16000 woodworking plans, almost too good to be true... (It probably is too good to be true)

 It is nice to find out that someone apparently have noticed that I have started to blog again, though I much prefer regular readers and comments from those instead of all those fake comments that once in a while seem to flood in.

Today I had 37 comments, all pretty much using the same words, and all completely irrelevant to the blog post where the comment was posted.

It seems that Ted McGraths 16000 woodworking plans have changed its name to woodbex. I guess it is the same scam, and I sincerely doubt that all the plans are some that he made himself.

Here's an earlier warning about the site from woodworkweb. 

I guess I'm not alone in once in a while seeing something nice and wondering, wow, I'd like to know if there is a plan available for that.  But I think there's a much better chance of finding that out if people ask in the comments field about it - rather than forking out 67 $ to a scammer and risk that maybe that plan isn't part of the 16000.

If you want to make chairs there are several well respected chairmakers out there who has got plans for sale, heck I think some of them even wrote a book about making chairs. Get those plan in a legal way instead of being part of a scam.

The same goes with a bunch of other stuff. Popular Woodworking and Fine Woodworking all have made great plans, if you haven't got the issue and can't borrow it at the library, well, then pay the amount of money the publisher would like for a back issue, and then go on and build a set of barristers bookcases with a good conscience. 

Truth be told, I didn't read all those 37 comments today, I kind of stopped after reading the comment that was posted on my post about building a coffin for my dad. 

That comment read something like: I built something similar with help from ... 
Hmmm, I bet you did! 

Stay safe for New Years Eve, don't drink and drive, use safety glasses and DONT support the scam sites 

All ready for Christmas Eve in Brooklyn

(Would you buy a used woodworking plan from this person??)

Keepsake box of birch

We had made a draft of who should give who Christmas presents on board. And my recipient had earlier on wished for a belt, so I made a nice wide belt that would fit in a set of jeans for her. I decided that I could make a keepsake box for her as well. That way it would also be easier to make a decent gift wrapping. :-)

I found a piece of birch that I had milled a couple of years ago, and I decided that it would be a fine material. I have never really worked birch before, other than for firewood, so I thought that it would be interesting to do a nice little project with it.

I settled on some measurements that looked fine to me and would enable me to make the panels for the lid and bottom without gluing anything up. 
the board was first crosscut into some manageable lengths and then planed to the desired thickness. 

The sides were ripped to the correct width and I made a groove on for the lid and the bottom, so that I could assemble the box completely and later on divide it on the table saw. 

I laid out some dovetails and took into account that 1/8" would be removed from one of the sets when I reopened the box. I just made regular through dovetails, and after dry assembling the sides I measured for the lid and bottom and made those too. those received a rabbet going all the way around, so they could seat in the grooves of the sides once assembled. 

After the glue had dried, I planed the protruding parts of the dovetails flush with the rest, and sanded the box lightly. I adjusted the table saw to nearly the depth of the material, so that when I separated the box I would not risk any movement or binding. I could just as well have glued in some small blocks of wood on the inside prior to assembly, but I chose the other route this time. The final separation was done with a Japanese pull saw.

I made some dust seal strips that would be mounted inside the bottom of the box. These all received an angled cut near the upper part. The depth of the cut was close to 1/32", just the same as the thickness of the fabric that I would use to line the box with.

The dust seals were glued in place, and I installed some small brass hinges that I once got from my brother in japan. I decided that I didn't want to ad a lock to the box, so from that point on it was just downhill smooth sailing. (The Danish expression downhill apparently means something different in English :-) )

I gave the box three coats of shellac with a rubbing of steel wool in between each layer. After the final layer I lightly rubbed with steel wool again, and then gave the surface a coat of wax. 

Some years ago I ordered a length of baize from Hainsworth in England. This is the fabric that was originally used in gun cases and such. Due to various reasons I never have gotten around to test it before now, and I have to say that it is an incredibly nice material! 

It looks way better than any of my earlier attempts using hobby felt which is actually a synthetic instead of real wool. The baize has a beautiful dark holly colour and it is much more firm so it is easier to cut and position inside the box.

Based on information that I once read on the "pegs and tails blog", baize was traditionally glued using glue made from wheat flour. 
So armed with this information I found a recipe for wheat flour and started. the recipe called for 1 part of flour to 4 parts of cold water. The flour is mixed thoroughly with the cold water and the mixture is then brought to boil and left to boil while stirred until it thickens.
The glue worked a lot better than I had anticipated, and in a short time the keepsake box was complete. 

Assembled box

Almost separated

Just separated

The new puppy resting its tired little head on the soft cushion of our lovely Newfoundland dog

Getting ready to glue using wheat flour glue

Baize glue up in progress.

The keepsake box has been lined

Completed box ready for Christmas wrapping

A halter for Mette's horse

Last time I was out here, I ordered a reprint of an old German book on leatherwork. It is written in 1908 by a master saddler and covers everything you could wish to know about leatherwork including how to set up your own business with suggestions for various types of letters that you could be interested in sending out to e.g. customers, people who owe you money, newspapers etc. 

In that book there are some suggestions on how to make halters. And I thought that t would be interesting to make something from a set of plans instead of just copying one of the old halters like I have done previously. 

The measurements are pretty close to what I have made before (I guess the size of a horse's head hasn't changed much) but these plans also suggest that you make a head band. And that is new to me. I have only seen that on regular bridles. So before leaving for sea, I cut some leather straps and loaded my small box of leatherworking tools with me determined to try to make such a halter. I also ordered some hardware so I could make something that looked nice, instead of simply cannibalizing an old halter for cheap steel parts. So this time it is new cast brass parts.

It is funny that I can easily feel that I am not that accustomed to working in leather compared to working in wood. So my initial rough calculations on how much leather I would need is off. I had brought enough leather with me to be able to make two halters (I thought), but I only have material for one and a half. 
Also despite trying to think ahead, I make small mistakes. It is not that these are deal breakers, but I am pretty sure that they are avoidable if I had more experience. The good thing is that I am able to recognize some of them, and I have corrected a few along the way, so I still try to only make the same mistake once or twice.

At the moment we are sailing across the Atlantic, following the north east trade winds (Passat). We passed Cap Verde the other day, and the temperature of the sea water is 28 dgC, and the air temperature is the same during the night, but a lot higher during the day due to the sun. So it is nice to have a project that I can do outside instead of having to work in a super hot shop. At the moment I am working on the headband itself, so that is not yet in the pictures.

My work station on the poop deck.

The view is quite nice.

Halter hanging on the emergency steering wheel. (also on the poop deck)

Anatomic breastplate for Caj (Gustav's horse) glamour shots

 In February when I had to sign on the ship, the Covid 19 restrictions required that I had to go to Norway and sit for 10 days in a quarantine hotel before flying with the rest of the crew down to Tenerife to meet the ship.  As you might remember, I made a breastplate of leather instead of sitting idle all the time.

When I came back, Gustav tested it and found that a few of the pieces were a bit too long. This time while at home I found the time to fix those small things, and I snapped a couple of glamour shots of the breastplate mounted on Caj.

For some reason my inadequate camera skills have made it look like Caj is a small horse. That is not the case! He measures 1.72 m above the shoulders (17 hands).

Gustav and Caj

Anatomic breastplate 

Could I come outside please?

New gable on the barn completed

After a long period with fantastic weather, I decided that I'd better pull my act together and complete the gable before I would have to do it in rain and wind. 
I am not sure why I didn't really feel so excited about this job since normally I like to do carpentry jobs such as this one. 

Nevertheless I got the last boards installed, and managed to make a decent closure of the upper part of the gable too. That one had to be a bit different due to some of the original framing of the barn extending farther out than the rest. 

I applied some zinc drip edges on top of the doors and on top of the lower part of the opening for the sawmill, to prevent water from entering the end grain of the wood.

Since the boards were planed and not just rough sawn as they would have been if I had milled them myself, I found some oil based paint in the standard Swedish red colour. Painting didn't take much time, and it all suddenly looked a whole lot better. I have to admit that it could use a second coat, but I can do that some other time.

I still need to install some plywood on the inside, as Gustav and I had decided when we started the project. The idea is that we can each paint our logo on the plywood, and that should hopefully look good.

Completed gable at the North end of the barn

Stitching horse completed

 After completing the much too large and complicated glue up, I made a jig so I could mark out the legs in the correct length so the seat height would be 24" instead of 30 something. 

I turned a foot operated lever out of some sycamore that was left over from an earlier chair building extravaganza, and though the plans suggest a plain square piece of wood, I thought that it would look nice with a turned lever. 

Last time on board, I had made some hardware just in case that I would find the time to build this very project, Making the hardware itself was not a big deal. I think that realistic I used maybe one and a half hours in total on making a set consisting of a toothed part, a catch to engage the toothed part and finally a U shaped piece to hold the end of the lever.

I used a chisel and a spokeshave to chamfer all the legs and stretchers, and finally it was sanded to grit 180. Before applying a finish, I stamped my Newf & Gambrel logo onto the underside of the seat, and chiselled MMXXI which felt nice to be able to do after not having made anything for so long.

The instructions suggest that you give the stitching horse a coat of shellac, so that's what I did. Actually I gave it two coats. Between the coats and after the final coat, I rubbed the surface with steel wool. As a final touch I gave it all a coating of Mel's Wax made by Don Williams. This stuff is really excellent!

Now I just need to find a leatherwork project that will benefit from me having my own stitching horse (or I could try to sell it).

Completed stitching horse

Marking jig for length of legs

Mel's wax, packing, product and clear instructions!

Hardware.

Stitching horse part 2

 I completed all the mortises and tenons for the frame of the stitching horse, and I even made a test assembly. Given that the legs are splaying, the frame and the seat will all have to come together at the same time, so that is going to be a bit of a challenge, especially since I don't like complicated glue ups. The legs are left overly long. My idea is that if anything warps a bit during the glue up, I can still fix it if the legs are not yet cut to length.

All the individual parts have been drawbored, and I have made some 5 mm dowels using my Blum dowel plate that Alex from Austria gave to me some years ago. 

The instructions show a bit of extra shaping of the seat, so that your legs will not rest on any sharp edges, so that was another extra bit of work. 

I can feel that I haven't made much fine woodwork the last two years, so everything is going a bit slow compared to how I used to work, but I am also deliberately trying to take my time and enjoying making a project that I have thought of for a long time. 

For the clamp part, I found some elm, and the bandsaw made it easy to cut the curved shape. Instead of bolting the two parts together, I used some glue. I am pretty sure that it will be plenty strong enough, but if it isn't, then adding a couple of wagon bolts later on won't be a big deal.

The hinges for the clamp were some old black steel hinges that I found among some of the stuff that came from my parents summerhouse in Sweden. They look just right for the project and have almost no slack in them which is a huge bonus for this application. I couldn't bear to just mount them without letting them into the wood. It just looks so much better in my opinion.
I wanted to find some straight slotted steel screws for attaching the hinges, and that gave me an option to take a picture of my new inventory cabinets.  Those were made using parts from the old windows of my parents house, and I also used boards that came from my dads giant stock of wood to make the cabinets themselves. I still need to make some more shelves to fill in half of the cabinets, but that will have to wait for another day. 
My thought was that I'll make a stores room in the room next to the workshop, (where the big metal lathe is placed), then I can keep the workshop as a workshop instead of a combined store/shop. The big glass doors and a bunch of shelves also makes it easy to find different types of screws etc.

Dry assembly.

Test assembly upright.

Hinges ready for marking up

My inventory cabinets

Part of my inventory of old screws.

Stitching horse

I have started doing a bit more leatherwork lately, and once in a while it would be nice to have some decent work holding for hand sewing.
Some years ago I made a clamp that you could hold between your legs, and while it worked, I never really liked to use it. 

So to get back into the woodworking mode and actually start using my tools and my shop again after a long period of essentially not doing any woodwork, I have started making a stitching horse. I found a plan for a really nice traditionally looking stitching horse in a pdf file of a book called "Farm woodwork". There are a bunch of nice projects in the book, some more useful than others, but an interesting little book nevertheless.

Gustav has been practising milling with the mulesaw, and he milled an old beech trunk, that I had left on the saw almost two years ago, and never gotten around to milling. Beech if not milled will very quickly develop black streaks inside a trunk. I don't mind it since it ads a bit of visual interest to an otherwise fairly boring looking wood (in my opinion). Anyway, one of those boards that were milled wasn't even in thickness along its length, and I decided to use it to make the seat of the stitching horse. 
I marked up the wood according to the plans, and sawed the curvaceous shape out on the bandsaw. A slanting mortise was chopped and I drilled 4 holes for the legs. 

The legs were made from some ash that I had milled several years ago and never found a use for. I'll turn a round tenon on the ends of the legs that will go through the seat. But this was about as far as I got today.

Double pear shape

Seat and legs + stretchers

New gable on the barn

 When I returned home from sea this Monday, Gustav suggested that we did some work on the northern gable of the barn.

The barn was originally designed so that you could drive straight through it, and unload all the grain in the middle where there was a pit and a grain elevator. Being of this design meant that both ends had large barn doors.

The southern one I replaced probably 10 years ago, but since the northern part ends in the paddock for the horses, making a new gable hasn't been high up on my list.

Gustav suggested a rather elaborate design where the inside would be covered in some thin plywood, so we would have a place to put our logos, and I couldn't really argue about that. Instead of the old one piece door, we are making it like a wall with a regular door and a double hatch to allow logs to be loaded onto the sawmill. It will be a major improvement over the old system, where I had to squeeze myself through the same hole as the logs, and I couldn't close up that hole, meaning that there was a lot of draft through the barn.

Are woodworkers generally a conservative bunch part 2.

 Almost 3 years ago I wrote a blog post wondering if woodworkers generally were a conservative bunch. 

I started that post because Popular Woodworking Magazine had made some changes to their homepage which I didn't really like. And I ended up thinking that I would just have to wait and see if it was indeed a change for the worse.

A couple of days ago, I visited the homepage again, for the first time in maybe a year or so.  I have to admit that I was utterly disappointed. The once vibrant community that followed most blog posts there seemed to be dead and gone. 

Earlier there would be maybe a banner ad for Bessey clamps or Forrest blades etc. But always something woodworking related. 

Now when you go to the blog section, half the page is filled with clickbait links advertising for stuff like "ecological Viagra" and "You won't believe this video - watch it before it is banned" 
I let my subscription lapse some years ago, because the quality of the magazine took a hefty dip. And I have to say that looking at the homepage wouldn't make me think about subscribing again.

I hope that the magazine has been able to attract some new readers, because I would guess that they have managed to push some old readers away in the process.

Totempole for the local kindergarten

This time while at home, I barely had time to go into the shop, since we had to empty my parent's house as it was sold. it is a good thing that we managed to sell the house fast, but clearing up your childhood home is not a pleasant job. 

I spent roughly 3 weeks out of my 4 weeks of home period emptying the house. And I was sorry everyday that I was doing it. 

I even started dreaming about moving stuff around in my trailer, and I was a bit stressed about it.  It was much better when I dreamt about stealing a helicopter from US Coast Guard. (I have no idea why I was going to steal a helicopter, but it seemed like a good idea in that dream..)

Anyway, when the house was ready for handing over to the new owners, it was a relief, and I was planning to do a bit of organizing in the shop and the stores room, sort of as a reward to myself, and to find a place for all those bits and pieces from my dads shop too. 

Before getting started on that, one of the adults from the local kindergarten called me and asked if I could help her make a totempole. Asger stopped in the kindergarten 10 years ago, but they remembered that I had always willingly helped them in the past, and they knew that I could work wood. 

I instantly decided that it was worth doing to help them, and they would bring over a log that I could use.

Kaja (the adult) explained that her group of children from 3-4 years old were going to have a theme event about Indians. they would try to build tepees and learn a bit about the history etc. So that was why they needed a totempole too. 

When I got the log I first removed the bark and then started dividing the log into a few sections. The idea was to make a Totem figure on the top with a beak and a smiling mouth and the later on ad a couple of wings. the lower sections would see happy faces of children and happy animals. I told Kaja that I didn't want to make any sort of scary faces or animals, which she agreed was a good ide given the age of the children.

By making an outline of all the faces and animals etc. it would give the children something they could use for painting, so they could do it and be reasonably certain to get a decent result.

I completed the totempole in one day and delivered it to the kindergarten Monday morning. The wings were not mounted, so that the could roll the totempole around for painting on the sides and the back of it. 
I'll try to take a picture of the painted totempole once I get home again.

A young Gustav having helped painting..

The raw log.

Bark removed and sections made.

Happy face of a girl.

Smiling totem figure

Wings attached.

Happy horse

Marlinspike manufacturing

It is not a secret that I like to turn stuff on a metal lathe. On my first voyage with the Lehmkuhl, I made a large marlinspike just to test out one special way of making cones. 
The marlinspike was well received by the deck department, and I ended up making a couple of smaller ones later on that year.

I have great difficulties saying NO to a Newfoundland dog and to young people wanting to learn from me. So when I signed on this time and almost all of our volunteers asked me if I would teach them how to make a marlinspike I replied that I'd be happy to.

Making a marlinspike is a fine little project. There are different processes that involves different tools, and you can leave the project for some time and pick it up again later without any issues.
The turning teaches people a basic understanding of the lathe and how to use it. The surface is improved by a file and by sandpaper before it is hardened.
Some sort of head or handle is dealt with next, and finally everything is polished using some fine emery paper. 
One of the volunteers asked if I could also help him make a sheath for the marlinspike, which I was happy to help him with. Soon after, a couple more of them wanted to do that too. Then one guy wanted to make a sheath for his knife to match the marlinspike sheath, and another one jumped on the same idea. So I have spent a great deal of time helping and instructing in leather work and metalwork this time.

An interesting thing was to see how they each had ideas as how they wanted the head/handle made. So each has his own very distinct marlinspike. 
So far we have made heads from leather, wood, laminated wood, copper & brass and steel.
Most of the marlinspikes have been around 10" long, so they work well as personal tools that can be brought with them into the rigging. A couple of them have been 13-14" and a bit beefier, intended to be used at the deck mainly for splicing wire.

A great thing about all the projects is that people have all been incredibly proud upon completion, and they have each succeeded in making a functioning tool that they can use for the rest of their career. And I am happy because I think that I may have planted a small seed of making in each and everyone of them.

Adrian's marlinspike

14" (as far as I remember)

Wood from various ships he has worked on

Laurids' and Simon's Marlinspikes

Laurids' sheath for the marlinspike

Simon has made a sheath for his pocket knife

Aske's sheaths

Brass & copper head

Nice work for someone new to leather working.