Finishing and Completing

It was a glorious weekend.  Glorious enough to warrant a blog entry.

The window of nice weather in northeast Oklahoma is pretty narrow; it goes from cold to hot pretty quickly but Saturday and Sunday were two perfect days where the temperature inside the house and outside were both the same at a perfect 70 degrees so the doors and windows could be left open and access to the great outdoors was easy.  Plus, the bugs don’t seem to have woken up yet so the almost ubiquitous mosquitoes and flies were not around.

And I spent all of it working with wood in some way or another.

I had wanted to build myself a loading stand – a thing to hold my cap-and-ball revolver upright while I load it.  It was a very easy project that I decided to do with only hand tools.  Except the vertical piece – rather than bother with a mortise and tenon, I just used a single biscuit.  I was using a piece of cheap pine from the home center and that stuff is so soft that it cuts like butter even with my poorly sharpened tools.  Or perhaps they are sharpened well and the last project’s wood was just very hard.  If so, then I’m sharpening pretty well.  I even shot the ends of the pieces on my shooting board for practice.  I’ve concluded that one of my problems is that my planes are usually set to take off too heavy of a shaving.  Pulling the iron back by “just a stink” (as my Dad used to say) solved the end-grain shooting problems I had.

I completed the project by the afternoon and I can use it next time I shoot. (My use of the word ‘shoot’ has become ambiguous :)

In between the various glue-drying sessions, I went inside to help with a sideboard that my wife bought last week.  She had asked me to build one which I was very excited about but then she found this one while we were out browsing in an antique store and it was pretty much perfect for the space we have.  And it was pretty cheap  - cheaper than new wood – so we bought it.  Its finish was in pretty bad shape so I had bought a can of Howard’s RestoreA-Finish which I applied out on the patio.  It still smells pretty bad (that old ‘antique’ smell) so I intend to add a coat of shellac to all the internal parts to seal in the stink.

I did get to do a bit of woodworking on it in the form of a repair to a portion of the top where the veneer had lifted up off the plywood.  I worked a bit of thinned wood glue up under it and clamped it down with a piece of scrap; that seemed to work pretty well.  You can still see it when the light hits it just right but no antique ever looks like new.  It’s a nice looking piece. 

I also had time to take apart two Disston hand saws and refurbish them.  Both were moderately rusty.  I had bought a bottle of Evapo-Rust which I was anxious to try out.  I don’t have anything large enough to put a saw blade in and submerge it in the solution so I opted for the wet paper towel method inside a trash bag.  That stuff gets rid of rust quite well and even though the label says that it won’t get rid of the black stuff, I still hoped that it would loosen it but no joy.  I got rid of the rest of the crud with a 220 grit pad on my ROS.  That would have taken off the rust too but this was as much an experiment as anything else.  In the end, both saw plates are nice and clean.  I had the time to scrape the varnish off of one of the handles and re-oil it with some Watco that was sitting on the bench.  That’s not a very good criteria for choosing a finish but there it is.  I like the feel of it at any rate.

I also polished the bolts by chucking them into my drill and spinning them in a piece of rag that I had covered with some Chromium Oxide from my sharpening supplies.  I haven’t messed with the bolts before but they look really nice when they’re shined up. I toyed with the idea of going to buy a buffing wheel for my grinder but it was more fun to stay in the shop/garage and accomplish something rather than go shopping.  And now the job is done.

I still haven’t reassembled them yet (or sharpened them) but to me the hard work is done.  Or at least the smelly work.  That brings me to four large (26”) hand saws and I probably don’t need more than two but it will be fun to work on my sharpening skills now that I don’t have to worry about messing up one of the ones that I actually use.  One has about 7 TPI which is more than the others so that one might be pressed into service as the one for ripping long pieces.  I still haven’t made any saw benches though so these will be a bit awkward to use until then.

I’ve been struggling with turning a burr on my scraper but it seemed to remove the finish from the saw handles well enough so perhaps I’m homing in on the skill.  Either that or I got lucky.  Doesn’t matter, the finish removal went well.

After all this, I actually cleaned up the bench so that I can actually do something the next time I go out there. That project will be a range box to carry all my shooting stuff in.

And with that, the sun went down and now I have to return to work.  In heaven, all days will be like these: filled with creative and productive work where the weather is nice and the bugs don’t bite.