sutton046

A customer had a couple of old window sashes which were rotten. They wanted to make up the new sashes themselves, but asked me to machine up the material for them from a pile of rough old jarrah they had supplied. This arvo I measured the old component profile dimensions, and machined up the sticks over-long. This included cutting the glazing rebates and the mouldings. Cutting the profiles with  a sash moulding plane. Stick mounted on a sticking board. Amongst my growing range of wooden moulding planes, I have a couple of sash moulders. One was a pretty close match to the original, so I used it to run the profiles, after the sticks had been machined to the correct dimensions. I then cut the rebates over the table saw. Job done. Now it's up to them to cut the wedged mortise and tenon joints and make up the sashes to replace the originals. Completed sticks, machined, profiled and rebated. Such a beautiful tool to use, cutting nice clean profiles in the jarrah components. Wooden mould...

Today was a saw sharpening day. I have a couple of teaching workshops coming up where I will be teaching the pleasures of hand cutting dovetail joints. It was time to get more dovetail saws organised for the bigger groups. Much of my dovetail saw collection has been amassed (like the rest of my saw collection) over the last few years from antique tool sales, garage sales and flea markets. I am not a Tool Collector, incidentally, for my purpose is to put tools back into service, not into glass cabinets. Many of the priority saws have been piling up in a box awaiting for a sharpening day. That day arrived today. A few of the saws awaiting cleaning up and sharpening... Some of the saws needed to be "given a birthday" first: Many needed surface rust removed, some needed a bit of straightening of their saw plate, the odd bit of nut tightening, and a bit of nourishment for the handles. The cleaning up of the saw plate was done with the wire wheel in the bench grinder, wet and dry p...

Amid the usual array of workshops on offer during my last series of public workshops in March, there was a couple of new ones, including: Making a Small Picture/Photo Frame. We used hand tools only. It was a great process and it's a fantastic little project. This project will be offered again in the coming public workshop series I'm offering in June. Nice job, Jenny! I reckon this will be a popular workshop. Get in early to secure a place! To tantalize you, here is a bit of a look at the process: It all starts with the materials. I regularly obtain some beautiful timber from packing crate material. This comes either from the UK or from USA/Canada. I wish I knew what the timbers were. I just refer to them generally as "Northern Hemispherical Softwoods". Much nicer and closer grained timber than the introduced softwoods grown here in Western Australia: Pinus radiata and Pinus pinaster.  So much potential! That could be a lot of picture frames... Although I am an...