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I am slowly building a Celtic type lap harp and find I may need to construct it using blind wedged mortice and tenons. Never actually made such a joint. Any tips?

&1 for semforite

Recumbent bike. Rough sketch of where I am at the moment. Still very early days at the moment. The joint in question is the boom to upright. The drawing shows a small “knee” to reinforce the joint. I would like to stay with all wood construction but metal or carbon fibre straps are not...

I want to laminate a structural L-shape beam using a central core and face plates. Each “arm” is 20” x 3”x2”. It will be supporting 75kg, and varnished not painted. It will be clearly visible and outdoors. Fancy joints or plain, there are so many options for joining the arms I’m a bit...

Ordered new Shinto rasp; swept rubble sack full of sawdust and woodchips out of the workspace

&1 for Shinto rasp if you work with difficult grain or do a lot of roughing out complex shapes. I’ve worn out 2 of them

Stopped at “there “ in “Hi there”

I have worn out my Parkside safety shoes. I have never worn such a comfortable safety shoe. I’m in them from 7:30am to 9:30pm 7 days a week. Averaging a mix of walking and running 5km a day. I don’t like or need high ankle boots but this year’s Lidl offerings are redesigned and now are low...

One carver to another, those birds are stunning

I don’t have any welding equipment and I pathologically hate using carbon fibre but I can do decent file work in mild steel and aluminium and have a garage full of exotic and domestic hard and softwoods, materials choice is that of Hobson😊

I was asked to run a taster course in beginners woodwork. The adult Ed course was free so the materials budget as close to zero as possible. Our local wood recycling centre provided ex-library oak shelving for a few quid, made lovely boxes, everyone was happy. Just made a set of fitted...

I need a couple of lengths of 2x1/2, 20 inches long. They will be under significant stress as the rear forks of a bicycle. I imagine glue lam is stronger than just cutting and shaping the natural timber. Is that the case? If it is stronger. How thick should the lams be?

Sorry for being vague. Not 1.2, but, somewhere more than 1 mm up to about 2 mm. My preferred depth of cut is 2mm but it’s not set in stone. The surfaces being rough is not sufficient in this case, the laminates need to interlock, the laminates are quite thin so the grooves can’t be too deep...

I need to cut v grooves into glueing surfaces so that the laminations will interlock. The grooves need to be triangular in section and 2mm deep. I was going to file a scratch stock as the pieces to groove are only 15mm wide but then I wondered if there may be a jig saw blade of some sort with...

I always struggled cutting thin strips on a band saw and by the time I cleaned and trued the cut surface generally lost as much as if I had used a table saw. The only reason I had thought of using the holly was the Google reference to it being used in engineering, but I suspect it was more like...

I think the laminate needs to be unidirectional?

Biggest problem with ash is I don't have any. Biggest issue with laminating is the waste. Laminating seems to use 2 or 3mm thick strips, so the saw kerf will be as wide as the laminate, and if I am raiding my stock of hardwoods, that'll hurt - I have a mahogany mantlepiece that would do very...

I am toying with the idea of building a (recumbent) wooden bike frame from holly as I have a few suitable lengths of 3” round wood seasoned. Google tells me it used to be used for engineering but doesn’t explain any further. I have made a long bow from it and some carved bits and pieces but...

Wooden boats need to be kept well ventilated or the wood will sweat and rot in very short order. One issue specific to oak vessels is the metal used as fastenings, iron was often used but would corrode quite quickly in the acidic timber, especially in the salt water and even more if the wood...