• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Holiday Toolchest

I've managed a return ferry crossing this year already. Out in storm Isha back in Jocelyn. I feel sure your tool box and it's contents will make it unscathed Al.
Tea and biscuits always available if you have time.
 
The 3D printer has been running pretty much continuously for the last week, churning out more drawer liners. I'm nearly finished now, with two more bits of the mallet drawer to print and then just the chisel drawer to sort out (I haven't even got as far as modelling that one in CAD yet).

You've seen the saw drawer already, this is what is nominally the sharpening drawer but also has a couple of knives and a handy wooden block in it:

L201_sharpening_drawer.jpg

At the bottom of the left-hand compartment is a piece of plywood with a recess cut into it and some magnets set slightly sub-flush. That provides a base for a selection of cheap 1 mm thick 230 mm × 80 mm diamond plates. Being nice and thin, they don't add much weight, but the plywood keeps them flat. The green thing is a bit of leather (with some stropping compound rubbed in) glued down to a thin steel plate of the same size, so it can be used on the plywood base if necessary as well.

L202_diamonds.jpg

The plywood piece also has some 8 mm holes drilled in the side, so it can be clamped down if necessary (although I doubt it will be necessary).

The measuring / marking drawer is also finished (note the 150 mm rulers standing on their sides on the right-hand side of the photo):

L301_measuring_tray.jpg

The empty areas are unallocated: there was nothing obvious I could think of that would fit neatly there, so I just hollowed the space out & it can be used for anything that fits and might be useful.

I've also finished the most complicated of the drawers: the router plane drawer. It was way more complicated than the other drawers as I was making full use of the third dimension to cram stuff in.

This is what the model looked like once everything was finished:

R6M01_model_view_1.jpg

A view from another angle:

R6M02_model_view_2.jpg

This is what it looks like "fully stuffed".

R601_router_plane_drawer.jpg

The router blade holder thing lifts out in one piece (the pale grey cover is there to stop idle hands from getting cut on the blades and also to give a bit of extra protection against the whole assembly falling over - it goes over the router plane's adjuster screw).

R602_router_blades_covered.jpg

The grey cover is a fairly loose fit; this is what it looks like underneath - space for 6 router plane blades of different widths: 3, 4, 5, 6 mm and the 1/2" / 12.7 mm wide "standard" ones (it's handy having the different widths as I'll be using the router plane as a plough plane):

R603_router_blades_uncovered.jpg

The metal block plane sits on a tray that lifts out as well:

R604_metal_block_plane.jpg

I'd wandered about omitting the metal block plane and just taking the home-made wooden one, but I thought I'd keep my options open for now as I use that little Quangsheng thing quite a lot. As it's in a removable tray, it would be very simple to just not fit the tray if I decide not to carry the metal block plane.

With the router cutters and the plane tray removed, the rest of the contents are visible:

R605_with_router_and_plane_tray_removed.jpg

Hiding down the left-hand side are a selection of card scrapers and on the right are spare blades for the Veritas smoothing plane and the Quangsheng block plane. The right-hand marking gauge has lots of different heads (two wheel marking heads, one pin marking head and a pencil marking head - in the little green-lidded jar in the top-left), so it offers a lot of flexibility. It's probably gratuitous including the Veritas one as well, but it's surprising how often I have one gauge fixed at one setting and want a second gauge.

In the bottom-right of the drawer are a selection of the Allen keys that came with Veritas stuff - Veritas insist on using inch-based fasteners, so I keep the Allen keys near the tools as I can't just grab any nearby Allen key (as it would inevitably be metric).
 
Having recently finished making new handles for my Narex chisels (see here if you haven't been following along), I could finally get on with the last job on the tool-chest: designing the 3D-printed insert for the chisel drawer. I did quite a bit of playing around with different layouts and ended up with this:

ARGH. Copy-and-pasting images doesn't seem to work any more - I've resized it to have the biggest dimension as 800 pixels (the same value I used on the old forum and I'm sure I've used with copy-and-paste since the upgrade) but when I paste it says "The uploaded file is too large."

I had to resize this down to just 640 to get it to upload.

1713462273366.png

Anyway, back to the story. The slot on the left is a dedicated one for a 3 mm chisel as I think I'll always want one of them for box making. The other slots are designed to take either the Narex ones with the new handles or some other types (as shown in the photo) including my skewed-end chisels. Some of my gouges fit too, so they can be taken if that's what I want to do. I decided against doing dedicated slots for specific chisels as limits my options too much. With this layout I can think about what I'm likely to make when I'm travelling and take an appropriate set of chisels.

I finished the bottom drawer a while ago, but I don't think I've posted a photo of it yet, so for completeness, here it is (also shrunk down to get the new forum to accept it):

1713462448757.png

There's a bit of flexibility in that drawer and also some empty space that can be filled with whatever seems a good idea at the time. The "Curiously Strong Mints" tin is empty, but it'll be handy for taking odds and ends like screws / hinges or whatever.

I think I can now say that the chest is finally completely finished. I'll be taking it to France in June and giving it a proper try.
 
ARGH. Copy-and-pasting images doesn't seem to work any more - I've resized it to have the biggest dimension as 800 pixels (the same value I used on the old forum and I'm sure I've used with copy-and-paste since the upgrade) but when I paste it says "The uploaded file is too large."
That is probably because the file size is too big, not the dimensions (limited to c. 1Mb) - this is always a risk with copy and paste as it doesn't optimise the file - whereas dragging and dropping / selecting from the file box will both optimise the file and allow a bigger dimension to be uploaded...

very nice solution....
 
That is probably because the file size is too big, not the dimensions (limited to c. 1Mb) - this is always a risk with copy and paste as it doesn't optimise the file - whereas dragging and dropping / selecting from the file box will both optimise the file and allow a bigger dimension to be uploaded...
I guess that makes sense. On the MIG welding forum I regularly use copy-and-paste to upload images with max dimension 1000 or more but I guess they've allowed a bigger file size.

The copy-and-paste method is so much more convenient than uploading files (I don't even save them locally, just crop, resize, copy). I guess I'll just have to post lower res images here .
 
I’m sure there is a reason for colour coded allen keys. :unsure:
I think they're brilliant: if I need a 4 mm Allen key I reach for the red one. I've added 3D-printed sleeves to my t-handle Allen keys to match the same colours:

1659277166764.png

That photo was taken before I got hold of the red & pink filament for the last two hex keys, but you get the idea.
 
Back
Top