Month: December 2024

I mentioned in the last post that I wanted to explore something more interesting with the boxes, like a furniture-like shape. I thought this would look like a couch without the back. Which my daughter came down and quickly blurted out “that’s an ottoman”. Which made me also realize that I missed the opportunity to do this style of box with one of the turkish oilstones. The two I have are permanently seated in something already and they are very irregular in shape, so that ship has sailed.

I think this is an interesting shape, but it’s lacking something a little bit and could be more interesting without much more work. Maybe another time. It’s the same boxwood substitute – Castelo Boxwood, which is interesting because it doesn’t stand out as much at first and could be confused for Maple. It’s harder than maple, but in some ways, easier to work by hand.

The ends are rounded over and the bead goes all the way around. I don’t scratch bead much and this curve on a wood that’s fairly hard isn’t trivial, so I had to sort of figure it out. There’s one other box that appears to be made of mahogany with curved ends online and when I first decided to try this, i took a closer look at it and the beads on the ends are pretty shitty. That box has interesting little carved details, and the maker of it was likely never intending to show pictures online. The trick to getting a beading blade to work across this was to sharpen the bottom of the profile to a point, otherwise it would just ride on the wood and not sink in.

the filing on the rounded side that goes onto the workpiece- the left flat – is pretty crude and it doesn’t need to be totally sharp. the center, this is a tiny bead and I don’t have files that would do it so much at a reasonable angle to the profile, but a small chainsaw file held at a very shallow angle did a good job. Night and day. It will bead anything now, even some of the 3000+ hardness central American woods.

The varnish on it is not the full set of coats, and It’ll get as much again more along with some steel wooling or sanding to try to make sure it stays level. This varnish is set with japan drier so that it can be brushed on two or three times a day. Two if no light box or warm box, and it really could be brushed on four times a day with the light box. So, it looks a little funky because it’s right off of the brush.

The stone housed in it is charnley forest. These all vary a little and this one like most is just OK as a finisher. It’s easy to see why hard arkansas stones took over for the few who needed them (dentists, engravers, some carvers) and the washita took over the end below them. They’re not a stone you need no matter what – they’re a little slow and most of them can take gouging with stuff like engraving tools.

Years ago, I bought the two handled beader that Veritas made just because I was in that phase where you’re doing a little woodworking and buying stuff that looks like a good idea, which is maybe too quick. the beading blades for this thing are decent to start with, but the beader is good for something I haven’t yet figured out. it’s pretty much garbage for this box project and there’s a handle in the way of everywhere you’d really like to put your hands to make sure the fence never leaves the side of the work, a long lever to help you accidentally spoil a bead if the beader catches, and enough cast iron and fence stuff to both trap the shavings and stop the beader from cutting, and also increase friction to 90% of the effort you’re expending.

I wonder if it was designed by the same person who decided chipbreakers don’t work. Whatever the case, I had to make a small very jiffy (fraction of an hour) stock to do the concave parts and then just turned to using it for all of the beading. It’ll be worth making a flat version of the same thing for more general use. I don’t think LV makes this tool any longer – which is too bad – too bad that it’s not lie nielsen where out of production means increased value.

So, What was my Diatrabe of the “Freds” About?

If you haven’t read the prior post, there’s no need to. Fred is a household term here for someone who doesn’t do anything, but always has an opinion on what you should do, what’s doable and how it should be done. There are polite well-intentioned Freds, but more common are the passive aggressive know it alls who really celebrate around them if nobody else enjoys themselves or accomplishes anything.

The last thing this hobby needs, or really any of us as individuals – because our intentions and wants as individuals are more important than the hobby itself. That should make sense – the hobby can be anything, but each of us wants to do something or nothing. The something could be making, researching, reading, whatever it may be. The hobby will be what it is around that. None of us has an obligation outside that. you don’t have an obligation to buy $1900 chisels or $200 router planes from China. You have an obligation to yourself – to figure out what you would like to do most and do it if you want. Very little of the information you get when asking or getting information unsolicited, will be useful to you, and most of it will be from people who are less qualified to give it than you.

Similar box. I posted a picture of the prior boxes on reddit and reddit is not exactly a site for much average depth – it’s a sign of the times…well, a decade ago when people started moving to devices vs. PCs. However, folks are usually positive there, except there’s often one or two people who are critical. I think they are Fred critical. Fred is an esoterica name in my parent’s sphere, a term for someone who can tell you the right answer for everything, offer an opinion, imply comparability with accomplished people and disappear if having to prove anything.

Freds on internet forums, reddit, whatever, are the folks who drop in on threads and disagree about something, get upset if you challenge them to offer a relevant suggestion or show something they’ve done. In my parents’ sphere, Freds also often like to tell you ahead of time you shouldn’t bother trying something because it won’t turn out well or whatever you might do will cause problems, so don’t bother.

You don’t know the Freds we do, but we know more than one person named Fred who has these qualities. Thus the name. Freds are fascinated with what you may have wasted money on (wood) or wasted your time on (making things with wood), offering unsolicited coaching as you’ll often find. People who talk the most about wasting time with something are not atypically the same folks who do nothing useful with theirs.

So…

Being notified that these boxes are a waste of time and money, it makes me want to make something more elaborate. I did want to first use stock nicer than the other wood I’ve used- which was cherry, padauk and walnut. Nothing wrong with those, and the padauk under varnish has surprisingly pleasing color. But I wanted something less common looking:

This box houses a stone that has been on a shelf in my bathroom – it’s an oilstone, but I have used it only on razors. It’s a nice burr chaser, maybe as fine as any natural stone I’ve ever used, but it’s slow cutting. I don’t think stones like this were even really used much for razors – they’re a little too slow for even that – but this one would be excellent for engraving tools or chasing burrs on profiled tools. That’s a little beside the point other than to describe why it doesn’t make it to the shop – it’s too fine for anything other than perhaps as a base for 0.5 or 1 micron diamonds.

The wood is castelo boxwood. Gilmer wood sells it on a regular basis and it’s a relative of lemonwood. It’s not cheap, but there are more expensive woods and it is divine to work. After planing the first of two blanks I bought years ago, I bought 5 more. Surprisingly, this billet has some brownish stuff in the middle, but not at the edges, so that kind of dictated the orientation of the grain here. I’d rather not see the stuff you see on the bottom at all, but on the ends is better than on the front and top, so it’s flatsawn looking on the side and at first glance, looks a little like maple.

The box is plain, I think done well enough that I want something a little more challenging in terms of uniqueness and that’ll mean difficulty.

The Freds of the world would declare it’s a waste of time, and I’m not the accomplished type who turns out something never seen before on a continuous basis – more the type who quickly responds “what have you made lately?”

Sweet Spot

I can make tools well enough now that the tools would have some open market value. But I think this box adventure has been sort of the sweet spot of what I like to do. There is no “make one” and it should be perfect sort of internet idea, nor is it something I want to do just kind of half shitty half OK in one example and move on. this box makes it five of the type with a carved bottom after what I really started out with was making several plain flat boxes to use oak that my dad had milled long ago. They left me feeling like I could make something nicer because it’s annoying for me to just make things and not think much about it other than fighting a power router or something. The difference between me and the difference between me 15 years ago wasn’t so much skill as it was tolerance to figure things out. I guess there is a lot of trivial knowledge gained, but the mindset is more important. If I was less talented, I’d make less nice things. If I was more talented (and pretty much every pro and lots of amateurs are more talented), I’d make much nicer things than just plain boxes like this. But I would be just as happy either way.

I’ll get back to chisels and cutting tools soon – it’s still nice to make those. I think I can do things more interesting – maybe subtly – and better than what I’ve done so far.

Padauk. I’ve got some padauk I bought back when it was inexpensive and you could get blanks kiln dried. which is a blessing and a curse. Dried purple heart, padauk, etc. is miles away from being anything like green turning blanks, but it’s also nowhere close to being stable as tool wood. I learned that making a skew infill shooting plane in the winter and then having the purpleheart infill swell a small fraction and telegraph all of the dovetail in the steel plane pretty seriously. Not a big deal. but for something like a fitted stone box, I’d also bet the kiln dried turning blanks cut to a close fit would be split within a year or two. The stone certainly isn’t going to change.

I have been drying the varnish on these in a UV box – it speeds things up nicely. Two or three hours, the box is up to 95 degrees, and you can remove item in question, wetsand if needed (every two or three coats) and brush a fine coat of varnish and keep going at it. The stone boxes that I’ve been making get tight just from being in that heat, and a scraper to the sides is all it takes to relieve things.

So, anyway, even this padauk, which was KD and probably 6 or 8 years old through a lot of dry winter cycles still shrinks in that box a little. when it was new, it may have shrunk enough to split the box in days. Too, I never found a use for padauk and have two 14x14x3″ quartered to rift blanks. They’re ideal. Why? wood is a funny thing – the smoothness of recently dried wood is one thing, the stability isn’t there. Once wood is decades old, it changes in feel, and I’ve started to realize that having wood that I may not use for another couple of decades will mean that maybe the wood won’t be as cooperative in certain ways. Cocobolo, for example, is just dreamy for handles if you find it really old. More than half of the cocobolo I’ve found is a little over 50 years old. Compared to newer oily seeming cocobolo, it’s almost unrecognizable. it’s agreeable, though probably less easy to plane to a perfect finish and the oiliness that it would’ve had has long since disappeared. Those volatile oils that make dry newer cocobolo kind of cakey probably aren’t stable over decades, and we already know the wood itself changes over time to be a little more brittle but much more stable as the volatiles are gone.

So I’d better use the padauk, and when you buy gobs of wood that you find on a deal, if you do, it’s probably good to treat it like a prepper pantry. It’s nice to have stuff around, but it can’t sit forever. (not a prepper, by the way, but I get the sense that preppers need to eat out of their stash on a regular basis and rotate it so as not to get to the end of the world and find something that looks like a WWI military ration).

Padauk in this case, again hand tools only again, same tools, just with a shot at making the lid thicker and the top rounded.

Padauk is supposedly around 1700-1800 hardness. it definitely has straws that aren’t terribly easy to plane expanses of on end grain easily, but it’s not intolerable. This one again has silica in it!! Too, the profile on the top is cut with little sandpaper, but unlike the other boxes where none is used, after planing, rounding and filing the profiles to near finished state, I did sand them to try to make them look as uniform as possible. I hate sanding – the mess, the boredom, etc, but on a round profile like this, it’s the easiest way I know to not have stray marks. The same beading plane worked fine again across the end grain, it has not been resharpened and the fact that it’s held up without beating up beads or leaving lines on anything is a testament to us often being off the mark about needing abrasion resistance vs. understanding geometry of edges.

Of course, the same design on the bottom after the above, and after pore filling with FF pumice mixed in a long oil varnish, the finish is almost gloss.

Almost gloss here, which you can see if you look closely suggesting that I didn’t build a big thick finish and the sand and rub out what’s left. Rather, it’s just applied and then wetsanded and after the last wetsanding with relatively fine paper, the final coat is just as brushed with a small fine artist brush. thin so that it will have minimal brush marking or stria.

It’s interesting that in making this box, I used some of the least abrasion resistant tools that I have and never once felt like they were limiting at all. For the gouges, if the tools were more abrasion resistant, it would’ve been aggravating.

Oh….

An after the fact edit – you can see the chip on the corner of the box in one of the pictures, or maybe several. You’d think that’s from chiseling or planing, but I was actually filing the end grain. I really like planing and then filing end grain – it’s miles better than sanding end grain, but it will break out the dry brittle grain that I mentioned, especially on padauk, which is really chippy at edges. I can’t imagine it would’ve been like that just after being dried. I did nothing about it – no repair, no attempt to glue the chip on and hide it because it’s a stone box. I’d be nice to make a jewelry box or something like this style and really tart it up for real – no damage, and build the finish and make it look nicer than the off the brush finish in this case. For stones, there’s no use…..why? As soon as you have swarf on your fingers, whatever you touch in terms of finishes will get deglossed by the metal grit. When these get deglossed, I’ll just hit them with 4F steel wool and wax them with carnauba. What I really want out of the varnish, and what it’s great at, is ignoring any alcohol or oils or WD40 that’ll be used on the stone – it’ll keep the wood clean.