Yet more offcuts!

It’s probably fitting that my first proper post this year is about buying more wood, rather than actually doing anything with it!

Wood Recycling Project

I have a couple of days off work to coincide with a school holiday, so after a morning pottering around town getting haircuts for most of the family, I had the afternoon to myself.

I went to check out a local Wood Recycling Project which I’d driven past a few months ago.

It’s based in a large barn and has a large amount of reclaimed wood:

As well as all the pine, ply and OSB/chipboard you’d expect from a project which provides wood waste collection services to the construction industry there are other more exciting things, such as cable drums and offcuts of oak beams from a local timber frame company.

There was even an old park sign turned into a garden bench and something that looked like part of a Church:

I’m still here …

Last year a combination of health problems, a bereavement and then the weather conspired against me getting any more time in the workshop.

This year my excuses are work, family life and severe procrastination!

As you may have noticed there’s been sporadic activity on my other blogs:

• Aggravated Car Booty – All my car boot sale posts
• Aggravated Metalbutchery – My metalworking blog
• Aggravated Bytebutchery – My computing/electronics blog

After almost a year of inactivity the workshop has become a dumping ground, but I’ve cleared one bench by putting a lot of my car boot finds into stacking storage boxes.

(Almost) clear workbench

Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon – I did some wood related stuff today and will post about it in a bit

In the mean time here are some pictures of the packed away tools:

Holiday woodbutchery

The other week we went on holiday to The Manor House Hotel in Devon.

It’s in a beautiful setting (although effectively being a large collection of barn like structures, it does little to enhance this!)

As well as the myriad activities for the children and the Spa for my wife, a few caught my eye:

• Computer assisted routers
• Scroll saws
• Picture framing

For some reason I was convinced there was a woodturning class, but there wasn’t (and never has been).

Thoughts on order

[A combination of health problems and bereavement have conspired against me getting any time in the workshop (or even at car boot sales! 😦 ) but here’s a post I’ve been writing for a while]

I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that given the time and money I’ve spent building up my workshop over again I might do things differently.

Workshop

Workshop, Jan 2012

My workshop started taking shape in January 2012 and has steadily improved since then.

There’s still a long way to go, and I fear one of the next steps will be to empty it, insulate & rewire it and start laying it out again from scratch.

It’s unrealistic to think that if I had my time over again I could do much different – I could perhaps concentrated on emptying out the garage a bit more before I started filling it with tools, but this would have meant I had to wait much longer to have something I could call a workshop and I may have lost motivation/interest …

The most realistic things I’d try to do given my time over again is to get a proper workbench and vice into the workshop a lot earlier than I did and maybe paint the walls.

Back online …

I’m back online after being suspended by WordPress for about 48 hours!

Apparently this post on my new Car Booty blog triggered one of their automated systems which enforce their Terms & Conditions.

I’ve had no information from WordPress on why this post triggered the alerts, or how to avoid it happening again, but I assume it was down to the number of Amazon affiliates links in the post (which were in turn due to the small number of tools and the large number of books & toys for my children that I bought at that car boot sale).

I presume the system thought I was in breach of the following clause:

the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated,
and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content
designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the 
search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further
unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to
the source of the material (such as spoofing);

I’m pretty fed up that they can be so quick to disable a blog without providing an equally speedy way of re-enabling it, or at least getting a timely response.

Although I could guess what the problem was, once my blog was disabled I was unable to edit or delete the offending post and all the “contact us as soon as possible” links resulted in no response for 2 days (I believe their only commitment is 2 working days, so it could have been worse!)

Burly barking girls weekend

I was on my own with both girls for most of the weekend, while my wife studied.

Saturday wasn’t a great day as they were both pretty tired and stroppy, but yesterday was much better (despite the weather) and we spent most of the day in various local playgrounds.

This dead* tree in one of the playgrounds caught my eye:

(* = or at least extremely harshly pollarded – it stops in a stump a few feet above the top of the photo, with no branches at all)

Dead tree in a local playground

Larger photos and an explanation of the post title after the jump 🙂 …

Mounting metalwork vices – Part 2

Today being Fathers day I was able to get some time in the workshop
to progress the vice bases.

Last time I found that using glue as well as pocket hole screws made accurate placement quite difficult, as the glue made it easy for the screws to move the pieces as they were tightened.

This time I clamped a piece of scrap across to make it easy to find and keep the pieces in place.

Weekend update

I didn’t get any time in the workshop during the week.

Yesterday was spent at a family birthday in a rural village hall, where I noticed this rather nice little toggle/latch, holding a long trestle table against the wall:

Something about the shape and simplicity made me like it.

Today we went to Pease Pottage car boot sale in the morning, but with the uncertain weather there was a very low turn out of stallholders (the main field was probably less than half full).

There were only 3 stalls with any hand tools on at all and most were cheap rubbish that had been abused, so I didn’t find anything at all to waste spend my money on.

This afternoon I was able to complete the vice bases.

Mounting metalwork vices – Part 1

Today I made a start on building some bases for my two metalworking vices.

The intention is that each base will have a cross member underneath which can be clamped in the woodworking vice on my larger bench.

They’ll also incorporate a low tray around the vice to (hopefully!) catch any metal filings and protect the bench.

The larger vice, my Handy Model G. 3A has quite a long handle, so it will need to be mounted far forward enough that the handle clears the handle of the woodworking vice below it:

The smaller vice, my Paramo No. 00 doesn’t have this constraint:

Glueing broken plane tote

One of the wooden planes in my recent eBay purchase was broken in transit, with a clean break in the tote:

As with last time I glued a tote I’ve used weatherproof glue so I don’t need to worry about sweaty hands damaging the joint.