Monday 5 August 2013

I've taken up woodworking....

As the title says, I've taken up woodworking, I've wanted to make things for a while now but always lacked any decent tools and any skill, apart from a soldering iron and some wire cutters.  as you can see from my other articles, I like embedded electronics, but there are never any sensible cases for things, if there are, it's a ridiculous price and probably not entirely appropriate to my needs.  So I want to design and craft my own cases, along with little bits of furniture and other ideas I might have for my other hobbies, eventually I'd like to build a cnc to take care of intricate parts but for bigger projects woodworking will be great.  I have been ill for some time, so this will also be an opportunity to start to slowly get fitter.

My tool kit has consisted for some time of rusty pliers, a junior hacksaw, a rasp, a claw hammer and a bent chisel, not exactly inspiring.  I started looking into getting some tools together, spoke to my dad and the upshot was that he donated me power tools and hand tools as he's been upgrading his.

So far I have a ferm scroll saw, jig saw, power drill, 2 routers, 2 router tables, compound sliding mitre saw, detail sander, cordless circular saw, detail sander, 7 bevel edged chisels, a record no.4 smoothing plane and an oilstone.  It all sounds like a reasonable load of kit and on the face of things it is, however, there are a few issues that needed sorting out.

The first power tool I was given was a Ferm ffz-400n scroll saw, it's pretty much your standard lower middle range scroll saw, it's a pinned blade system but can be upgraded to a pinless system, to use it properly it will need to be upgraded, as it stands it's quite hit and miss as to how the blade will behave and intricate inside work is impossible due to needing at least a 5mm hole to insert the blade through a work piece.

Next was the Bosch router and router table, the router is a 1/4", it's ok but apparently the micro-adjuster suffers from creep even when the thing is locked, it was missing bushes and being bosch they were proprietary and expensive, it also had trammel bars but these were rusty.

The Bosch RT60 router table is a cast metal table, it's really a jobbing table than a precision unit, it's got a rudimentary plastic fence which has a couple of nice features but non standard slots in it and no way to attach anything, being plastic you'll probably ruin it before you modify it with any attachments.  It's also got a mitre slot cast into the bench but the finish was so poor on the paintwork/casting that it would really need plenty of work to get it to a usable state for jigs and to top it all the mitre slot is shorter than the standard slots that everyone else uses.

I wasn't entirely convinced with the router, being a plunge router in a table it's not exactly simple to swap bits and adjust height, by the time I'd spent money on the router to get it up to a usable state, I could have bought 1/2 a new router with all the trimmings that could take 1/2 inch router bits.

The 2nd router was a blackspur, again, like the bosch it's a plunge router, it's a bit weak, certainly not suitable for a table and most of the bits missing for using it as a normal router, it's essentially now a fat 1kw laminate trimmer.

At this point I'd read up a lot on routers, router tables, fences and associated systems, my dad incidentally has an incra setup, it's something I'd like to aspire to but not something I would want to spend the money on, at least not right now.

So, what to do?  Well, it was clear that I wanted to have a router table with a fence system that allows repeatability, I also need a decent workbench to work on too, this was again discussed with my father, who graciously decided to donate his 'shopsmith' router table, this is a thick mdf affair, with a proper dado'd aluminium mitre slot, the only small issue with it is that the slot is actually a shopsmith proprietary size but this will soon be remedied when the standard mitre slot arrives.

I also decided at this point that if I'm going to have a reasonable router table then I should have a reasonable router, I don't have hundreds of pounds to spend on festool etc. but I wanted a fixed based router, I settled on a draper 1350w combination router kit,  it's got a plunge base and a fixed base, it comes with a 1/4" and 1/2" collets, a set of screw in bushes, trammel bars, guide rail and centring pin.  I didn't go mad with bits, I bought a cheap draper 1/4" set, I figured that I'd get a set of cheap generic bits so that I could learn which bits I really needed and wouldn't worry about trashing them with my ineptitude.

All that prep work and not a single thing built yet!!  This isn't really surprising, as my current workbench is a weak workmate style bench, I also have zero skills, along with a distinct lack of timber.

My Dad to the rescue yet again, brought over a load of wood that was supposed to be enough to build a bench and a couple of different sets of plans for building one.  I Studied the plans looked at the wood and figured there wasn't really that much of a relationship between the 2!!  I had 4x 29"x3x3, one of them square, the other 3 didn't have a 90deg angle between them, so they're too short and they'd need a bit of work to get them to a usable state.  The rails were also in a dubious state/not enough.

  To cut a long story short, I decided to cut my losses on the legs and go and get 4x 39"x3x3 PAR, my Dad also sorted me out with enough wood to sort out the rails.  I'm currently waiting on the wood for the top but that should be within the next week or so.

I've knocked up a design on sketchup (had to learn how to use that first), it's based on a few other designs dotted around the net, it'll be sturdy enough to last for years and give me a solid work area for all of my projects.

Once I've got the bench built, I will build a carcass for the shopsmith router table to sit on.

Onto the hand tools,  using a junior hacksaw for everything is lame and my bent chisel is only useful for opening tins of paint.  You can't really build a bench with those, so I bought myself a tenon saw, in hindsight it was cheap junk and not really that appropriate or at least not appropriate for someone who hasn't used a saw much in his life.  It was really too bulky for fine control, more teeth than a piranha and set wide enough to drive a bus through the kerf.

Dad to the rescue yet again (he really is great isn't he?), 7 bevel edged chisels, an oilstone, a record no.4 and a japanese flush cutting saw with a ninja style name.

A couple of the chisels were stanley, 3 of them looked like the stanleys but no markings and the last 2 had no names on them, some of them were the same size, so I ended up with 3 different sizes, 1/2", 3/4" and 1".

None of them had sensible bevels on them, I weighed up the time it would take to learn how to hone chisels by hand/eye coordination alone vs getting a honing guide kit and getting on with life, the honing guide kit won.

There are many methods to putting a bevel on a chisel and producing a nice sharp edge, I'm still trying them all out so I won't tell you how I do mine, you'll have to find out for yourself :-)

With sharp chisels, I could attempt to chop holes in wood, my previous couple of attempts with my bent paint tin opener were abject failures, tearout, poor control, rubbish bevel/sharp edge all contributed to a crummy mortice.

I watched quite a few videos on the net, most notably paul sellers, he has a really nice presentation style, very easy to listen to and explains everything simply.  Armed with what I'd seen and sharp chisels I have attempted a few more mortices, with much better success.  I am refining my technique, getting a feel for the chisel, a feel for the wood and how the grain will behave, after 5 mortices with the sharp chisels I'm getting nice straight walls, neat lines and I'm cutting them much faster.  I still need to keep an eye when I'm cleaning out chips as I seem to not pay attention at some point and crush a short wall.

The plane has been a fun learning experience, I first had to learn about all the parts of a plane and how to fettle them, not exactly easy when you have no idea of how a plane should behave, it didn't behave too well, it seemed to jam up quite quickly, so I set about taking it apart and seeing if I could make it better.

I sorted the bevel out on the blade, then flattened the chipbreaker edge so that it was tight against the blade and set back from the tip accordingly. I also adjusted the frog to give a slightly wider blade/mouth opening and set about using the plane on one of the bits of 29x3x3 legs that my dad had given me, 4 sides later and I have a plane that I am confident in using and a length of 3x3 that is nicely trued and not a matchstick either!!

Yeah, yeah, I know, I still haven't built anything at this point, I don't see the point of attempting anything with the wood for the bench until I am sure I can complete the task.  Due to my illness I don't have oodles of time or energy to spend a day in a workshop, so I've been doing things when appropriate, over time this will get better I'm sure.

I would like to point out that I have been reading up and watching wood working videos on the net, as well as getting superb help on  http://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/ the guys there have been fantastic and given me great advice and opinion, they've given me lots of insight into modern and old techniques that are going to prove invaluable in the future, thanks guys.

Everything I've been doing so far has been self learnt, I won't say self taught as I've used those wonderful free resources supplied by google to find forums, videos and articles by people that have taught me, I know the internet is a big place but I found that there are enough opinions out there whether they're conflicting or not that will allow you to filter them and find the information that's appropriate for you, your skill level and your budget.

It all seems a bit daunting to start off with, there are loads of websites, hundreds of tools, gadgets and doohickys out there, with more opinions than stars in the galaxy, so if you're starting out like me, my advice is to read a lot, watch as many videos as you can, join a forum, ask lots of questions (whether they seem stupid or not), never be afraid to challenge opinion and most of all, learn to use google to your best advantage.

I've learnt tons of stuff over the last few months, it doesn't feel like I've done much as it's all been prep work,

I reckon in the next week or 2 that I'll get started on my bench for real, I think by then I'll have gained enough skill and confidence to produce something that I will be proud of, I had originally planned on using 1/2 lap joints but I'm now starting to think I might actually be able to do decent enough mortices that I might use those instead.

I think that's about enough from me for now for my first woodworking post, see you next time....