Handles and Panels

I haven't posted in a while, as I have been working on the sewing room walls. They are sheetrocked and primed. After the rest of the stuff is moved out, I will paint the room then lay down the floor. Until then, I am back in the shop.

The first thing is I turned a new handle for the vice on the carving bench. As you see it is Myrtle Wood and one end was turned as part of the handle. The other end was turned from a piece of scrap Myrtle and I positioned it so you can see the screw I used to mount it to the handle. I also drilled a bunch of holes in the top for bench dogs to be mounted. I also placed 3 holes in the vice to be able to lock down the items using the vice. I tried to get a tap-down bench clamp, but they were out of stock at Rockler.


My next project was preparing some boards for a drawer set I want to place under the windows next to the carving bench. This is to hold my tools when not in use. The first step was to make panels for the ends of the cabinet. I wanted to stay away from Myrtle on the project, so I grabbed some unidentified wood and began planning and cutting it to size. As it turns out, it is Juniper. Very pretty, lots of color and knots in the wood as you see in the pictures. My bandsaw wouldn't cut the panels as they were too tall, So I used the table saw and cut the length on each side then hand cut the center with a standard rip saw. It took a while. I then sanded the surfaces down to even them out and remove all of the saw marks.


As these are going to be raised panels, I needed to cut the boards edges at 10° so I made a jig that would help keep the boards vertical on the table saw. It is made from MDF and within .1° of 90, not perfect, but should be close enough.


Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters