• 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...

This morning I made a rather diminutive little hammer:

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My travel toolchest is rather full with not much space for extra stuff to be added. The only persuading stick I have in the kit is a soft-faced mallet. The mallet is really nice for hitting chisels with, but occasionally it can be useful to tweak a plane setting with a metal-headed hammer (and the mallet is a bit big to be much use regardless of the head material). I'll be taking a bag of clamps with me, so the easy option would have been to just bung a hammer in with the clamps, but I thought it would be fun to make a small adjustment hammer. It doesn't need to be very heavy duty as it'll only be used for tweaking plane blade positions.

It's made from stainless steel with some sort of brass on one end and some sort of plastic on the other. All the material came out of a skip so I can't be completely sure what any of it is. The head is 16 mm diameter; the handle is 10 mm diameter. Given its intended use, there was no real point adding different jaws (rather than just using a cylinder of steel), but I thought it would be fun to add a bit of bling!

The handle is offset from the centre of the head so that it sits on the centre of gravity (which is obviously offset as a result of the plastic being lighter than the brass).

The handle is screwed into the head such that it can be easily removed in order to store it in one of the free pockets in the tool chest:

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Not visible in the photos is a small (4 mm AF) hexagonal hole that I rotary broached in the bottom of the handle. I added that just in case I over tighten it by hand and struggle to get it apart: an Allen key (which sits in one of the pockets you can see next to the hammer) will help me get it apart if needed.
 
I've just finished a pair of end grain cutting boards. one of which will be a wedding present and the other we'll keep. The one on the left is maple, black walnut, American cherry and sycamore, and in the one on the right the maple is swapped out for sycamore. It was just a case of using what I already had in the woodpile! I used this Youtube video as my plan so not much point in doing a WIP
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RogerM said:
I've just finished a pair of end grain cutting boards. one of which will be a wedding present and the other we'll keep. The one on the left is maple, black walnut, American cherry and sycamore, and in the one on the right the maple is swapped out for sycamore. It was just a case of using what I already had in the woodpile! I used this Youtube video as my plan so not much point in doing a WIP
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They look fantastic! To receive one as a wedding present must be wondeful, you must be very proud of them I know I would be.
 
No they are strips glued in when I glued up the boards for the base, so they go all the way through the base.
 
You’ve got that inlay put in perfectly, makes my offering look very shabby indeed!
Simple ply box to house all my Spindle blocks, cutters and Groover spacers.
The knob turns the latch which tightens up as it turns, might put a small fillet of wood with P strip on it for the door to close onto to keep any moisture out.
Ian
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Robert,

Lovely board.

Did you make the cross board inlay yourself (not the edge banding)?
 
Stuart said:
Is it as simple as a sandwhich approach or something more complex? Interested in copying if I’m honest!
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It is Stuart. I just use 18 mm strips of coloured veneer which are glued and clamped between two matching cauls.

The tricky bit is then cutting the inlay lines. A fine tooth blade and close fitting insert on the bandsaw is essential.

Before making each cut I clean one edge up with a sharp block plane and this goes against the bandsaw fence. The second face is cleaned up once fitted with a scraper.

I hope that makes sense!
 
fifth_tea_caddy_800.jpg

It's made of American black walnut with mitred (at the bottom) dovetails and the same simple hinge I've used on all the other ones. I've now made three with "TEA" carved into the top (all American black walnut), one with "KEEMUN" carved into the top (made of cherry) and one with "EARL GREY" carved into the top (ABW again). The Earl Grey one (of which I can't find any photos at the mo) was a present for my parents, the Keemun one is (predictably enough) for Keemun, which is what I mostly drink (weak and black). The bigger one of the existing "TEA" ones holds English breakfast tea, the smaller one has different things in depending on what we trying at the time (currently Darjeeling). The new one will also hold Keemun tea but is for me to take into work.

fifth_tea_caddy_open_800.jpg

With that done, I had a fun little session using my little home-made block plane to make a load of shavings out of maple, walnut and cherry so that I could take an arty photo of it, which I'm going to get printed on a mug as it'll be a bit more interesting than the one I have at work at the mo:

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