leaves.

And these guys are here almost all the time, sometimes 20 foot up in the trees.

And then there’s moss.

Lots of it, climbing anything raised from the woodland litter.

Sometimes creating a landscape of its own, with sinister companions.

Ok more sinister.

Rather like trees.

And they like trees.

No fear of man-made sawing horses either.

(These can be used as splitting breaks too.)

I been doing woodwork too. Planing ash.

To make a test stool leg.

But really I’d like to do some painted work that would look like this.

A Correction for Laziness

Posted on 16 April 2013 by Flying Shavings

Title page of the first quarto edition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1600 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been struggling along with a sash cramp made up of Marples loose heads and a 3 foot odd piece of milled ash. The ash was thicker than it needed to be, so I’d attacked it with the axe to thin it down and seem to have drilled random holes that were:

a) not far enough away from the edge of the ash to make the heads seat properly, and

b) the randomness meant that it was almost always the wrong length and much packing was needed to make them kind of work.

I occasionally get fed up with my sloppy ways as I did when I was using this sash cramp on the memory box which has now gone to a satisfied customer:

When I set initially set up in Strid Wood I had a pole lathe and a shave horse and a stock – simple old days. Then I added a bench. No vice mind, just some dogs and a weird cam device, which kind of worked.

Now I have a proper(-ish) bench with a vice I made a couple of winters ago, with dogs, yes, and some Gramercy hold fasts from Brooklyn. But why do I put up with inconvenience for so long before I sort it out? The inconvenience is often more time-consuming in the long run than doing the fix. Well all I can say with Puck is ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyway, I sorted out the ash plank yesterday:

All I needed to do was some (rather warming) planing the thickness, measuring and boring. So now the heads sit properly, are set at the right width so I can cramp any length up to about 3’3″ on a continuous scale, and I can pat myself on the head (but not necessarily rub my tummy at the same time (C’mon it’s not that hard – Ed)).

Look how crazy the old holes were on the back of that plank, doh!

Weather update

It has been too cold for anything much to grow for the last month when Spring should have been springing, but I’m delighted to say that Spring has now indeed sprung and the wood has suddenly come very much alive, even the bluebells look to be about to give us their misty display at any moment:

Grass is flowering: