Working Projcet

Well, today shall prove to be a good day, the weather is pretty mild for Wisconsin this time of year, hovering around the 20 degree mark, and so its fairly tolerable within the shop. was able to take the handles that I roughed out last night and start to form them into something comfortable and ergonomic. I got an early start even, :)  thats around 11 am here :) and within about an hour and a half I had the open handle done. I longed to straighten the edges by using a belt sander. but there is always set up time when dealing with a piece like this. I opted to stick with the path I already set last night and keep to the hand tools.


I used a large woodwrights rasp, and a couple of smaller profile rasps I picked up a few years ago, to even out the areas where the coping saw did not cut square, Which was actually quite a bit. . . nothing more than a few degrees of tip and I wonder if this is the nature of the tool a bit, or if its more my technique. I guess well see over time but at the moment Im gonna call it fifty-fifty. Christopher Schwartz over at popular woodworking magazine has been beating on coping saws in his recent blogs and Im afraid my coping saws are guilty of the same faults he was finding unsatisfactory in his, mostly not being able to place enough tension on the blade to keep it directly in line, they all seem to waiver. For now my take is thats how its gonna be . . . and sometimes youve just gotta play the course, sand traps, water hazards and all. Im confident things will improve over time, could be things like a bandsaw have just spoiled me a wee bit. (naw, not possible!)

After rasping everything to rough shapes and curves like I wanted,, I then smoothed over the work with a card scraper and some sandpaper for areas difficult to work the scraper in. One of those small profile rasps has a smoothing file side to it and that worked awesome to sharpen up some of the valleys between curves.

Anyways, today is just a matter of settling in and doing the work, the open handle is done with shaping, ready for the kerf cut to accept the saw and the irvets to hold the sawblade in place. The "D" handle is in the vice right now. I touched on it a bit before deciding to take a break, come inside, eat lunch, warm up, and knock out a post of the progress. Just to finish out a couple "action" pics of me working away, I really like the one using the card scraper, its neat to see the reflection bounce off the scraper and get captured by the camera.

I will probably post more later today, until then . . .

Once, a long while ago, I was very involved as a co-owner of a company that produced medieval and renaissance style faires, At one point our company was asked to consult with an area buisness about putting on their own faire to promote their buisness. As we offered some of our expertise and tried to ask prying questions into their plans for advertising and what not, and they kept coming back to a recurring pattern of speech that said variations on the phrase "Ya, thats cool, and wed really like to try something like that, but really Im not worried because the universe will provide."

Very Big Lebowski-ish, I should have asked the lady if she wanted to be called "The Dude-ette" or "Dude-erella" or "Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Dude" if I wasnt feeling the whole brevity thing.


My buisness partner and I walked out of that meeting shaking our heads and laughing, to this day "The Universe Will Provide" is a phrase one of us will bust out to add some levity when there seems to be a huge pile of work before us.


Maybe Im just more sensitive than usual because Im feeling under a bit of a time crunch, but I have made a commitment to do a weekend of hand tool woodworking in front of the public the weekend of June 19th & 20th at the Olde English Faire near Peoria Illinois. and I have just started the Joinery Bench that I want to use to work from. but this last week and a half I have been able to get no where, My shop is too small to do glue ups in, necessary to pull off the laminated 2x constructed top, and we just finished up a week of nothing but rain and super cold weather, The weather improved this weekend, but I was schedueled to spend the whole weekend ata a nearby communities Syttende Mai (Norwegian Independence Day) Festival promoting Tribe Woden Thor, the Medieval Reenactment group I am a member of.  A lot of fun, but still no work was accomplished.

I can almost hear the clock ticking in my ear.

So if your are not the kind of person who will sit and wait for the universe to provide for you,  what do you do when you feel like the universe is working against you? (pic from the Hubble Telescope found on Wikipedia)

My answer is you knuckle down and work harder. I vow to continue to rail against the falling sands of time and accomplish everything I can. (I know, I know, a bit over the top) Well see if I can do it.A real challenge. . .  I accept.
Cheers!

Oldwolf