With one end of the head now embedded with the turned padauk plug I fired up the lead smelting cup. To make sure the opposite end of the head was plugged I clamped a scrap of plywood over the end with several layers of aluminum foil as a gasket, and poured in the molten lead.
Since the lead shrank on cooling I had to dribble on a bit more of the molten material to fill the void to a slight excess.
I filed the face of the mallet flush with the margins of the plumbing fitting, then epoxied on some 3/16″ cowhide.
Trimming that flush with the edges of the face let me move on to the final assembly of all the plumbing parts.
After saturating the padauk plug with dilute epoxy, the final step was to apply a couple layers of sharkskin to the handle. Just because.
In the end, it was a fun project but I am not persuaded of its efficacy due to the ungainliness of the head; it seems too long to me. I’ll probably make another one with a fatter and shorter head.
Stay tuned.
the had now filled with cast lead it was time to finish the assembly and wrap it up.
A while ago I commented on the mallet that Bob Rozieski was using in chopping some joinery (later identified by several readers as a Lee Valley tool), I mused about making something similar myself. I tend to enjoy making tools myself, sometimes even more than using said tools, so making a steampunk mallet could be a blast. In addition, my location in the hinterlands, where the local feed/seed coop/hardware store has both limited inventory and limited hours (and our one local auto parts store is closed on Saturday!), as a result I keep a solid inventory of hardware on hand. Thus the odds were pretty good that I had everything I need on-hand to construct the tool.
Could I turn a pile of pipe fittings and scrap wood into a usable mallet?
Let’s see.
In browsing through my inventory it was clear that I had most of the parts in-hand and needed only to buy a couple of double-nipple 1/2″ NTP fittings and one reducer. I assembled the head fittings together as tightly as possible using my big pipe wrench and a piece of long pipe to act as the handle extension.
So far, so good. Now I just had to figure out how to add some heft. How could I do that? Oh wait, I have several hundred pounds of lead under the gunsmithing bench. And a lead melter; I could fill the head with molten lead. But first I had to plug the ends.
I had already decided to make the mallet to have one end-grain wood face and one leather faced surface. I might as well go ahead and make the wooden face now to use it as the plug for one of the ends. I found a square scrap of padauk in the scrap box and tossed it onto the lathe to turn one end to the taper needed to screw it into one end.
Once that was accomplished i could turn the actual face of the block and drive (screw) it in.
A couple months ago for my birthday Mrs. Barn gave me this remarkable tool to keep handy. I’ve had many headlamps over the years as my fading eyesight is always seeking more lumens, but this one is the first that I’ve tried that is actually comfortable, high performance, and long lasting. The combination of the LED illuminator plus the 2 AA batteries being located at the rear of the unit giving it a perfect balance, I can wear it all day long with comfort. I cannot tell the lifespan of the two ordinary batteries as I have not yet had them go dark after almost 60 hours of use.
She says she bought it at the local feed-and-seed coop, so I am guessing it may be available at Ace Hardware stores.
The tool cabinet is really three big boxes, one being the main box of 48″x42″x14″, and the two outer hinged boxes are each 48″x20-1/2″ x 4″. I built the big box first and outsmarted myself some, a lesson I learned in time to change the way I built the two door boxes.
Beginning with four pieces of 48″x24″x3/4″ Baltic birch-ish plywood panels from the big box store, I ripped them all to 14″ wide and sawed rebates on the back edges to accept the 1/2″ back panel. I ripped a fifth 3/4″ panel to be 1/2″ narrower than the outer box elements in order to allow for the 1/2″ back panel since it serves as the center stile.
It was at this point when I outsmarted myself and wasted a lot of time to no great purpose when I decided to miter the corners. This was simply unnecessary and a step I avoided when building the matched door boxes. Given the set-up of my shop the only way I could cut miters on the ends of the box panels was to use my battery-powered circular saw, which is an excellent tool that works just fine. The time sink was in getting the 45-degree cut just right in order to accomplish the 90-degree corner. After some test cuts I got it right and had the four outer panels ready for assembly.
Once that was done I cut the dadoes in the top and bottom panels to receive the interior center vertical panel, cutting the shoulders with a Japanese saw, excavating with a router plane then finishing it off with a small dado plane.
I assembled the back panel from two pieces of 48″x24″x1/2″ plywood, using PVA adhesive and pinch dogs to hold the together while the adhesive sets. Pinch dogs are one of the treasures I discovered in the pattern shop, along with using nails and screws for clamping stacked elements together for painted curvilinear structures. In this case it’s not painted stack laminations, but the surfaces will be obscured entirely by veneerwork.
With all that complete the entire structure was assembled using PVA adhesive (I cannot assure that the tool cabinet will always be in the best atmospheric environment) and deck screws. I chuckle with the gasping and pearl clutching I am sensing out in the fruited plain. I augmented the corners with full-length mitered glue bocks using nails and PVA.
I learned my lesson with the bog box so I assembled the doors with butt joints and glued-and-screwed.
Whew, all the pieces fit together. The thing is so big I shoulda called it “the tool closet.”
Like many hand-tool woodworkers I am continually refining my sharpening habits. Not my technique: I don’t jump after any fads since settling on my sharpening protocols a few decades ago (I am mostly a free-hand sidewinder but will use a roller jig to help establish the bevel). Rather, I seek to systematize my sharpening habits to address the cutting edges before they need anything more than a thirty second touch-up. My problem always comes when I am not diligent in this habit and let things go too long, or when I accidentally whack into a piece of store or metal with a keen bevel. Yes, it does happen and once the foul language subsides I grumble my way through the process of essentially starting from zero on the edge.
The only new sharpening tools I’ve adopted over the years are the LNT honing jig to get a badly damaged edge into the right configuration, and diamond stones, which are now the workhorses of my sharpening preps. I still finish everything off with an 8000 or 10,000 Japanese ceramic stone, and occasionally will strop the edge on a rigid board I’ve infused with agglomerated microalumina.
My “go to” approach for a badly damaged edge is to re-establish the bevel with some 60-grit on a granite block. Works just fine. Recently I obtained a new tool that may reduce my time on the trueing granite a fair bit. I am a frequent customer of Woodcraft (I have no other relationship with them) and get their flyers in the mail regularly and I always browse them quickly before discarding. Every now and then there will be a sale for something I’ve wanted and now it’s discounted. The most recent flyer included a tool I did not know they had, a twin diamond stone that is coarse (180) and extra course (120).
Up to now I have always stayed with DMT diamond plates but this time I decided to take a whirl on the Wood River wagon for this utra-coarse diamond plate. If they are of acceptable quality and performance this pair of diamond abrasive surfaces will spare me a lot of time on the granite block which, being dry abrasion, generates enough heat that I have to wear gloves to keep from blistering my fingertips. Given that I will use water on the diamond stone while re-shaping the tip of whatever it is I am working on, heat will not be an issue now.
This function will definitely come in handy as I am currently re-beveling a Japanese plane blade that was 1/8″ out of whack. Oh, and some chisels that had unfortunate encounters with screws.
When it comes to large scale furniture making, or at least when there are large expanses of flat elements such as sides, doors and backs of larger cabinetry, one of the constant challenges to makers is adapting to the movement of wood through the seasons by means of various assemblages. Long ago I developed the attitude it would be more efficient and more successful to use wood re-formatted to simply not move in response to environmental moisture. In other words, to use good quality plywood. That might make me a heretic in the fine woodworking world, and I will give that accusation all the consideration it deserves.
Okay, I am done with that consideration. As pundit Mollie Hemingway once remarked, “My spiritual gift is not caring what you think about anything.” That pretty much summarizes my attitude towards plywood as a legitimate fine construction material.
Frankly it is not a concern for most of my projects given the scale of my work. That said I have begun experimenting with home-made plywood even for some of my smaller work, consuming my copious inventory of veneers and marine epoxy to make nearly indestructible plywood like this. I will be blogging about this undertaking in the near future.
Sure, I know how to make frame-and-panel furniture and use it when it is stylistically appropriate, but otherwise I move on using good plywood for the panels of my projects. This becomes even more imperative for me when the ultimate purpose of the project is to express the decorative surface, either marquetry or japanning/fauxrushi. I just want the seasons to unfold with the carcass substrate not even noticing.
Over my 50 years of restoring and conserving ancient furniture I have seen far too many instances of a solid wood carcasses tearing apart the decorative surface to go down that road in my own work, as in this 19th Century French desk. Given the prominence of decorative veneerwork on my cabinet this phenomenon was one I did not seek to replicate.
This brings me to the construction choices for my tool cabinet, in some ways to be the culmination of my “making” undertakings. In point of fact this will be a huge (for me) simple box measuring roughly 48″ high x 42″ wide x 15″ deep. The cabinet has two purposes; 1) to hold as many woodworking tools as I can possibly cram in there on 12 (!) swinging panels, and 2) express the aesthetic of traditional Roubo/Roentgen parquetry (outside) combined with HO Studley’s inspirational aesthetic (inside). For this reason, I need a structure that is both robust and exceedingly stable if I want the cabinet to redound to my descendants. This pretty much means that I build the box and its doors out of Baltic birch plywood, for the most part 3/4″.
When you merge that preference with the additional facts that I am not set up to do large scale millwork combined with the ready availability of 24″ x 48″ “project panels” at the Big Blue Box store, my path forward was pretty self-evident.
Now the only real question is, “How many months with this adventure consume?”
I do not pretend to be any kind of expert in hand saws, old or new. I only know what I like and when it comes to buying vintage saws what I like is a full, meaty plate with no kinks or distortions.
A much used saw being readied to lose its tip and become a panel saw. In this case I will remove the final six inches by striking it repeatedly with a carbide stylus until I can snap off the extraneous material.
If a saw is generally nice but the plate is too thin at the tip, indicating a great many re-sharpens, I might pick it up and chop off the tip to turn it into a panel saw (such a tool will be featured in a coming post about my traveling kit).
Recently while outfitting my under-construction tool cabinet, I was installing the saw rack I had modified from its earlier wall-mounted configuration. This provided the opportunity to once again review my inventory, to see what I was missing or needed to upgrade.
Most saws. old or new, bear some sort of marking to indicate the tooth spacing. This can be either stamped near the handle, just above the teeth, or etched into the plate insignia.
This particular saw plate is a mystery to me. What does the “27” mean? It is certainly not a 27 tpi saw. Perhaps there is a special nomenclature of which I am unaware. In point of fact the saw is an 8 tpi cross-cut saw.
Somewhere in the misty memories of the Mesozoic era I picked up a blacksmith-made petite curved adz head, probably at a PATINA tailgate tool swap. At the time I fashioned a handle from a broken shovel and sharpened the head to a keen edge.
I used it from time to time but not as much as I thought I would. Unfortunately, the tip was convex, rendering it almost useless for any task I might have. So, I decided to reshape the tip into one that would be more useful to be, one that is at least flat, maybe even a bit concave.
In few minutes on the bench grinder the shape was established, but the ~1/8″ cross section at the new edge was presenting me with the potential of several hours hand grinding and beveling on the inside curve with round slips or sandpaper wrapped around a dowel.
Instead, I had a flash of inspiration and took the top shield off the belt sander in order to access the roller. Miraculously the roller size was absolutely perfect for grinding the new in-cannel bevel. That one thing cut the work time from several hours to several minutes. I like innovations like that!
I reattached the handle to the head and gave it a test drive.
For many years I was/am a friend of Knew Concepts founder Lee Marshall and his collaborator and successor, Brian Meek. When we met at their first Woodworking in America conference they were just beginning to explore branching out from their world of jewelry-making tools into our world of coping and marquetry saws. I think those first interactions occurred around 2010 or thereabouts and I recall vividly an evening of dining and sketching on napkins as I proposed they undertake the design and manufacture of a vertical marquetry chevalet. Sure, this concept was revolutionary and heretical and might raise the hackles of horizontal-chevalet-traditionalists but that did not concern me nor apparently did it do anything but enhance Lee’s curiosity.
I had already made my first foray into the chevalet machine form with my c.2002 benchtop horizontal unit, but to be truthful I already had too much muscle memory dedicated to vertical sawing to ever feel fully comfortable with it. I always kept returning to my tried-and-true bird’s mouth and jeweler’s saw.
So my intersection with Knew Concepts crew was underway. Our ongoing collaborations led me to hold virtually all of Knew Concepts products in my workshop, trying out what they already were making along with many protypes in development.
I was very excited when they brought their first complete proof-of-concept prototype to WIA 2016 and gave it a good long test drive. There was much left to noodle out in the details but the overall concept was in place. Before those details were resolved Lee’s health declined to the point where he died, and Brian succeeded him at the helm of Knew Concepts. The transfer of the company was long and complicated, but eventually the new regime was in place.
Some time in 2019/2020(?) I dropped an email to Brian asking about the progress of the machine. He called me to say that one of the terms of the company transition was that at least one unit of the machine be manufactured and that unit would be sold to me. A few months later it arrived and I set it up just enough to give it a look-see. It is a spectacular machine and as of last month is now permanently ensconced at the end of the third daughter, ready to make marquetry at a moment’s notice.
While I was at it, I made a major improvement to my Knew Concepts Mark I jeweler’s bench saw by adding an oversized working platform, making it all the more amenable to marquetry than it was before, not surprising since it was designed for jewelry-scale work.
This post might be a long-winded way to say that I have loved marquetry since I first encountered it almost fifty years ago and now have the time and tools to make it an integral part of projects. I suspect my main emphasis will be parquetry, not curvilinear marquetry, but I am now outfitted for either or both. My tool cabinet will be my first big foray into monumental scale work as the outside will be vaguely inspired by the works of Abraham and David Roentgen.
I’m thinking this might be the conclusion of this Winter Projects series and it is time to return to our irregularly scheduled programming.
While watching a Bob Rozaieski video the other day my eye was drawn to the mallet he was using. So I sez to myself, “Self, you gotta make yourself something like that!”
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