marking gauge

this is another post about adding important elements to my toolbox (with the secondary goal of getting some much needed practice). so be warned.

it's essential as a woodworker to be able to mark lines repeatedly and accurately. all my life, i have accomplished this with a carpenter's square and a sharp scribe or pencil. and that's perfect for a lot of applications, except for when it's not. the main advantages of a gauge are that it cuts the wood fibers so that a cleaner cut can be made and that it can be used with one hand, thus speeding things up considerably. also, it's the kind of tool that all the old woodworkers, both european and japanese, would surely have. and when have a bunch of dead craftsmen lead you wrong?

i started with the same base woods as i used for the mallet- mostly because they are available, but also because now my tools match and that's kinda cool. after cutting the arm piece, i punched a mortise through the end where the blade will be set later. (the quality of cut made by the mortising machine is surely lacking but it is a hell of a lot quicker than cutting a mortise by hand.) then i cut a rabbet for the brass wear plate. for the body of the gauge, i hand cut a big ol' mortise which took quite a while as i wanted a tight fit that still allowed the arm to slide easily. here's a test fit:

next, i drilled a hole for the set screw and tapped it using a standard metal tap. i've heard that using a tap can leave a bad thread in wood and that a shop made tool is the way to go but i've never had a problem using this guy in hardwoods:

then it was just assembly. screw in place:

and the cutter that i ground from a piece of tool steel (i have since decided should be facing the other way, but that's easy enough to fix when it's held in with a wedge):

and there you have it.

i've already found some flaws with my design, mostly regarding the size of the pieces, but i will spend some time with it, and once i really know what i want from a marking gauge, i'll give it another shot.

bailey #5

using a good hand plane is a wonderful experience. a sharp, well tuned plane will lift a continuous wood shaving thinner than a sheet of paper with much less effort than you would expect. it will leave a near mirror surface without dust and with only a low, satisfying "purr" to be heard. a dull plane, on the other hand, takes all your effort and turns it into a ruined board so that you can use more effort with a loud and dusty sander to get what is still an inferior product. maybe that's why a good plane can run upwards of 200 smackers.

lucky for us, they've been making good planes for a long time and old ones can be found all over the place. a good friend of mine gave me his grandfather's #5 stanley bailey plane. it was in pretty reasonable shape when i got it- a little rusty, some paint globs on the handle, a chipped blade- but no cracks in the casting or anything like that.

 
a plane like this is definitely worth the repair effort. i used an article in fine woodworking #216 as a guide and now have a beautiful, functional, long lasting tool.

after removing as much rust as i could with naval jelly and then washing all the parts in alcohol to remove any remaining grime and moisture, i got to work on the blade:

this was the original condition. there is at least one big chip in the blade and the cutting edge has been rounded from sharpening. i ground down the bevel to get past the chip:

after some grinding, the chip is still visible on the right side. after a little more grinding, i set to work on the 1000 grit water stone:

the honing jig locked on to the plane iron was a great and rather inexpensive purchase. the wheel on the back keeps the blade at the correct (25 degree) angle. i spent way too much time working the blade down before deciding to take a step back and clean up the body of the blade on fine (320 then 600 grit) sandpaper. i then restarted the sharpening process on a 600 grit oil stone. after stepping back up to the 1000 grit water stone and finally the 3000 grit water stone, the blade was in pretty good shape:

i could have gone farther and gotten a completely flat, mirror finish. but i'm lazy and i gave up once i got to a rather flat, somewhat reflective finish. i then cleaned up the chip breaker on some sandpaper. before:

after:

the plane body was still quite flat, so i just lapped it over some fine sandpaper to take down a few high spots and remove some bits of paint. then i gave everything a light coat of camellia oil to prevent rust, tuned it up, and made some test cuts:

that's good enough for me!

chisel mallet

i've been working on building my tool kit lately- mostly because i want to be able to transition smoothly from my father's shop to my own work space when the time is right (i'm really hoping the time will be right around mid-may. but we'll see.) i'm also trying to get back to a heavier and more continuous project-load in all areas (both art and various crafts) as well as build and hone my somewhat rusty and limited skills. thus, i have started assigning myself little workshop projects. the first of these projects was a small chisel mallet.

i started with a little chunk of some very hard, heavy, tight grained wood that i scavenged from a friend's scrap pile. i bet it is teak, as he is a sailor, though it could be one of many exotic hardwoods that i don't have experience with (i try to stick to more local stuff when i buy material) (ed: he says it is probably ipe). for the handle i found a scrap of maple.

i cut a piece from the block for the mallet head and then cut a flared through-mortise by drilling out the excess and then bringing the walls to relative flatness with a bench chisel. the front and back of the mortise flare about an eighth of an inch from bottom to top- this will be important later. i cut the tenon on the handle on the router table and then cleaned up the shoulders with a chisel:

then the handle got a quick spin on the lathe and a couple of notches in the tenon:

then i mounted the head and drove wedges into the notches to lock the pieces together (remember that flare i mentioned earlier- that's so the tenon will have room to spread).

see-

finally, i cut the wedges flush with the tenon, rounded the bottom of the handle with the stationary disk sander and carved a maker's mark into the head:

in the end, it was a good little project. i really do need practice cutting clean mortises (did you see the tear-out in the second to last picture? i sure did) and nice, tight shoulders, and i haven't done much spindle work on the lathe. oh, and i got a nice little hammer out of it- just the right weight for controlled joinery cuts.

preserved lemons

i mentioned preserved lemons yesterday, with the thought that i had mentioned them before. but i don't think i have. "so what are they and why should i care, you jerk?" you wonder aloud to yourself. well, first off, rude. but also, i'll tell you:


they are lemons, cut up, rolled in kosher salt, sprinkled with more kosher salt and unceremoniously crammed into a jar.

the cramming comes next.

when we first heard of them, via food in jars, i believe, but also an indian cookbook and maybe a few other places, i was not terribly enthusiastic. "what ever will we put them on?" i asked. "i bet they'll be hella nasty" i opined. but my lady friend, sarah, told me to shut up and cram lemons and i sure am glad she did.

you see, after the lemons have been crammed, you just give them a little shake every day until all the salt is dissolved and the liquid has covered the fruit (if it doesn't, add a bit more lemon juice) and then you just kind of forget about them for a month or so (seeing as the mix is super salty acid, there isn't really any fear of spoilage). by that point, the juice has thickened to a briny syrup and the rinds have become tender. the flavor is powerful- something like a savory lemon candy.

i now find myself chopping up a piece and incorporating it into salad dressing or stirring it into a soup that just needs that last little something and sarah just puts them in everything, as far as i can tell. we have yet to use them in anything moroccan, which seems to be the point of origin for this idea, or with meat (as i don't eat the stuff) but i've heard they go great with both.

marmalade

after a year of preserves projects, my lady friend got me a great jamming book for christmas- the blue chair jam cookbook by rachel saunders. all the recipes are very thorough and seem to stem from a desire for very consistent and delicious results. so, for our first test drive, we bastardized her delicately crafted page mandarin marmalade recipe and made it with blood oranges instead.

according to ms. saunders (and i thoroughly misquote and make things up here), you have to sneak up on citrus fruits, lull them into a false sense of security and then trick them into being marmalade in a process that takes three days. after an overnight soak in water, the fruit is cooked down...

you can't tell, but there are two pots going here. this one has quartered fruit that will be strained out on day three, the other has the pretty little slices of fruit that will be part of the finished product.

on day three the reserved syrup from one pot is combined with the slices from the other, a bunch of (in this case) lemon juice and a whole lot of sugar. then it is back to the stove...

but only to get the marmalade up to the temperature needed for the jelly to set.

we had extra assistants for this project who kept us on top of the set testing process which involved frozen spoons...

 

this is how you know it's done.

we ended up with around 10 jars of product (half for our wonderful assistants) and, since there were some extra fruit, a new jar of preserved lemons...

now, to be honest, i don't love marmalade. the bitterness doesn't really do it for me. but, that being said, this stuff is pretty dang good.

one sock

i bought the yarn and needles and a pattern to knit a pair of socks sometime in the early fall and promptly started to knit.

and then i found out that #2 double pointed needles suck and big ol' hands make for a terrible sock knitting experience.

and then i learned that i had been knitting wrong all this time!

so i re-learned how to knit (i had been putting some weird extra twist in each stitch that was really ruining my cable work on that orange scarf and lead to me restarting that project as well). and then i learned to knit the magic loop (this tutorial looks pretty good, but there are tons of them on google). and then, after christmas, i re-started my sock.

the heel is blue, too.

it was slow going for a while as i worked through the once-knit (and thus all twisted and bad) yarn but things really picked up after that. i also used the countless rows of straight knit stitches to work on my technique. i can now form a stitch with fewer movements of my wrists and without dropping the yarn between stitches. the drawing below is the wrapping method that works best for me although i think i would drop the pinky wrap for a heavier weight yarn. unfortunately, i haven't gotten purls down nearly as well.

i went to art school.

the pattern also expanded my repertoire of stitches as rectangular scarves don't require reductions or the picking up of stitches. (i also got a lot of practice saving dropped stitches with a crochet hook.) huzzah learning experiences!

now all i have to do is make another one, the exact same way.