Shiny sharp things

spoons

2012-01-11T04:16:00.000-08:00

My Mum bought a sugar spoon in the sixties, and wanted a couple of copies done for two friends of the same vintage. This spoon is a classic example of the angular designs of the period, optimised for mass production and a bit tricky to reproduce in small numbers. The time to build the necessary jigs to do it with routers would be longer than just carving by hand.
First step: dig out the bowls from the edge of a 2" by 4" bit of oak:

Then cut out the blanks on the bandsaw:

Keeping the original handy, bring the shape together with belt sander (yuk) and block plane.

And finally sand with 120 grit, raise the grain, sand with 240 grit, raise the grain, sand again at 320 grit, then finish with a food safe oil (Nostalgia, appropriately enough!). The original has long since lost its original finish (if it ever had one) but I'd lay money that it was a good old carcinogenic danish oil or similar.

Done! One happy mother, which is always a good thing.

a serious problem

2011-08-04T03:52:00.000-07:00

But a nice one to have...
whisky glasses (even empty ones) do not belong on the arm of a sofa. They may spill! But for ages now, that's where they've gone. Given the quality of the single malts involved, this is a very high risk situation.
The solution:

This little table is made from scrap wood, from a birch taken down in our yard because it was rotten. I have hidden none of the firewood-like nature of the material, and am quite pleased with the results. Joinery was very simple- a couple of through tenons, two bridle joints, two housing joints. Finish equally so: a single coat of french polish to seal, heavy rub down with 1200 grit wt and dry, and wax. The surfaces are prepared with plane only- no nasty sanding. Bless that Krenov fellow!

ebay should be banned

2011-01-16T07:11:00.000-08:00

Because I just bought some planes I really don't need- let's see what condition they turn out to be in...

woodwork page part2

2011-01-13T01:10:00.000-08:00

It proved too clunky to do the whole page in one post, so here's the rest:

Bows

Some examples of early bowmaking efforts:

English longbow in elm with a linen back:

Ash flatbow: this bow was originally one piece of wood; I misguidedly gave it to a friend to shoot and he overdrew it by about a foot (it was designed to shoot 45lb at 26"). The belly chrysaled all over, so I cut it out and replaced it with maple, which happened to be to hand. It's been shooting straight for 9 years now.

Inlay

These plaques were made when self-employed in Edinburgh in 2000. These examples were too flawed to sell, and so are now on my office wall. The ivory tooth on the Clan Campbell crest came from an old piano key.

Clan Campbell

Clan Cameron

15 foot dining table.

This table was made in 1999 at Patrick Baxter Furniture with cabinet makers Jim Liggatt and Jim Harrington. My contribution was primarily the carving around the edge, which took a week to do. The pictures show the scale of the project, the work in progress, and the final result. It was designed to fit with an existing dining set, and made from walnut.

Woodwork page part one

2011-01-13T00:38:00.000-08:00

This post shows examples of some woodworking projects I've done over the last 10 years or so. Some readers of this blog (I am amazed there are any) have asked about custom work- in short, I don't take orders, unless offered sufficiently vast sums of money to compensate for taking a fun hobby and making it into work, or you happen to be a close friend or relative.

Baby's Rattle

This was a present for the daughter of a friend, and a chance to have a go at something I'd never done on a lathe before: turning a loose ring. I also used it as a teaching project for a student who is also learning some woodworking from me. I did the first ring, to see how to do it, he did the second.

I then carved the name in by hand with a narrow gouge.

Mortar and Pestle

A Christmas present for my wife. The mortar is one piece of spalted birch, from a tree that was taken down in our apartment yard this year. I turned it while it was still green, then waxed it, left it to dry for a month, then finished it off on the lathe. The pestle is maple, left over from the desk legs.

Productive Procrastination

I started writing another book in April 2008, then decided that a decent computer desk was necessary before continuing. It has a thick elm top, with natural curves, and maple legs and rails.

The front legs are jointed through the top, and wedged in place:

The rails are buttoned on, so if necessary the whole thing can be dismantled. Three large holes in the top allow wires to be organised a bit, and the sockets underneath can be flipped to left or right.

The extension cord runs in a groove up the back of either back leg.

Now I suppose I'd better get writing that book...

Canteen

This was commissioned by my father as a Christmas present for my mother, to house their silver cutlery. It took about 200 hours to make. The animal motifs on the top represent my father (lion), my mother (antelope), my brother (elephant), my sister (rhino) and me (fish), a reference to a set of carved wooden napkin rings we used to use.

The carcase is birch ply veneered with cherry, framed in walnut. The drawers have cherry fronts and ash bodies, and are lined with baize. The handles are walnut, with cherry veneer faces, and I turned them on a lathe at Plektra (Ruusankatu 8, 00250 Helsinki), the best woodworkers' shop in Finland.

The inlaid pictures are in a range of woods, and reclaimed ivory from old piano keys.

Cutlery drawer inserts:

Each piece of cutlery has its own niche, in frames of walnut or cherry, built onto frames made when the canteen itself was still in the workshop (you can see them in the pictures of the drawers). The frames slide snugly into the drawers.

Spoons:

Forks:

Lectern

This was made entirely from off-cuts; leftover birch ply from Grace's cot, leftover pine from building the storage-room, leftover oak from making a grave marker for the family dog, leftover oak veneer from a bowmaking experiment. I did buy two bolts though. The idea for making this came last year when I got my copy of Tobler's In the Service of the Duke, shown here in its rightful place.

The lectern has a range of positions and heights, and can go completely flat for displaying laptop screens etc.

Jewellery Tray

This was made for my Mum, who asked for something to keep some of her most-worn jewellery in order. It is made from one central price of solid cherry, which is surrounded by a frame to make it more stable.

Grace's Cot

When I found out that my wife was pregnant, I immediately thought of making a cot. I didn't like the idea of my child spending the first few years of its life behind bars, so decided on pierced panels, with trees and animal motifs. The tree at the cot head is based on the one at the end of Fior di battaglia. The

cot is built from solid cherry and birch ply, and has adjustable bed height, and a drop side.

Occupied!

Making the castle

2011-01-13T00:16:00.000-08:00

The castle was finished in good time (of course!). Cutting the individual pieces of plywood was fairly trivial:

The hardest parts were routing out the inserts for the plastic windowpanes, and mixing the colours:

Painting the background was, for me, probably the most challenging part- freehanding a rainbow is not for the unsteady of hand. Then choosing, editing and printing out all the little pictures of relatives and godparents was extremely tedious- and as you see we still don't have everyone's window filled.

Still, Katriina loves pointing to a face and yelling out the (almost always) right name.

K's birthday

2010-11-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

It's my youngest daughter's second birthday next month, so I am making her a fairy castle picture frame- each window will have a photo of a family member in it. The watercolour is the basic sketch I'm working off, though there are some changes occurring between the painting and actually cutting wood.

Planes again

2010-11-24T06:48:00.001-08:00

This is my second wooden plane, following Mr Finck's advice quite closely. The oak I got for it wasn't quite thick enough for a one-piece, so I made a virtue out of necessity and made the cheeks out of walnut, with the crosspin and wedge to match. The blade is a 1 1/2" honey from Ron Hock. This is lovely to use.

The first plane, in maple, has been adapted for it's 2" Finck blade, and feels a lot nicer now :-)

2010-11-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

So, planes then: my first attempt, with a blade from Plektra trading, which straight off the bat took lovely angel hair shavings. It has since been adapted for a lovely 2" Krenov-style blade from the one and only David Finck, author of Making and Mastering Wood Planes, and was instrumental in making my second plane, finished yesterday. Pics of that honey to come.

2010-11-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

That was easy. This is my shed, where most woodworking gets done. It started out as a tatami store, and ended up being a mini workshop, with lathe and bandsaw.

Planes

2010-11-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

What with one thing and another, I am thinking of moving all the woodworking stuff off the swordschool site and onto this. Hmm. No idea how to do it...

2010-09-19T06:34:00.001-07:00

Blimey, this is even more erratic than I thought it would be. Oh well.

Three Good Books

2008-07-29T05:02:00.000-07:00

I buy a lot of books in airports. Usually non-fiction, and usually something I wouldn't normally buy (when for instance browsing through an internet bookshop). On my last trip to Singapore, while stuck in Schipol for 5 hours) I came across Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and bought it on a whim. It was so readable that I missed most of the in-flight movies on the 12 hour flight, and on the return I bought his first book, The Tipping Point.

Both of these are well worth a read, if you have any interest in how your perceptions can be manipulated, and how cultural trends take off.

Blink is a classic of psychology-lite: Gladwell draws on a huge array of psychological, behavioural and marketing studies to present a clear, concise and engagingly written overview of how we make snap judgements, how those judgements can be improved, and how they can be distorted or manipulated (by marketers, for instance). One thing that comes across clearly is that the author is fascinated by this stuff himself, and sufficiently well informed that he makes an excellent guide through the otherwise bewildering territory of the subconscious.

This is a must-read for martial artists, I would say, as one of the most universal problems faced by martial arts is how to make a person's snap-judgements reliable and effective ("I'll attack with this"; or, "is he about to come at me"; or, "is that a gun in his pocket or is he just pleased to see me").

The Tipping Point, Gladwell's previous best-selling work, is likewise fascinating. He has a gift for making complex subjects approachable, and presents a clear set of rules that apparently govern the development of epidemics, be they crime, shoe sales, or syphilis. The Law of the Few (Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen), the Power of Context, and The Stickiness Factor.

In short, this is an unmissable book for anyone interested in how global phenomena take off. Even the maths is presented in an accessible way, usually in endnotes for the curious.

One interesting point is his analysis of the ending of the crime epidemic in New York, which he attributes (at least in part) to Bratton's innovative policing strategies (based on the famous "Broken Windows" theory). In Freakonomics, which I picked up in Arlanda, on the was home from Sweden, Steves Levitt and Dubner apply the tools of economics to real-world phenomena (want to know what your real estate agent is really thinking? Is sumo wrestling rigged? When and why do teachers cheat on school exams? Why did crime rates fall in the 90's?). At one point they refer to the economist who coined the term "the tipping point" and remark that he did so "30 years before Malcolm Gladwell made the term popular". They are also adamant that the innovative policing credited as reducing the crime rate (by Gladwell as noted above, but also by many others) had nothing to do with it: according to their analysis, crime rates were already falling, and the primary reason for it was the legalisation of abortion in the USA in 1973.

I would pay money to sit in a corner and listen to Levitt and Gladwell argue their cases. Whatever the result, and whatever ill-will may or may not exist between these authors, all their books that I have read have been a sound investment in terms of money in for enjoyment out.

Which brings me on to Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (a gift from a friend, no airports involved), who like Gladwell in Blink, takes us through an enormous range of research into how the mind works, and especially how it can be fooled. His aim is apparently to explain why our present selves are so bad at anticipating what will make our future selves happy. The manifold means by which we can be fooled by our own brain are clearly presented, in a very accessible way. The cover includes a quote from Levitt, describing the book as "relentlessly entertaining"; this I agree with, and it is the sole aspect that detracted from at least my second reading, if not the first. Not a paragraph and barely a sentence goes by without some quip, wordplay, joke or witty aside, which, while it makes the book great for dipping into, and no doubt sell well to people who buy on the basis of reading one paragraph in the shop, can get a little wearing when reading for hours at a time. Still, the content is well worth the price of admission.

It would be even more interesting to get Steve, Dan and Malcolm together over drinks, wind them up and let them go.

here we go

2008-07-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

As if I didn't have a million things to do...