16 January 2009

Ethereal...maybe not

Cleaning up this American White Oak stuff ain't easy you know. I was in the 'shop last night doing a bit on my 'fun' project and I'd got round to cleaning up the outside. I set the V-BUS to take off the featheriest, most ethereal wispy shavings imaginable but there was still a small amount of tear out in one or two places. Fortunately I'd got one of the Veritas No80 scraper planes and decided to go over it the outside with that, the first time I'd used it properly on a job...very impressive, all the little annoying little bits of torn grain were removed. Just for 'belt and braces' I went over the outside again with the Mirka sanding pad and that's also equally impressive. All the sanding dust just gets whooshed up the pipe into the 'shop vac so it doesn't actually appear if the material's cutting the timber...it is though! Little bit of detail sanding along the edges and the job's all done, on then with the first coat of Osmo-PolyX.
Is a job ever perfect though? This one certainly wasn't, there's plenty of goofs that I ought not to have made...dovetails that were too tight, stub tenons that were slightly out etc. However, that's not the point of this exercise, what I actually wanted to do was to make a drawer with a curved front and that part of the project went very well. The difficult part of it was making the front (slight cock-up in making the template) and one or two hitches with the lapped dovetails, but apart from that, the making and fitting went really well. I just need to put on the second coat of Osmo tonight, an application of Teak Wax on the 'morrow and it'll be finished.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Look forward to seeing a picture of the finished job, Rob.

Cheers ;-)

Paul Chapman