• 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!

Post a photo of the last thing you made...

A very quick and simple project, knocked up in next to no time:

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The plank is an off-cut of a bit of 40 mm thick oak worktop I used to make a couple of desks a few years ago; the rails underneath are some bits of sweet chestnut I had lying around. Finish is two coats of Mike's Magic Mix. The rails are simply attached with some 5 mm diameter, 80 mm long screws sitting in oversized holes in the chestnut so that any expansion can be coped with.

It gets attached to the end of my desk with a couple of clamps (I could have used screws again, but it's only intended to be temporary):

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With Carolyn needing someone around most of the time until she's fully recovered from the car accident, I'm having to work at home much more at the moment, but there's a lot on at work at the moment and I'm needing a reasonable amount of lab time. Therefore, I decided it was time to upgrade my home desk with a little more space so that I could bring home the "proper" oscilloscope from work rather than using my picoscope:

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I do hope that it is only temporary Al. My missus has been working on a “temporary” home desk for 3 years or more. Two old wardrobe doors atop a gate leg table, a wine cabinet and a hastily knocked up extra set of legs.
I really must do something better.
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I get increasingly asked by family and friends for the "could you just do...." type of jobs.
I'm sure everybody here hears similar.
I've usually just grabbed whatever tools I think I might use, and left them loose in the back of the car. So I decided I needed a tool tote.
My options were;
1. Pop down to the local Screwfix, and pick one up for around 40 quid. Bargain.

2. Spend an inordinate amount of time and effort and make my own.

Easy decision...:)

Cheers

Geoff



IMG_20240729_164140.jpg
 
Very smart, Geoff. Far too smart for a tool box. :)

You did well to get those bottom pins to survive!
 
Very smart, Geoff. Far too smart for a tool box. :)

You did well to get those bottom pins to survive!
Thanks Mike.
They're a wee bit bigger than they seem in the photo. I've put quite a heavy chamfer round the bottom.
 
I’ve been promising myself to make a small tote box like that for ages. Frequently have to cart tools to the outlaws. I still make do with a couple of Sainsbury’s blue plastic shopping boxes. Shame they did away with them.
 
probably the nicest tool tote I have seen yet! mine is battered, might make a new one out of oak instead of pine, they are very useful
 
A tote like that would be very handy for when we go and see No.1 son and partner in Bromley; there's always something I'm tasked to do - Rob
 
Yes, elegant! And the wood is....?
Thanks Gary. It's lovely old oak. They were cupboard shelves that my brother down south bagged from an old cupboard in a school. They were heading for a skip. 😱
 
I presume the black gate is the previous one. Is that right?

Why the gap at the top?
It's not that obvious in the photo but there is one yes, and the reason is simple - I ran out of wood :) haha. The reclaimed stuff was not tall enough on it's own and the door had to be tall enough so that no scrote could climb over it - the top and bottom are.... the mid and top rail of a particularly wide edwardian reclaimed pitchpine 4 panel door :) with the panel rebates cut off and they sized up almost perfectly once the breadboard ends were done and WHY they were done :) (small fib on my part).

Honestly my first door, but not my first T&G vertical table with breadboard ends, sans legs and some ledges added - that's basically how I approached it :)

Erikthevikings old solar panels donated the aluminium strip for the top, and the two kickplates were cut out of a cooker hood vent enclosure (those tall things above a hood).
 
A simple little jig out of an offcut of aluminium angle and a bit of brass:

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Inside view:

1722961075962.png

I made a 3D-printed version (again with brass inserts) of this a year or two ago but I wanted a new one with a different hole size and I figured it would be just as quick to knock it up out of aluminium as it would be to design & print one. This one should be more robust anyway.

The idea is that you clamp a bit of 8 mm (ish) thick wood to it and then drill a 4 mm hole in the edge or face, exactly 4 mm from a reference edge/face. The brass tube on the drill bit ensures the tip of the drill bit goes to a depth of 6 mm and no further, giving about 4.5 mm of 4 mm diameter hole but with no risk of punching through the other side of the thin wood. It'll be used for making boxes with hinged lids like this one:

teacaddy_3.jpg


The jig helps drill the holes in the sides and the lid and then some little 4 mm OD brass tubes are glued into the holes. A 3 mm steel pin then sits in the brass tubes and acts as the hinge pin.

By removing the brass spacer on the drill bit, you can also drill a deeper hole in the lid and insert a longer tube, a small spring (e.g. from a biro) and a longer pin. The lid can then be fitted after assembling the box if desired. This is a good option if you forget to insert the lid when gluing the box together, not that anyone would ever do a thing like that now, would they? :oops:
 
Nothing terribly exciting here, but interesting none the less. This is:

IMG_3255.jpeg

....the first pressing of some Laburnum 'Oyster' veneers for a little box (top or the bottom) This little panel has just come out of the cauls n'cramps and has been passed through the drum sander just to see what it was like. I've never done this sort of veneering before so it took a while to get my head round the process, but fingers crossed, the little box should look good when it's dun - Rob
 
Really like that Rob, you’ve got them placed so that the corners look brill.
Thanks Ian. The oysters have been glued onto a very thin substrate of birch aero ply and once all the other five sides have been done, I've got to make the box from some Swiss pear and then work out how to glue them on. The edges of the box all round will have a boxwood lip with a box interior lining but I haven't quite got round to working out how to make it yet. It's all a bit of a guesstimation game at the moment 🤣 - Rob
 
Nothing terribly exciting here, but interesting none the less. This is:

View attachment 27841

....the first pressing of some Laburnum 'Oyster' veneers for a little box (top or the bottom) This little panel has just come out of the cauls n'cramps and has been passed through the drum sander just to see what it was like. I've never done this sort of veneering before so it took a while to get my head round the process, but fingers crossed, the little box should look good when it's dun - Rob
I made a similar box year ago from berberis slices glued to mdf and oak slices.

Oak and Berberis box by Pete Maddex, on Flickr

Pete
 
A simple little jig out of an offcut of aluminium angle and a bit of brass:

View attachment 27836

Today I made the other pieces of this puzzle: the hinge parts (which are now covered in sawdust as I laid them out on the woodworking bench to take the photo :oops:)

1723290059987.png

The brass bits are 4 mm long and made from 4 mm brass tube with a 0.5 mm wall thickness (so 3 mm inner diameter). To make them as efficiently as possible, I used a 1 mm thick parting tool in the lathe to face the end, then part the tube off to length (running a 3 mm drill bit through after the facing cut to get rid of any interior burrs on the outer end):

1723290203606.png

The rear end (i.e. the parted off face) narrows a bit due to the parting burr, but that's fine for the purpose (as long as I put them in the holes the right way round). The hinge pins are 7 mm long (ish) and made from 3 mm stainless steel bar, hacksawed to length and then chamfered by holding them in a cordless drill and rubbing on a file.

I've made 25 brass "hinge bodies" and 13 stainless steel "hinge pins": that's enough for six boxes with one spare of each part for when I inevitably drop one and lose it.

The brass "hinge bodies" get superglued into the box pieces and then the stainless steel hinge pins get dropped into the tube as the box is assembled. They couldn't be much simpler to make or use but they give a nice clean look to a hinged lid box:

1723290456716.png
 
Striking patterns there Rob. I reckon the finished box will look stunning.
It's actually a lot more difficult to construct than I first thought as I want to remove as little possible of the 'oysters' as each is dead square as shown. Bear in mind also that all six faces of the box will be oyster veneered and every edge will have a boxwood banding; I haven't even thought yet about the lid and hinging, though a set of Andrew Crawford's Smart Hinges will probably figure somewhere - Rob
 
Very nicely made, but are those pins on the corners of the tote just short grain?
Thanks Mike, you're right re the pins. I noticed that from previous feedback.
With hindsight I guess I could have made them a bit more beefy, or mitred the ends,
But I have a good glued joint with the tails, so with the lightish use it'll get I don't think I'll have a problem.
But It's good to have feedback that I can learn from.
It's mainly why I'm here... 😊
 
I think the expansion /contraction of the horizontal board will simply snap off the pins.
Ahh ok, I now see what you mean.
A lesson learned for anything similar in the future.
Cheers,

Geoff
 
This is a Turkey!! In summer. It doesn't look big here but is actually in an XL Big Green Egg and it fed 12 people plentifully. The sauce is basically a LOT of elephant garlic herbs and a LOT of butter, plus some whipped cream. It's fully relevant to a wood forum as I used leftover oak to slow smoke this bird for 8 hours at 120C.
Summer turkey.jpg
 
Today I made the other pieces of this puzzle: the hinge parts (which are now covered in sawdust as I laid them out on the woodworking bench to take the photo :oops:)

View attachment 27891

The brass bits are 4 mm long and made from 4 mm brass tube with a 0.5 mm wall thickness (so 3 mm inner diameter). To make them as efficiently as possible, I used a 1 mm thick parting tool in the lathe to face the end, then part the tube off to length (running a 3 mm drill bit through after the facing cut to get rid of any interior burrs on the outer end):

View attachment 27892

The rear end (i.e. the parted off face) narrows a bit due to the parting burr, but that's fine for the purpose (as long as I put them in the holes the right way round). The hinge pins are 7 mm long (ish) and made from 3 mm stainless steel bar, hacksawed to length and then chamfered by holding them in a cordless drill and rubbing on a file.

I've made 25 brass "hinge bodies" and 13 stainless steel "hinge pins": that's enough for six boxes with one spare of each part for when I inevitably drop one and lose it.

The brass "hinge bodies" get superglued into the box pieces and then the stainless steel hinge pins get dropped into the tube as the box is assembled. They couldn't be much simpler to make or use but they give a nice clean look to a hinged lid box:

View attachment 27893

This is a Turkey!! In summer. It doesn't look big here but is actually in an XL Big Green Egg and it fed 12 people plentifully. The sauce is basically a LOT of elephant garlic herbs and a LOT of butter, plus some whipped cream. It's fully relevant to a wood forum as I used leftover oak to slow smoke this bird for 8 hours at 120C.
View attachment 27902
Mouth watering, what veggies did you serve with the turkey?
?This is a Turkey!! In summer. It doesn't look big here but is actually in an XL Big Green Egg and it fed 12 people plentifully. The sauce is basically a LOT of elephant garlic herbs and a LOT of butter, plus some whipped cream. It's fully relevant to a wood forum as I used leftover oak to slow smoke this bird for 8 hours at 120C.
View attachment 27902
 
Ahh ok, I now see what you mean.
A lesson learned for anything similar in the future.
Cheers,

Geoff
I've wondered about this issue in the past but what's the solution? Is the answer to make all four sides with the grain running vertically (horizontal grain would make the tall handle supports very weak)? Is there a 'right' way of making this sort of box? (Question for everyone rather than aimed at Geoff specifically.)
 
As suggested the box would be better with the grain running horizontally with a handle support fastened to the outside face or tenoned into the top edge.
I’ve never made a tote but most I've seen rely on nails and plywood rather than quality joinery.
 
This is a side gate made in iroko for a friend. Every winter the face side bows out about 15mm because I failed make enough allowance for expansion of the boards. It’s about ten years old now and I’m confident it will last another twenty at least, but it proves that even really old hands make mistakes.
Mike.
 

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I've wondered about this issue in the past but what's the solution? Is the answer to make all four sides with the grain running vertically (horizontal grain would make the tall handle supports very weak)? Is there a 'right' way of making this sort of box? (Question for everyone rather than aimed at Geoff specifically.)

Not that I really know what I'm talking about, but one way that I think would work would be to split the side pieces into multiple slats (with narrow gaps in between) and use M&T joints on the end. If you didn't want gaps at all, you could use tongue-and-groove on the edge to allow for expansion without having anything too tight.

The slat idea was the premise I used for the back of my tool chest, seen in this image. The gaps between the slats are obviously a lot bigger than you'd want on a tool tote (and there's a diagonal cross piece that may screw up the whole idea of allowing things to move!), but the M&T joints are relatively small so percentage expansion shouldn't be too much.

I'm sure someone who knows what they're talking about will be along shortly to describe the right way to do it!
 
The last thing that I made was a pair of track saw setting gauges, gratefully ripped off from Steve Mastery's design which I found on this site.

I was looking around for some suitable wood to make the stems when I spotted the two 1m long aluminium extrusions which I have been using as winding sticks.

These are amazingly accurate and I did not even have to trim the ends square they were at right angles to the length already.

I did not have any barrel nuts as used by Steve but I did have some steel threaded inserts as seen in the photo.
My mistake was to think that if I made the pilot hole just the right size then I would be able to screw the insert into the stock tight enough to stay put when screwing and unscrewing the locking knob.
Of course they pulled out on tightening but araldite came to the rescue.

They work perfectly and I can still use the stems as winding sticks.

Thanks Steve.
 

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