A Couple of Pens

Well, I needed to turn something, so I tried my hand at a couple of pens. I tried something different by using my own centerband for one. For the other I turned the tip, centerband and top from acrylic sheet goods. I had a few problems, but that comes from trying something new. Let's say I was glad the finger-nail remover was close at hand. The white/black and red one I turned large, so I could see if it felt more comfortable in my hand. The green one I kept slim and tried to get the best fit possible at the tip. The centerband I glued on and turned to get a smooth fit. While it was fun, the working parts for both pens are the same, even though the red one it twice the diameter of the green.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

Panels and Lathe jigs

I have two projects that I worked on the weekend. The first was the end panels for my drawers that I am making for the shop. The pieces are juniper, I think. They look great and after a lot of patience went together as shown in the picture. I still need to make the boards to join these together. I'll cut a dado near the bottom of the panels and use poplar, and I will use a dovetailed joiner near the top that is juniper, as that may be seen. At this time I'll add a rabbit along the back edge for a plywood panel there. This is for the shop after all.



Project two is a pair of axillary jaws that will hold small square pieces on the lathe for drilling out. If grabs only the opposite corners and the max size of what it will hold is only ½" on my jaws. Instructions for making and using the Axillary Pen Blank Jaws are found at David Reed's site. The first picture shows the jaws after I epoxied one side of the jaws together, the second on the final step. I may need to look for another jaw set to mount these in order to get the .75" spread I wanted. If I can't get more spread, I'll make another jig for my pens on the drill press. I want to drill out some blanks for my pens accurately , but I can't find my old jig. I guess I will make another one, and maybe I won't lose it.


Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

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

Santa Circle

Here is a carving design that I picked up at the carving show in Lincoln City. I bought a pre-cut blank and just needed to carve it to the final shape. There really were no instructions, just the set of pictures that you see on the table beneath the carving. I finished the woodburning of the beard tonight. After I started taking pictures, I went back and made one more change to the face, so the picture straight on is a little different than those from the side.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

The Bench Vice - Part II

Last week I posted pictures of the vice as I was attempting to blunder my way through the process of getting it mounted. I made a bunch of mistakes, but kept at it anyway. The 2 pieces I made for the jaw faces turned out being too thin, so I surfaced and planed a 2" face for the end of the table. This piece was narrow enough that I just cut places to keep the tops of the bars from hitting. I then took the thicker of the earlier two pieces and used the band saw to change the holes to slots and sanded those down.

Neither piece requires the removal of the vice to install or replace, thank goodness. The piece mounted on the vice face has the top of the slots above the vice top and is a candidate for replacement soon. I still have room to drill 3 dog holes in it, but the is only about ¼" to spare. Not enough backing to place much pressure with the vice. The table side piece is just short of the full table width, which was fine by me. The next step is to create a handle to work the vice. A large screwdriver works, but is a little to tacky even for me.

At this time I laid out a series of three dog holes directly in front of the ones on the vice, at 6", 9" & 9" apart. Two more dog holes will be drilled half way between the front table edge and the first row of dogs and centered between last two holes. I should be able to get those drilled out this weekend and pictures will show more.

I also wanted to add a my magnifying light with a magnetic base to the table. The clamp for the mount only opened up 1.5" so on the right side I chiseled out two boards to the correct depth let me mount the clamp. It was slow going, but satisfying to do this by hand. The lamp is now installed.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

The Bench Vice

It has been a busy day, full of mistakes. But all of them were recoverable from. To get started a have a picture of the vice I was attaching to the Carving Bench. The jaws need to be made from wood, so I took a Myrtle Wood block as shown, split it so I would have just over an inch on the outside jaws, flattened them and used double sided tape to put them back together. Then I marked the hole locations down from the top of the bench and drilled it out using my drill press. The pictures show the result, unfortunately I was 7/16" too high so I lowered them making the holes oval after I re-drilled and sanded the pieces.

I used clamps to hold the vice base plate under the table, then drilled and screwed the plate on. It looked great, then I went to cut a matching set of slots in the horizontal board between the legs and I ran into the hinges. So I took the plate off, moved it to the left 1.5" and tried again. You can see where the jaw boards are set on the shafts (still loose), some of the cut for the bars. So with some quick playing with the vice, my boards were still ¼" low, and the vice would not close and clamp because you need at least 3" of jaw between the outside plate and the inside to account for the cut of the main screw.




This was not going well.

Enjoy and be careful of the splinters.

New Project

Can't seem to get anything done before there is another project. This was the wall in a sewing room that was covered with a homasote-covered burlap. While it is soundproofed and a great place to stick pins, it was not appreciated. So the wall came down and Sheetrock will go up as soon as it stops raining. (I hate working with wet Sheetrock.) About 3 sheets should do it. If it's not enough I have some pieces in the garage that are about 21" wide. While I had a counter and metal shelves in front of the old wall, this time I have been requested to not include any built-ins. The idea I think is to make it easier to re-arrange, but it is hard to store stuff if you can't run the full height of the wall.