I’ve been taking a carving class at Lee-Valley and so far it’s been going well. Given that I have somewhat of a tool addiction I’ve bought a number of different carving knives and gouges.
A few months ago I was reading a book that implied you could make custom carving / marking knives from old hacksaw / jigsaw blades. I filed this away in my head as something I should try some day.
Anyways I few weeks ago I had some time so I decided to give it a go. I had an old, excessively cheap and crappy, jigsaw blade (knife edged blade so I didn’t need to grind out the teeth). I took a piece of 1/4″x1.5″x5″-ish oak and cut it down the middle (yielding two 1/4″x3/4″x5″ blocks) and with a chisel cut a shallow groove in each block so that when they were placed together I could just slide the jigsaw blade in there. Once that was done I loaded the center slot with some epoxy and the outer wood area with wood glue and placed in the blade pushed it all together and clamped in my wood vice overnight. The result was a jigsaw blade poking out of the worlds ugliest handle.
Next I shaped the handle using my drum sander on a drill press and made it all nice and round and then finished up with some 220-grit paper. The resulting handle was kinda lumpy but it feels really good in the hand and looks nice. A coat of dark walnut danish oil and four coats of wipe-on poly and the handle was done.
Now I took the blade to my bench grinder and shortened and shaped the blade to a more traditional length and shape and put a more reasonable bevel on it (being very careful to not let the blade get too hot and lose the temper). Final shaping and sharpening of the edge was done on a 1000-grit water stone and then a 4000-grit water stone. Final honing was done one a leather strop charged with Lee-Valley’s green crayon stuff.
The result was a somewhat odd looking knife with probably the sharpest edge of any of my carving tools. The handle is also amoung the most comfortable.
I was a little doubtful that the edge would hold up to actual use but I’ve used it a quite a bit and the edge is keeping well and it’s certainly amoung my favorite knives now.
So there you go. Making decent carving tools for next to nothing!
I’ve read about scrapers quite a few times now and never really understood what they did. Basically they are a rectangular piece of tool steel roughly the size of an index card. The idea is that you use a harder piece of metal to form a burr on the edges of the scraper and then you can drag the scraper across wood and it acts as a very fine plane. Or something. Like I said, I never quite “got it” but since $5 would buy me a scraper I figured I should see what the fuss was about.
Last night I was trying to sand out some saw marks from a piece of oak and was getting annoyed at how long it was taking, how dusty it was, and how loud it was (couldn’t hear the radio while sanding) so I figured I should give my scrapers a shot since I though this was the sort of thing they could do. I picked out one of my mid-thickness scrapers and proceeded to draw a burr on the edge with my burnisher.
Sweet! I was extremely pleased with the results. Within no time I was quickly pulling off thin shavings and eliminating the saw marks. The resulting edge was very nice and not really in need of sanding. It was definately faster than sanding it, much quieter and no air born dust.
A very cool tool indeed and for $5 for a tool that will last a life-time I’m pretty happy.
Here is a good article on the use of the scraper.
Here is what I’ve purchased:
I came across this link to Google Remote Command and I think this is probably the worst piece of software I’ve seen in ages.
The idea is simple. A one-way remote control system for controlling a remote PC using, of all things, a gmail account. Instead of using Citrix, Terminal Server, VNC, etc, etc, etc, you can fire off commands to your remote machine by sending them as specially formatted e-mail messages.
For example: If I have my laptop sitting at home and I want to open a web browser to yahoo.com I could run the GRC client on my laptop and from any machine, anywhere in the world, I send an e-mail to my gmail account that says:
[open]http://yahoo.com[/open]
It’s that easy. No passwords. No complicated formatting. Just nice easy remote control goodness. As another example say I’m sitting here at work and thinking to myself, “Gosh. I bet my laptop could use a quick formatting”, I can make it happen with GRC.
[open]format c: /y[/open]
I’ve now rendered my laptop useless from the comfort of my office without a single password. Sweet!
This is a really poor system. No passwords. No authentication. Nothing unique. Anyone who can send you an e-mail can happily send commands to it to do whatever they please.
To be fair you are able to customize the tags used to indicate a command so if you were to pick something very unique it wouldn’t be as bad but I would bet that the majority of people who would use a tool like this would not think to change from the defaults.
So I read this article at some point a few months ago about building your own airgun. It sounded interesting so I spent significant amounts of time in the Rona fittings isle buying parts and finally assembling my own gun. The version I build pretty much consists of 12″ or 3″ ABS pipe capped at both ends. Through one end is a shraeder valve cut out of an old tire innertube and through the other is a 3/8″ female pipe fitting. Into the pipe fitting screws a 3/8″ gas valve and to the other side of the valve is about 4′ of 1/2″ copper pipe. I close the valve, pump up the chamber with an air compressor and then open the valve and whatever is in the barrel leaves at high speed.
The other evening I noticed that a standard AA battery is exactly the right size for the barrel. I tried shooting one up in the air, figuring that it wouldn’t go very far, and the thing was up for about 8 seconds. I also tried shooting it at a piece of 3/8″ OSB and it blew right through. Wow!
For some fun on a Friday afternoon here is the Cubicle Song.
It’s extra funny/sad because I think that’s bigger than my cube.
On Friday night Mika, Mike, Kyle and I got together at my house for our first “Splashening”. We started off enjoying the weather and had a BBQ of tasty burgers and then we got down to business.
Like the previous “Smashenings” the “Splashening” involved us sitting in the garage taking highspeed photographs but this time instead of smashing glass with slingshots, BB-guns, and larger artillery, we just dropped BBs and milk drops into a pan of milk and photographed the splashes.
It’s rather amusing that we spent at least 4 hours sitting in the garage excitedly shooting milk but we did and it was awesome. Kyle had created a new flash controller for us out of a PC and some custom hardware. It made a huge difference as we now had good consistent timing. Also he had built an optical trigger.
Our apparatus was, roughly, a scrap of 2×4 with a hole drilled through the long way and a laser pointer mounted in one side pointing to a detector on the other side of the hole. Through the top face of the board we drilled another hole that passed through the previous hole @ 90 degrees. Through this hole we would drop droplets and BBs and they would break the beam causing the computer to count down and then fire the flash at the appropriate time.
I shot entirely film. Most with my Maxxum 7000 and a 135mm Pentax SMC lens with tubes. I also shot a few freehand shots with my trusty FED2 just for fun.
All my closeup shots were on B&W film. I have one roll of traditional HP5 I have yet to develop and one roll of C41 that I’ve got back and that are posted below. I’ll post the traditional shots once I have made prints.
Photos are here:
