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My woodworking output...

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My woodworking output...

Postby D_W » 13 Oct 2021, 17:46

Since I landed in a thread about razor blades, I think I got the obligatory question about "show us your woodworking projects". So, here's a sample:

my kitchen cabinets (I did the whole kitchen - i'm sure there are things that aren't pro as I"m not a pro, but i did fabricate the counters and install everything, too).
Image

guitars (I've made a bunch, but no pictures of all of them)
Image
Image
(cringe at the rust colored carpet - it's the basement and it does get wet down here. Sometimes with the wet comes some dirt, so a neutral light carpet is a no go).
Image

case work in progress:
Image
Image
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(this is a cabinet that had modern hinges in it and no face frame - i protested, but my wife wanted it made this way and painted. I didn't relent on the painting)

planemaking:
Image

And of late, I've been forging chisels:
Image (bench types)
Image
Image (parers)
Image (very thin chisels getting closer to the seaton chest proportions to see what they were actually like to work with - not bad, but extremely light. Half the weight of chisels we're used to).

I'm not familiar to this forum, but I do have the curiosity for some of the small details, which often leads people to believe I don't make anything, but I've never claimed that I don't.
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Re: My woodworking output...

Postby 9fingers » 13 Oct 2021, 17:59

Excellent selection there D_W

Thanks for posting

Bob
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Re: My woodworking output...

Postby D_W » 13 Oct 2021, 18:10

9fingers wrote:Excellent selection there D_W

Thanks for posting

Bob


Sure thing.

The forging isn't necessarily woodwork, but I'm definitely not going to forge horseshoes. Making chisels and trying to make them look better and also hold up in use better than commercial chisels is an interesting challenge, and surprisingly accessible.

I can say that the first set with the apple handles were made generally completely without power tools, but I doubt that's historically accurate as the filed side bevels introduce warp. Warp has to be hammered out after they're tempered unless wanting to make them soft up the length (that doesn't seem very legitimate) to bend them, and let's just say, if you hammer a few, some will be much shorter without having used them in wood to shorten them.

I tend to work entirely by hand where I can, with the exception of drilling (mild arthritis says hand tooling is good, it loosens things up. But change that to turning screwdrivers or grabbing small knobs, and then the arthritis says no).

Some of the guitar parts are made without power tools (the rosewood neck is made with only the tuning peg holes drilled with a cordless drill.

AS to the making of hand tools, often forums have a "talk about hand tools" section, and if there's too much talk about making hand tools, people get cranky. So I'll leave that out here. Most guitar styles heavily consumed these days were also designed in the power tool era, and simple little things are hard to do with hand tools (the inside curves on the horns, etc. And even though I'm a die hard, I stopped fighting that and rout the guitar templates and OSS them. A slight change in style would be needed.

I'm in the US, but the tools that I like are almost entirely english origin (metal planes and socket chisels were the norm here very early on)
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Re: My woodworking output...

Postby Andyp » 13 Oct 2021, 18:42

Hi D-W
To make it easier for everyone to see I have inserted your urls inside Img tabs. This is very easy for you to do when you create your post.

There is a line of buttons above the text where you type. Select the Img button and a couple of img tags will appear separated by open and closed square brackets. You need to paste your imgur url in between those two tags.

HTH
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cheers
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Re: My woodworking output...

Postby TrimTheKing » 13 Oct 2021, 18:43

Thanks for sharing D_W. The forging is something I’ve never had a go at but am very interested in. If you have any more pics or info on how that’s done abs particularly without pro tooling requirements that would be great.
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Re: My woodworking output...

Postby D_W » 13 Oct 2021, 19:52

TrimTheKing wrote:Thanks for sharing D_W. The forging is something I’ve never had a go at but am very interested in. If you have any more pics or info on how that’s done abs particularly without pro tooling requirements that would be great.


Hi, Mark - in general, it's:
1) get good quality flat stock
2) heat it, but not to high forging heat, and shape the chisel into a taper (if possible, the heats to do this should be descending in terms of peak temperature and the steel allowed to go to black heat before getting into the forge again)
3) grind the forging into a taper (or rather, clean up the forge work and then flatten out the top and bottom so that there are two straight planes meeting at the edge thickness with a little excess to deal with warpage after heat treat).
4) cut the tang part of the back side of the chisel, heat and then hammer the tang into a point
5) install a square of steel by heating that square (with a hole drilled) and pounding the tang into it (through a hole in an anvil). do this several times until it's formed to the tang and goes where you want it to end up.
6) flux and heat the joint for the bolster to bright orange or yellow heat with a brazing torch and then hammer the bolster (which is still a big square). Check for tang straightness as it can get rumpled a little during that, and adjust as necessary before everything is cold (this forge weld can be skipped, the bolster will probably not move much)
7) grind the bolster to rough size on a belt grinder (filing is fine here, too).
8) file the bolster to finish more or less with a safe edge file that's been made safe corner (you get to make the file, but just out of a plain old mill file. The safe edge has to be done, but also the corner, else the corner will still cut into the tang
9) harden and temper the chisel and then finish grind with ceramic belts. This can be done with a typical 4x36 home belt sander (I have only only very slightly better than the home center type here that's direct drive -some unknown brand called "bucktool" they are pretty close to the same price, but it's got more power, a flat platen, the ability to tension a belt and more belt speed).
10) grind the bevels onto the chisel
11) hand finish the metalwork

It sounds like a lot of steps, but it's like anything else - if you have anything else in hand that you like, you know exactly what you're looking for style-wise.

If you don't want to buy special oil, O1 steel is a good choice (and it won't air harden too much on you).

It would be harder to do this without:
1) a good anvil
2) a good belt sander since if you want bevels, they really need to be ground on after the steel is hard. A high speed belt of coarse ceramic (specialty belts that are described as cool grinding) is almost a must - their ability to grind steel without making it too hot to hold is uncanny
3) files - decent files are key

A usable forge is as simple as a paint can with refractory blanket in it and a hole cut in the side for a good sized (bernzomatic TS4000 in the US is a good choice) plumber's torch (use in high heat kills the ignitor, but a striker works fine). A brazing torch is needed for the forge welding, but that's something that can be avoided for a long time.

For more bare bones making of something like this, you can just order bar stock and grind it. Blue spruce doesn't even do that in terms of tapering - it just looks like polished flat stock.

Heat treatment is a matter of evenly heating simple steels (like O1) until a magnet doesn't stick to them and then heat a step further (if the magnet stops sticking at a very dull orange, let the steel get a little brighter orange and then quench it). Once the steel is fully cooled to at least room temp, you can put it in a kitchen oven at 350-400 degrees, depending on how much or little temper you want.

There's no need for a heat treat furnace for steels until you get into alloys like A2 and then on into stainless (they're not a forging steel, anyway - they're just a cut and grind kind of steel - I think they're popular with toolmakers because they're stable and don't warp much, so they end up being cheaper and easier to work with even though the stock is slightly more money).

Aside from lucking into a good anvil, the rest of the stuff can be used elsewhere (I never sand much, but having a slightly better belt sander vs. the tabletop hobby things - one that has a flat platen - is a revelation.

The handles on the "seaton" chest chisel were made on the same 4x36 belt sander and then just cleaned up with a file to get the coarse sanding marks off. I saw knife makers using their belt grinders to make handles in a sheffield video, so it seemed like a good idea, and it works well (aside from managing dust).
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Re: My woodworking output...

Postby D_W » 13 Oct 2021, 19:53

Andyp wrote:Hi D-W
To make it easier for everyone to see I have inserted your urls inside Img tabs. This is very easy for you to do when you create your post.

HTH


Thanks, I'll post as pictures going forward. I didn't know the etiquette here - sometimes I there's a negative reaction if the number of pictures is too many and they're displayed in large size.

My preference is for what you did, though - if they are links, people will miss them.
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Re: My woodworking output...

Postby D_W » 13 Oct 2021, 20:05

separately, this whole forging and heat treatment thing can get lengthy - so I'll defer on talking about it too much more. But if someone wants to do it (I have done a lot of work trialing methods for making the grain of simple steels finer so that the toughness is better), I'd be glad to discuss it. Good O1 and any decent kitchen oil will make a very good tool as long as it's heated hot enough before quenching, but the refinement that I do (and that I"m sure was done 200 years ago) can be done by eye and by color without any special equipment. For short items, a paint can with the high temp blanket lining it will heat anything from a long length of chisel to any reasonable plane iron's business end.

I think more people would make some of their own tools if they knew how easy it was, but there's also a lot of bad information floating around about heat treating with limited equipment.
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