To continue this thread of hand tool daring do, I give you:
"Galoot is reminded just how long it is since her last serious planing session"
Yes folks, on a real project.
None of this stopping every 2 minutes to take another glamour shot of a review plane, carefully arranging the shavings in the background, but real planing to a purpose! Oh brother, and do I ache this morning in consequence...
Anyway it's The Board From H*** (tm) being made into a simple (very simple) footstool/small table. An opportunity to finally get round to trying the Miller Dowels too, but that's unsuitable talk for this illustrious board. No, the main fun was shaping the stretcher with shaves, and cleaning up the
planer thicknesser marks/shooting the ends. Folks, there's good reason why the tool gods have seen fit to equip me with a wide range of spokeshaves from which to choose; no one single shave would deal adequately with that curve.
In the end a combo of the Veritas low angle and the Preston adjustable (oh Preston shave, how I do love thee, even if Ray Iles blade isn't quite as super duper as the original) cracked it, and I'll admit I preened over the result just a little bit...
But the best fun of all was had with the Veritas low angle jack. This is not a cheap shill for it, but genuine, honest-to-goodness what I think; that plane is a dream to use. I'm neglecting all my other planes as a consequence of it's luciousness; pity me, dear reader, when I tell you I'm wondering why I own a L-N #4.5. <Gulp>
It's pretty pathetic to say it, but
I love that plane. Forget the tote; all its virtues make that small niggle null and void. I shudder to think that if it wasn't for the reviewing I'd never have given it a thought, let alone owned one.
So thank you Rob, and Martin, and you guys for reading the reviews. Bless you all.
Anyway, enough of this Oscar acceptance speech stuff; back to the shavings.
I wish the camera was working, 'cos the end grain shavings from TBFH are really beautiful; that was with the standard low angle blade, natch - ground square and used on the shooting board. But the long grain stuff with the high angle blade! Aaargh, if only I was capable of reading my vernier calipers accurately I could do a DC.
Oh what the heck, I will anyway: "they're of the order of 1 or 2 thou", I'm sure of it.
This was with a slightly cambered blade (honed freehand...
), and with DC's second DVD fresh in my mind, I tried out his method. S'good. Not as different from what I was doing before as I thought, but having the guidelines from the pencil does give a bit more accuracy than I had before.
So I now have virtually all the components ready; just got to make the feet by doing a cut out in the leg boards. You know the sort of thing; where the legs are just planks but a semi-circle cut out from the bottom creates two little feet. Except I want to do
Gothic Arches, and I'm not sure yet how I'm going to them clean up right into the point.
Any thoughts on that would be appreciated, btw. And as you may be able to tell, despite the aches, I'm all a-buzz with the joys of woodworking. This begs a question:
Why the heck do I go so long between making proper projects?!
Cheers, Alf
P.S. I was warm as toast too
(no jigs either) (well, except the shooting board)
