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The Big Firkle 2020


Timbo

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I've Got A Scrollsaw And I'm Gonna Use It!
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One of the last presents I received from Uncle Albert was a scrollsaw. I've only used it on a couple of occasions and even then not really to very good effect. When I say I've only used the saw a couple of times I do indeed mean the saw part of it. The flex-drive attachment with the Dremmel-like tools I use quite a bit, but the saw itself is left idle. Until yesterday.
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I decided I would try my hand at cutting out some letter shapes from wood to fulfil my better half's suggestion I put Grace's name on her pencil box. I have several pieces of figured black walnut that would provide a good contrast.
“Looks a bit eighties, definitely quirky!” was Ellie's judgement on the result of a day's firkling.
She was being kind of course as my efforts were an unmitigated disaster.
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Since the big Windows 10 update my printer and several other peripherals have decided to stop working, or rather Microsoft has decided I should spend money. And that ain't gonna happen! Neither was my first thought of printing out the letter design I wanted. Instead I reached for some squared paper and my geometry set. At the thought of pi...I got hungry, so time for a cup of tea and a biscuit, one of those new McVitie's VIB's with chocolate hazelnut.
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Armed with a cup of tea, biscuit and compasses, I set about designing letters to cut out on the scrollsaw. There are a couple of problems with the scrollsaw. Firstly even though I bought the finest tooth blades Machinemart had to offer, they are still very aggressive for 24tpi blades. Secondly the baseplate where the blade dips inside the table is not what you would call a flush fit. Small pieces of work run the risk of being dragged from my fingers and down the gullet of the saw. Climbing up the charts to number three is the missing adapters to take pinless scrollsaw blades. I have some expensive spiral cut blades for the saw and although the instructions and the box say they were supplied with the saw...they were not supplied with the saw. I have some on order but for now I will have to make do with what I have.
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With my patterns drawn, I cut them out and stuck them one by one onto the walnut I was going to use. I designed the letters to make use of 10mm and 20mm holes, so starting with the letter 'G' I used Vaughan to cut the 20mm holes and Andrew to cut the 10mm ones.

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I then set too cutting as close as I could to the lines of the pattern on the scrollsaw. It was a little easier cutting to the patterns. I used my band saw to cut any straight lines, tidied up any curves on the bench sander and used bench files to get rid of cut marks in more awkward areas. I do need to add a set of needle files to this weeks 'tools shopping list'.

Another break for a cup of tea between the letters 'A' and 'C' and I whizzed through 'E' quite quickly just using the bandsaw. When I picked Ellie up for lunch she approved the new lettering, so after lunch I got on with fixing them down to the lid of the box.

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While the glue set up, I had a quick firkle cleaning up, putting tools away, getting rid of rubbish into the wheelie-bins for collection tomorrow and using the shop vac to hoover up all of the dust.

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I then got on with applying the fist coat of Beagle's Ear Varnish TM.

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So that's two pencil boxes ready for Santa's sleigh, just a couple more to make and I can move onto the next project!

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Live! From Norwich, OK Lincoln, OK just outside Lincoln, OK not quite live but upright...it's Daft Question Time!

I'm sure I already know the answer to this but I just wanted to check what the Brain's Trust think? I've been asked to make a 'portable bar' in the campaign furniture style to replace a damaged one someone had bought and to repair the original. This will be a box that is 9" in length, 10" in depth and 17.5" in height. I've taken a look at the original and it was constructed from 18mm plywood wrapped in leather. The box was split into two and hinged in the middle. Both halves are fitted out in rosewood to accommodate two bottles of booze and a drawer in one half and six glasses and a wooden tray in the other half.

On the original box, which cost over a grand and is best described as 'knocked together on a back street in the Far East', hinges were screwed into the edge of the plywood and this is where the box is damaged, the plywood splitting and cracking and the hinges coming away from the plywood. The simple solution would be butterfly hinges screwed to the face of the plywood, but could I get away with edging the plywood with inch thick hardwood strips glued and dowelled into place and then fitting a piano hinge to the new hardwood edge? Would hardwood edged plywood and a piano hinge (just like RT's rear doors) be a suitable design for the new box?


 

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yes, cut back the ply inset some hardwood (glue and peg or biscuit into the ply end grain as necessary - or even arrange the hardwood so it dovetails into the ply (think of your insert as the dovetail finger, then it cant pull out directly it would have to slide out sideways, and cant be pulled out in the direction the two parts would pull)

|____\_____________/____|

 

 

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Friday
I'm going to be making a Safari Bar of a type the Victorians and Edwardians would have taken with them on their trip to massacre unsuspecting lions, tigers or natives come to think of it. An Oxbridge education taught me one thing, if anything. When you are chinless and gormless the social niceties requires the consumption of large quantities of alcohol. Because you are chinless and gormless, of course, means you can only swill said alcohol from the correct glass served on a fancy tray, the bottle resting on a drink coaster and your shiny boots resting on the back of your manservant.

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Campaign furniture, as a furniture style, has always interested me. Perhaps it is the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century that call out to me? It could be because I was born in a colony of the British Empire and for most of my adult life lived and worked in various former colonies of the old empire and resided among the furnishing detritus of past glories? Then again, it could be the absurdity of the chinless and gormless who could not contemplate mounting an expedition into the back of beyond without a collapsible bed, armchair, chest of drawers, shower, gun rack and bar strapped to the back of a camel or pachyderm that appeals to my whimsy? Whatever the reason, the simple lines and utility of campaign furniture fascinate me. So, when given the opportunity to make a piece of campaign furniture, even a small piece, I jumped at the chance.

I'm getting quite good at understanding the construction of furniture. I can recognise and cut many of the joints employed by the cabinet maker. I'm also getting quite good at spotting the evidence of Mrs Cockup having popped in to say hello with her friend Mrs Cheap N' Shoddy. I'm also of the Yorkshire persuasion. Therefore, when I started researching the style of Safari Bar I was being asked to make I quickly spotted several things. First and foremost was the price these small 'boxes' were being sold for, between £750 and £1160 pounds a time. Secondly was the cheap materials they were made from. Cheap plywood with offcuts of leather, scraps of hardwood and cheap Chinese hardware. Finally was the dodgy joinery, even on the better quality pieces.  A closer inspection of the image above will demonstrate that both Mrs Cockup and her friend have paid a visit. But could I do any better, hampered by the shoddy quality of materials available through the local DIY store and the small quantity of good timber I've ferreted away? We shall have to see!

Saturday
Rain, rain, sod off and give me a break! Hardly poetic, doesn't even rhyme, but it does accurately reflect my sentiment. Stuck indoors as I am with only the rustle of feathers as little Donny's pigeons come home to roost pooping on his bedsheet as they land to brighten my day. Just as I'm setting off to traipse through the woods with the beagles the postman delivers a package. Things really are looking up as these are the missing blade holders for my scrollsaw ordered Friday morning from Machinemart spares centre. Now that is quick and efficient service!
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I'm soaked through on my return from the woods and in need of something hot and spicy for lunch. I dry the beagles off before making a Malaysian Laksa. Don't be getting all impressed. Pot Noodle has a cornucopia of flavours these days. I head off to the shed to fiddle with the scrollsaw and start the design process for the safari bar pausing to chuckle at the Beagle Brothers who having filched a noodle pot each from the bin and now have them stuck on the ends of their noses unable to get them off.

Outside my workshop it's gloomy with a chill and the rain is siling down. 'Siling' another one of those Yorkshire dialect words, from the Norse 'sila' meaning to filter or strain, that so confuse my American and Canadian friends. Inside my workshop it's bright, the daylight LED lighting is doing it's job, and although rather an odd word to use for a shed, it is comfortable. With the footie on the radio, a pot of tea and slice of cake, I sit and firkle to my hearts content setting up the scrollsaw. An email from Ben Gunn to ask if I've finished the job he wanted me to do has me nipping out in the rain to the car to take the timber for the job out of the car.

Give a man a shed and he starts to accumulate timber. Where I accumulate offcuts of walnut, oak, maple, mahogany or cherry, what my future father in law collects has more in common with John Innes than any specific species of tree. Much of his hoarded timber is best described as compost with nails in it. Lots of nails in it. After a mangled blade in the past by means of 'pop this plank through your tablesaw for me' I decided I'd pop it through my hand saw and my bench plane after I'd located and removed every single nail. The planks are from the old conservatory taken down this week, so no time for decomposition. They required a forty-five degree chamfer along the top edge as they will be fasten to the bottom of Ben Gunn's workshop doors to stop the rain from seeping through.
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Job done and as the final scores come in I give Chelsea my usual boo for the benefit of my Chelsea supporting neighbour and head off to collect my better half from work.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sunday 4th October

The sun is up, the sky is blue, there's such a lot for me to do...before it starts raining...raining in my yard.

Other half dropped off at work, dogs walked and watered. I pause briefly to make sure I did those things in the right order and the beagles are not running riot in a perfumery while my other half sprawls on my duvet covered in mud. Hope is eternal, apparently. Disappointed once again, I got on with building the safari bar before the rain started again.

I'd spent a few minutes the previous day trying to draw a plan and cut list, but I was damned if I could find what I'd done with it. Time for some 'fag packet' design or in my case 'cig paper' design.

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Black clouds loomed ever closer, as did my neighbours who were peering nervously over the hedge at the sound of the whiskey, gin and rum bottles I'd fetched from the house clanking on the top of my table saw as I checked their dimensions against the materials I had to hand. My neighbours are cautious and keep an eye on me when I'm using the table saw but when they spot a combination of table saw and hard liquor they get positively nosey!

With rough plans, and I do mean rrrrrough plans, scrawled on paper, dimension calculations made I start with cutting the 18mm plywood that will make the outer case. Each 'half' of the bar will be a five inch deep 'tray' of plywood edged with a hardwood. My Bosch table saw is the largest of their contractors saws and the table will expand to take sheet materials quite comfortably. The biggest problem is physically lugging the sheets about. I change the saw blade for a specialized plywood finishing blade and cut several oversized strips which I then rip down to final width.

The inner case of the bar will be made of hardwood. In this case ash, as I bought a job lot cheap two years ago. I need four inch wide planks but unfortunately I only have three inch by three inch lumber. I will have to glue up some panels. But first I need to rip down the hardwood. So, out with the finishing blade and in with a dedicated ripping blade which has larger teeth with deeper gullets. I rip down the ash into 12 mm thick planks but, before I cut everything that I need, it starts to rain. A mad dash to get the saw unplugged and back inside the shed ensues. I now have enough hardwood to make one half of the bar and enough plywood to make all of the outer carcase, but there is a problem. A problem that will haunt me through the rest of the build.
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Cheap and crappy DIY store plywood! The instant that it was cut the plywood has buckled. It was Alan Lee that gave me a lesson on plywood and fortunately he also gave me a partial solution to the buckling problem. I'd always assumed plywood was used because it is stable and cheap. It turns out that plywood is not only expensive but it's none too stable. It's the moisture content of the various veneers inside the ply that cause the buckling. If one side of the plywood dries out more than the other, then the sheet will buckle. The cure is to dampen off the concave side with a small amount of hot water and to lay the plywood on a flat surface with the side you've just dampened facing down. Now apply some weights to the top. I have a long corridor indoors with a flat linoleum covered floor. I damp down the plywood, lay it flat on the floor and add some weight in the shape of heavy cases and two fat beagles!

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Thomas Edison said 'To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk'!

Monday 5th of October

Wood is a material that has a mind of it's own. Enven when it's been chopped down, chopped up, milled, drilled, drawn and sawn it will still twist, bend, wobble, wave and split contrary to any shape the woodworker wishes. When making the rear cabin doors for RT I worked out that you need to sneak up on the timber while it's still dazed and confused from the milling process and press right on with defining the woods new shape before it has a chance to reassert it's morphic field! I had stacks of spalted ash to glue into planks and the plywood was momentarily flat on the hallway floor.

Although the sky was fleetingly blue and the sun was warm, I could see dark clouds bubbling and roiling across the Trent Valley and heading in my direction. I still had some spalted ash that needed milling. Pulling the table saw to the door and fetching the chunk of timber to be milled, I made a discovery. By extending the saw's feed table out of the shed door I had enough room behind the saw to safely feed the timber into the blade without taking the saw outside.
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Soon I had all of my timber milled to rough width and it was time to cut everything to length to start making panels. I decided to make the cuts by hand for the excercise, and to give the neighbours some respite from the table saw. Just as I was cutting the last piece of timber for the smaller panels I realised that I had made a mistake. The smaller panels were less than the fifteen inch length required to go through the thicknesser. Ah well, I will have to plane them by hand, but first I was going to have to get inventive to make some panel clamps.
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I had several long bolts that I was going to use for a new veneer press but for now I would use them to knock up a small panel clamp. With the first panel in the Heath Robinson panel clamp I made another simpler clamp. Gluing up all these panels was going to take some time!
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I'd run out of long bolts so instead used a simpler system incorporating a couple of sash clamps.
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At this rate is was going to take me some considerable time to complete all of the panels I was going to need. It was also going to take quite a bit of glue. Fortunately I have a big glue pot, mine is much bigger than the Psychic Surveyor's!
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Tuesday 6th October

I was still making panels.  I was also having to attend the mountebank's office for my monthly check up and dressing down. A few minor adjustments to my meds and a spot of banter with nurses and receptionists and I'm on my way back to the shed. Slowly the pile of completed hardwood panels grew and the larger panel clamp was free to start applying the edging to the plywood. I cut some half inch wide strips of poplar and attached them to the edges of the plywood panels of the outer carcase.
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This is where I discovered there was a serious problem with the plywood. In a normal panel of plywood there is an odd number of veneers. There is the central core and then two veneers placed either side of that core, then two more veneers and so on until the panel reaches the correct thickness. It's done this way so that each veneer glued on either side creates an equal pressure to that of it's opposite and so keeps the panel straight. This is why when you apply a hard wood veneer to a box top or bottom you place veneer on both sides. This B&Q plywood had an even number of veneers of differing thicknesses. It really was cheap and shoddy stuff. Even with the hardwood edging applied it was still trying to shift and warp. The only solution was to plane the surface to try and remove one of the veneers and hope that stabilized the board. Either that or go buy some more plywood. A trip down to B&Q revealed they had a new batch of plywood in stock, with the correct number of veneers and they had added an outer veneer a good millimetre thick at least on both sides. They had also added forty percent to the price! As Napoleon said at Waterloo 'sod this for a game of soldiers'!



 

 

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It doesn't matter how big your glue pot is, when you are desperate to finish the job there is not enough for that last square inch to complete the job!

Yup been there, (not) finished the wallpapering yet, well it was only 3 years ago and the curtain covers the missing bit.

paul 

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Wednesday 7th and Thursday 8th October

Wednesday and Thursday are Gracie and Arlo days. Days spent picking up from school, driving to Lincoln to deliver shopping and visit Nanny and Ben Gunn as well as organizing and conducting Gruffalo hunts, feeding sticks to owls and foxes in the Gruffalo Tunnel, dodging crocodiles in the shark infested custard and watching the miniphrants dance down slides. There's also a fair amount of stoat wrestling and laughing at T-Rex's in bed making competitions goes on as well. Shed Firkling is limited to the early morning and late evening when boards are removed from the clamps and new boards set in place. By Friday I was ready to start on some joinery.

Incidentally, you don't sniff wood glue! For maximum enjoyment you spread it on your hands, let it dry and then pick it off in the largest sheet possible whilst singing the original Mission Impossible theme!

Friday 9th October.

I have a stack of hardwood boards all ready to go and a smaller stack of plywood boards edged with poplar.
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The plywood is still twisting, warping and buckling even with a hardwood edge attached to both sides. I reach for the hand plane and level them all off again! This stuff really is garbage with knots and voids microns below the surface veneers. Still, the outer carcase will be invisible when complete so I can hit the wood filler quite hard before the covering goes on!
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I'd decided on half lap joinery throughout, so set about marking up and cutting the joint the table saw.
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I leaned up the rebates with a chisel and ran through a test fit before gluing up the first of the outer cases.

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I used the first case as a guide for the second and used cauls to make sure both outer cases matched each other as close as possible. Leaving everything in the clamps I set about finding myself something to do while the glue dried.

Cutting boards and cheese boards are the objects I get asked to make the most. Although I don't like making them, I was a little bit shocked and pleased to discover the other day that amongst the 'well to do ladies that lunch' a Timbo made wooden platter is de rigueur to the candle lit supper and a much sought after item. I'd been asked if I could make a cheese board with a matching cheese knife with a turned handle. Now, I don't have a lathe so I set about carving a handle with a tenon to accept a ferrule...just to see if I could. I managed to keep the tenon uniform  and the handle as a whole symmetrical although, as a wooden object, it wouldn't seem out of place in an Anne Summers catalogue.
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An interesting diversion, but the outer cases of the Safari Bar were ready to come out of the clamps. I used a technique I first tried when I made Ellie's cantilever sewing box all those years ago. I taped the tow boxes tightly together and levelled off all sides using a plane and some sandpaper stuck down to my bench top.
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As any good musician will say 'it was near enough for jazz'! Out with the router and I cut the rebates for the back panels using a chisel to get the corners square.
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Now for the hardwood internal compartments!

 

 

 

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Friday 9th

Inside my head I'm still in my early twenties. I'm fit, lithe and run marathons for the hell of it. Outside my head I'm old and decrepit, possibly in my seventies. In reality I'm only in my mid fifties...but decrepit all the same.  I wake up with a banging headache. Dylan is laid by my pillow his nose millimetres from mine. Toby is on the floor with a paw lifted to tap me on the shoulder. This is not going to be a good day. I walk the boys through the woods and Ellie sends me back to bed after taking one look at me.

Saturday 10th

The headache is worse, compounded by Tesco not having my coffee bean of choice. The beagles are sticking to me like beagle hair to fresh varnish. A quick saunter through the woods and the leaves are starting to turn to bronze and gold. Gold above me and a carpet of gold beginning to form at my feet. 
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I try to amuse myself having a tidy up and firkle in the shed, but it's an international weekend so there is no football worth listening to on the radio. The headache is getting worse so I close the shed and head back to my bed, the beagles scooting under the duvet beside me. I've had what Ellie and I call 'a bit of a do'.

Sunday 11th October to Thursday 15th October

Sleep. Pottering. More sleep and...I discover the YouTube realm of mudlarking, bottle digging and self proclaimed 'amateur archaeologists' who all seem to have Etsy stores where they sell handicrafts for the deranged made of the detritus they find from the bottom of rivers. There's another category of 'Magnet Fishing' which proves entertaining although I've only come across one channel where the guy knows what half the junk they pull up actually is. Such gems as 'I've found a Jesus Cross thing' have me shouting 'It's a crucifix you plumb'. A 'crafting session' where clay pipe stems are attached to broken porcelain doll heads and hands and turned into alleged jewelry has me wondering whether a criminal psychologist reviewing the channel might help solve a few murders. 'Isn't it cute?' wails the young lady and her mother together. No it's macabre and disturbing. I must be feeling better and Ellie has gone the extra mile to get me my coffee!

Friday 16th October.

An early morning trip to the mountebank and I am given the all clear. Time for a spot of firkling. I drag the planer out from under the bench and begin to plane all of the spalted ash panels. I quickly discover that I made a mistake in making the shorter panels too short to go through the planer. No problem, I relish the excercise of hand planing and took some time first to get my left hand and arm practised. I also scrounged a tea light from my neighbour to lubricate the sole of the plane. With all the panels planed and cut to size, I downed tools for a spot of tea and cake. Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake!

Tea over, time to get on with some joinery. I tackled the side of the bar that would hold the bottles first. Again the joints would be half lap joints. The process was slow going as I calibrated the table saw over and over again to make sure I had everything correct. After 'a bit of a do', I'm often dysphasic and suffer a partial loss of language and or numbers, so I'm extra careful playing with tools like the table saw. It takes me the next two days to cut the joints required but eventually, slowly and surely with plenty of afternoon naps, I get the job done.
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I clean up my joints with a chisel and clean off all the pencil marks with an eraser before giving everything a sanding. Time for a test fitting, so far so good.
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Space for a drawer at the top and two bottles below it.

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A test fit inside the outer carcase also goes well so I glue up the first lost of hardwood partitioning.
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And now the fun begins! Taking the partitioning out of the clamps it's time to fit it into the outer carcase. A slow a tedious job as the outer keeps changing it's internal dimensions. The outer faces of the carcase are square but the inner faces are continuing to warp. The hardwood partitioning is square, plumb and true. A shaving here and a shaving there and eventually the partitioning slides into the outer shell.
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October the something or other until this morning.

Days are beginning to blend and run together as I lose track of time. Clocks going backwards doesn't help my temporal dislocation at all. Neither does Dylan who had a seizure the other night and now wakes me up every hour to either go outside or refill his water bowl. Dylan's method of alerting you to the fact he wants his bowl filling is to pick up his metal bowl and bang it against the wall. Eventually, he will settle down but it does mean that I'm awake at some really weird hours of the night and catching up on sleep during the day.

Back in the shed I started work on the second part of the Safari Bar. In the meantime, I've given the project a name. It will be a present for our friend Wendy who enjoys her gin. Ellie's nickname for Wendy is 'Maj' as in 'Her Majesty'. So, the Safari Bar is now 'Her Maj's Gin Palace'. 

I do a spot of research to ascertain the dimensions of various tumblers and gin schooners as this next part of Her Maj's Gin Palace will hold the glassware. I then divide the partitioning to equal dimensions. I kid you not, it must have taken me a day of measuring and calculation to do this. But eventually I had the dimensions right and cut the joinery.
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Cleaning up the pieces took a lot longer than I anticipated. As did putting masking tape around every joint to prevent glue squeeze out. Taking the masking tape back off again took even longer still! But eventually the hardwood partitioning slotted into the second carcase and I could give everything a final sand. I looked at a few historical sources and discovered that the original 18th and 19th century pieces had dowels and brass screw fastenings to secure the interior partitioning in place. So I did too.
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So that's the current state of play. I'm now at the pondering and designing on the hoof of the next phase. The bottles will be secured in place by a tray and the glasses will be held in their compartments by a chopping board. I also have a drawer to make to go above the bottle compartment. How those fitting will be held in place is something I'm still pondering. I have a sheet of solid brass that I'm thinking of making turn locks from. The leather that I'm going to cover Her Maj's Gin Palace with has arrived too, so I'm currently researching how I'm going to wrap the finished piece. But so far, I'm happy with what I have.

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  • 2 weeks later...


"What are you making?" Grandma asked grandson Arlo as he rummaged through his box of plastic play tools.
"I'm not making, I'm fixing!" replied Arlo.
"So what are you fixing?" asked Grandma.
"Anything that is broken." said Arlo.
"How do you know something is broken?" asked Grandma.
"Because I break it so I can fix it!" said my two year old grandson, holding up the pieces of Grandma's telephone handset.
The kid has a certain genius.

Work is progressing on the Gin Palace. I'm now on a timetable as Ellie has started making the various Christmas gins. Packages from eBay and Amazon arrive through my letterbox containing the various fixtures and fittings I'm going to need to complete the project. It's exciting!

With the outer carcase and inner linings completed it was time to cut the rebate for the hinge. From now on each stage of the project has to be right or I will have to start all over again. So I took my time marking up the hinge, cutting it to length, marking up both sides of the case and then routing out the slot to accept each side of the hinge. With temporary screws holding the hinge in place, I set about countersinking the hinge plates to accept the correct size screws and then drilling pilot holes to accept the fixings. All told it took me an afternoon of steady firkling to get everything mounted correctly.
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Because the outer carcase is going to be wrapped in leather, I don't want sharp edges cutting the hide, but at the same time I don't want to round things over to the extent that I normally like to see box edges. As it was too late in the day to get on with anything noisy, I picked up one of my favourite tools to start the process of breaking the edges on the outer carcase. Uncle Albert bought me a Veritas spokeshave for my birthday one year. It really is a fabulous high quality tool.
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In just a short time I had all of the edges uniformly rounded and I was one step closer to getting the project finished.
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The next job was to make the cutting and cheese boards, you can't have an evening snifter without a slice of lemon or lime or indeed a nice hunk of cheese! I don't like making cheeseboards, but I have it on good authority that among the Ladies Who Lunch a 'Timbo Hand Crafted Cheeseboard' is a 'must have' item worth more than money and only the best candle lit supper will have such an item as a centrepiece. The reason I don't like making cheeseboards is that it just feels like a waste of good wood! But with two boards needed for the Gin Palace and an additional board Ellie wanted to give as a gift I had three of the things to make.

I rooted around in my offcut bin and came up with some spalted ash, Canadian maple and some black walnut. I decided to use the maple as the core of each board and then alternate the spalted ash with black walnut pinstripes. I needed two boards at around twenty millimetres thick and one board at just ten. So, I ripped the boards to thickness on the tablesaw and broke out the clamps and glue.
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Before clamping the boards together they were given good coats of Titebond II and then wrapped top and bottom in greaseproof paper. Then everything was clamped up. Once the glue had time to set I scraped off the worst of the glue seepage before clamping up the next board. In short order I had the three boards ready to plane.

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This time around I made sure that each board was well over fifteen inches long so that they could go through the Triton Bench Planer. This machine has been worth every penny, excellent bit of kit! On a cold but gloriously sunny November morning, I lugged the planer outside, donned my mask, safety glasses and ear defenders and set about torturing the neighbours eardrums while I planed the boards to the correct thickness. Then out with the tablesaw to rip the boards for the Gin Palace to width and all three boards to length using the crosscut sled.
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While I thought how to go about securing the Gin Palace boards inside the inner lining a finished off the standard cheeseboard. A forstner bit to cut the finger hole at the top and then to round over all the edges with the router. I prefer to use the Axminster Ovolo cutter as opposed to the Trend cutter as it gives a much cleaner edge and being smaller in diameter I can run it at a faster speed. I use 'Bench Cookies' to support pieces when I'm routing to prevent things slipping and sliding about.
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Once everything was cut and rounded over it was just a case of going through the grits with the sanding. I start off with sixty grit on the orbital sander. You can sometimes get tear out during the planing process as the grain of the individual strips making up the board run in alternate directions for strength and prevent warping of the board. From the sixty grit I work my way up through 120 grit, 240 grit, 320 grit and finally 400 grit. I then spray the surface of the board to lift the grain and start sanding again with the 240 grit through to 400 grit.
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While I'm sanding I'm looking for any defects in the board and fill any of these hairline or minor blemishes with epoxy. Anything bigger than a hair and the board gets scrapped. Once the epoxy is dry, I wet the surface again and once more go back through all of the grits.

Finally it's time for some finish. I start off with a good coat of mineral oil. Wipe it on with a cloth, let it soak for an hour and then wipe it off again. The board is then left overnight to dry thoroughly. I make use of the bench cookies again but this time with their little 'pointy hats' on to support the board while the finish dries. When the board is dry it's time for another sanding, this time just a quick one at 400 grit. Then it's on with the finish proper. I use a hard oil and wax finish. I apply four coats of this finish allowing eight hours drying time between each coat.
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Three more coats to apply to this board and it's ready to go! Now then, how am  going to attach those other two boards inside the Gin Palace?

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A sad day today. We lost one of our dogs, Spotty our border collie. He was a ripe old age, nineteen in October. But over the last couple of days he let us know that he'd had enough. Where normally he would be waiting at the door for me and the beagles to collect him for his walks, he was staying tucked up in his bed. We thought we were going to lose him nine months ago but he not so much perked up but point blank refused to go in and see Gordon the vet where normally he would trot in happy to see him. On that occasion a prescription and a booster shot had the old boy back on his feet. So much was he on his feet that he returned to his old tricks and organized an 'escape' that had me and the eldest lad tearing around the town and countryside for eight hours trying to recapture him, Spot staying just out of arms reach and still putting on a fair turn of speed when he wanted to. When we did finally catch up with him we clocked him trotting along at 28mph. A fair turn of speed for an eighteen year old dog.

Today was different. The old boy'd had enough and although in true Spotty fashion rallied enough to resume eating, his favourite Maltesers, he only managed a couple. Our Vet's were brilliant and did their level best to accommodate us taking into account the Covid regulations. Ellie and Gracie are upset, but OK. The Beagle Brothers are a bit confused and keep looking for Spot. As for me? I don't think it's quite sunk in yet. For the last two days the walks have been quicker without having to wait for old Spotty and I keep turning into Ellie's gate to take the old boy home instead of carrying on to my house. Other dog walkers keep asking me why I only have the two dogs with me and not the usual three. But I'm sure I will cope.

A spot of firkling in my shed is in order I think!
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