Thursday, March 16, 2006

Armed and dangerous

Ah, I love it when a plan comes together - eventually. As it so frequently the case, at least in my experience, if one side of something goes swimmingly chances are the other side will give you trouble. Well naturally it did, and I had to do a good deal of tweaking and trimming to get a good tight join on the lap joint (at least I hope it's a good tight join - it was before I put the glue into the equation at any rate). The medium shoulder and the skew block have both earnt their keep for this year already, bless them. A "number" of clamps later, and it's all gluing up. I even managed to remember to wipe over the joint with a damp cloth for the polyuckethene this time. I'll need to plane up the top surface once it's done and then I can cut and glue the doubler before embarking on the marathon task of shaping it all into something reasonable - I can already hear my thumbs registering protests...

Given that I couldn't make any more headway on the arm or anything much bench-related until that was all done and cleared away, I made a little preparation towards turning those pesky leg tenons. Regular readers will recognise all the signs of a Job I'm Putting Off... Anyway, a couple of gauges; one to check for size while the legs on the lathe and the other to check the whole tenon length for fit. The latter meant boring another deep hole in that hard beech with the unsuitable auger bit I chose to use and it was Heavy Going. I've really got to get back in the way of looking at auger bits at the car boots again; evidentally I'm rather less well-off in that department than I'd fully appreciated. Tsk, that's a shame, isn't it...?

2 comments:

  1. Which shoulder plane do you prefer large or medium

    D

    ReplyDelete
  2. 'lo D, sorry, I managed to overlook this before. Well I prefer the right sized one for the job, but if it was going to be one for everything I'm a believer in it being more accurate to use the large on small work than the medium on large - so large it'd be. If it's an isolated "which do I like best", I'm not sure I could choose...

    ReplyDelete

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