Driving me buggy!

"I have wheels, Houston, and I have running gear. What do I do next, over?" Houston obligingly answered, "bodywork, dummy! Out". Much obliged, Houston, you're quite right. So it's time to make a buggy body. The dimensions are no sweat. We have the cardboard model, remember? But the wood is another matter. We could cut rear end out of solid wood, but however we look at it we are going to need thin sheets about two mm thick. So we saw them out, and then plane them. This was actually the most time-consuming activity of bodyworking. I did not buy so much as a toothpick for this model.
Above, the rear end is being glued up in my homemade clamp. Woodworkers, regardless of scale, will all agree that you can never, never, have enough clamps. The one above is a bit large, but perfect for its purpose. Next we glue and pin on the front end. For pins I use thin wire, #22 I think, and drill the holes with a jeweler's drill.
There are quite a few clamps in operation. The toolmaker's clamp, along with the jeweler's drill and bits to suit, are available from Lee Valley, my favorite tool place.

Now comes the wheeling, so we put the wheels on the running gear.
I have dowel axle pins put in. There are also wire pegs sticking up. These are to match the springs. Amazingly, the buggy is attached to the running gear only by springs. So I had to make the springs. These were made out of an old bandsaw blade, annealed, teeth ground off, formed around a block, and wired together. For this wire, I use the kind of wire that holds lettuce together at the supermarket. Free with my salad. Strip off the paper and there you are. You can just see the springs in the next picture.
The springs, "elliptical" they are called, are being held in place by even smaller toolmaker's clamps. This whole business is all about clamps. I could not deliver the buggy that way! So I made a nut out of a piece of very thick wire, courtesy of Mat-Su Electrical co-op; they left about a foot of cable lying around after wiring up somebody; I pounced on it, cut off a little section, and laboriously drilled a Morse #70 hole through it; then I forced it on to the wire, and it acts as a nut. So then we attach the wheels permanently, with pins (they can turn); we carve out a seat, put on the rear deck, and ta-da (music, please, Houston! Thanks):
The Doctor Buggy is complete. Much remains to be done on this tableau. We need a horse, for instance, to draw the buggy. And the harness, and the shafts. We need a doctor to drive the buggy! We need a nurse and at least one patient. But this is a long-tem project. Making models is fun. I still have a lot to learn about wheels, for instance. But for the moment it will do very well. I wanted to put steel tires on the wheels, but had no suitable steel on hand.

Wheeling and dealing

Once again we have arrived at secret project time. These are projects that are destined as gifts for someone who may be reading this blog. It is a whole tableau, but of course I cannot tell you what it is. However, a piece of it has turned out to be quite the Odyssey, so I'll post it now. The thing is, I have to make four wagon wheels. (They are not "wagon" wheels but let that pass). Two of them are 50mm across and the other two are 40mm. Not very big.

I was misled by the ease which I made the spinning wheel. But that has six spokes and a very thin alder rim. Well, on with life. The spokes are made on the drawplate. You have seen drawplate before so I won't waste bandwidth reposting it. They are 2.5 mm diameter. The next job was to make the hubs of the wheels.
I took a piece of mahoganoid ex-table top and sawed out a rectangular piece. Then I planed it down to an octagon. The octagon is 8mm across flats. The first idea I had was to turn it down to 6mm on the Taig, easy enough; but getting the holes for the spokes in it was a nightmare. That's the left end of the piece above. Kept chipping out. No. No round hubs. We'll go with 8mm octagons! So I cobbled up the fixture in the picture. I call it the dividing fixture-future nanolathe. It will come up again. The centers are broken moto-tool drill bits. It is very easy to break a #80 Morse drill. With this fixture, holding by hand, I could drill out the spoke holes.
And there are the hub and spokes. The piece of paper is the beginning of an evolved jig. So the next step is the rims. Steam bent. At this point I figured out how to use the pressure cooker that I picked up at the thrift store for ten bucks. Amazing! Three minutes; you're done. Saves gas. Saves time. And it even cooks! So I took some pieces of lilac and planed them 2x5 mm. Tedious. Steam them, dig out every small clamp you own:
Notice that the jig has evolved from a piece of paper to a wheeling jig. I bored it out on the Taig (and it needs to be rebuilt) but it was much better than nothing. There are two pieces to these wheels, three for the small ones. It proved impossible to bend 2mm thick stuff into a circle 50mm diameter. Crack! Broken. Maybe alder next time.

The next job is to drill the thing. Mr Gerald Wingrove does this in his sleep, but I am a lot less skilled. Also his jigs are a lot more elaborate! I now see why. The jig allows me to mark out the positions of the spokes. Then I spot each hole with an awl (another broken #50 Morse drill bit) and drill on the drill press, after painstaking alignement in the drill press vise. Big wheels are built in segments called fellowes, but this might be even more work for me. The rims have to be scarfed at the joints; more painstaking work. However, at the end...
We have a wheel! Spokes need to be trimmed up, of course. Naturally, lessons have been learned. Mr Wingrve's elaborate jigs are just the thing. Save trouble in the long run. However, I am not sure that I will start turning out wheels en masse, but if I do I will certainly rethink the jigging.

The word "jig" is a curious one in English. For one thing, it is a dance; for another it is a way to fish; third is my usage -- a contraption to hold things put while you work on them, although the word fixture is also used for this. If it is a dance, the word probably comes from MF guige, as in the Jig Fugue by J.S. Bach. I am quite sure Johann S. did not have wood or metal working in mind when he wrote that.

A Crochet Hook

The title of this post looks completely bizarre. What, JRC taking up crocheting in his dotage? Not at all. But I do use crochet hooks in my weaving. When a stubborn warp thread is having a wild affair with its neighbor, and refuses to pull out as a good warp thread should, I reach for a crochet hook and assist it to conclude its amours. This is one prong of the fork in the road to crochet hooks. The other is a very interesting discussion on Bodger's forum on making crochet hooks (Beginner's corner, How thin can you go?). Person wanted to know how thin you could go on a lathe, because she makes crochet hooks by whittling. Well, said I, you get down to 2-3 mm -- but not on a lathe. When you turn real thin stuff it tends to whip. If you can support it with a steady-rest you are in better shape, but even steel will whip without tailstock support and/or a steady. My suggestion was to use a drawplate, which you have already met. Drawplate is now at version 2.0, because for my sheet-metal drawplate got reamed out by my lilac dowels. Lilac is iron-hard when it finally dries; never mind the poetic stuff about "perfumed with lilacs." Here is v2.0 drawplate:
It is a piece of steel about 4mm thick. The turned-up corner was an attempt at mini-forging a square corner; it didn't work (not with a propane torch) but it makes a useful handle! The rest is drilling. When you drill steel, by the way, you step drill. That means drilling a very small hole first. Then a slightly larger one, and so on until you are at the desired size. Failure to do this can ruin your drill bit (and your day). Tough stuff, steel; even unhardened "mild steel."

So today I meant to post on something else, but this afternoon I was tired of that and I said -- hey! Let's try a crochet hook!
So I had this piece of lilac branch. Cut it about 20cm long. Cut it into quarters with tiny froe, at left. Hammered it through the 4 mm hole in the drawplate. Then I took out my favorite crochet hook and measured it. Hmm, about 3.8 mm diameter at the thick part. Not bad, I'm at 4.0. Tapers... but perhaps that is too much detail. Anyway, I took my smallest knife (it is sitting in the still life above) and roughed it out. At the end I had to use my swiss files (beween froe and knife) to finish the hook. But I did it. Still a bit rough. More swiss file work needed, I am afraid, even tiny knife (or maybe it's me) can't quite do those 1 mm radius turns in the hook. But I am pleased with it. Not bad for a beginner, I think. It goes very well with my Navajo loom.

Oh, and speaking of whipping on a lathe. At the right is a homemade pin punch made out of a derelict screwdriver. The pin is 2.6 mm diameter. This is metal, so it was done on the Taig lathe. But due to a combination of the length of the piece and the configuration of the Taig, I couldn't use the tailstock. The 2.6 mm was as far as I could go before the whip got out of hand. The pressure of the turning tool causes the piece to bend (whip). This is steel! Wood would whip at twice that or so. I use Mr. Pin Punch to drive the wood out of the drawplate when I have hammered it through.

Music Tableau, Episode 2: the Organ

When I make my tableaux, one piece of the tableau takes on a life of its own, and winds up taking more time than the rest of it put together. In the case of the Crafts Tableau, for instance, the loom took forever. In our Music Tableau, the long path went right through the organ. The sketch in the last post shows an organist and a crude organ. OK, let's make an organ. The organ was a whole bunch of subassemblies glued together as we went. I began with a keyboard.
Keyboards on organs are called manuals. This manual was put rogether by cutting out individual keys and gluing together. This is the hard way to do a keyboard. The sharps were cut out of contrasting wood and glued on, with great difficulty and tweezers. The thing below the keyboard is the beginning of the pedal assembly, because all self-respecting organs have pedals. I did not do sharps for the pedals. Too much like work. I have pinned the pedals in, no glue yet, bacause pedals splay out and I needed to adjust all the keys later.

The next step was to make another manual. Again, all self-respecting organs have at least two manuals. This manual I made by cutting slots in a solid piece of birch. Much easier! Gluing on the sharps was just as difficult, though. Here we are gluing together the two manuals and the pedals to the sides of the case. There are tiny slots cut into the case to take the tenons on pedals and manuals. I refuse to use glue by itself, got to have a proper joint. But what is a pipe organ without pipes? So I started in on those.
Here is a rectangular piece of wood, the "windchest" it is called, that holds up the pipes. This rank of pipes is lilac, passed through my trusty drawplate. The pipes are "scaled," that is they get thinner as they get shorter. Drilling the holes is painful; you can't make them all the same size. As you can see, I blew the last hole on the right of the picture. I rescued it with plastic wood (oh, the shame, the horror of it all!) and kept on going. Then I made another rank of pipes, square-section. Quite legitimate, square sections. Many pipes are made that way in real organs.
I have also put on tiny pieces of lilac for stop knobs. Hmm, short pipes in front rank a bit askew. Well, "history of the piece." And so we come to the current state of the organ:
I like it. A bit rustic, as it should be. It is very small, and great detail at this scale is impossible, for me, anyway. Organ is 45 mm wide. And I see some of the sharps have become unglued. One more shot, taken an hour ago:
Case completed. Yes, it will definitely fit the Tyrolean aspect of the tableau. Now all I have to do is carve the organist!

The Music Tableu, Episode I

An alternate label for this post could be "work in progress." Anyway, it occured to me that a bunch of Tyrolean-style musicians would be a great addition to my tableaux. The woodsmen, the craftsmen -- they need entertainment. So let's have a band! Yuch-he! as they used to say --and possibly still do -- in the Tyrol. It means, more or less, "yippee!"

The construction of a tableu begins with a single sketch.
Hmm, a little dark at the bottom. Have to work on the lighting a bit more. But it gives you an idea. Sometimes I will make more sketches of what I want. This time I didn't. There is a fiddler, an accordionist, a bass player (morphed into a woman in the final version), a vocalist with guitar, and an organist. I threw the organist in because I love pipe organs.

In this tableau, I made the musical instruments first and then carved the figures to suit. Anton the fiddler you have seen (being held by the Nano Vise) so I'll skip him. The accordion player came next. How do you carve a figure? Well, a real sculptor would no doubt have catfits looking at what I do. But I begin with a piece of wood collected during summer for just this purpose. Usually a branch. Then I saw two more or less parallel flats in it.
This is heavy work, the miniature Ryoba saw won't hack it (literally), so I'm using a big Ryoba in rip mode. Then I draw the figure on one of the flats and start roughing out.
Here, I am using a miniature Japanese keyhole saw to cut away superflous wood. This saw cuts very quickly, but it is not too good at getting around sharp turns, so eventually we resort to the turning saw, covered in a previous post. It is slower but much better at turning corners.
Mr Turning saw has a narrow bandsaw blade in him. You might say, "why didn't you use the bandsaw?" I answer, it was -20C in my shop. Just try using a bandsaw at that temperature! For rough work, I think a bandsaw is legitimate. But not at twenty below. Eventually we get something that vaguely resembles an accordionist.
At this point we can begin carving. I didn't take pictures of this stage. We use gouges (my own home-made gouges) and the occasional chisel to do this. As the duck decoy carver said, "start with a block of wood and cut away anything that doesen't look like a duck." Very sound advice; woodcarving in few words. At some intermediate stage, accordionist looks like
Looks a little better. You can see where the accordion fits in. Some more work, and we get
Not finished yet. But now recognizable. I never found a carving book yet that would put in all the steps you go through. However, I did find a book on duck decoy carving that went step by step; most of my carving technique is derived from that book! So, mostly, I do it this way because I taught myself by trial and error. Now it is time for the finicky details, such as features, round corners off, and so on. Accordionist is, by the way, 75mm high. I didn't plan for such a number -- scale is done by eye.

And that is enough for one post. Next time we might look at the organ.

Crafts Tableau III: some details

This is to finish up some last details on the construction of Ye Crafts Tableau, as Olde Englyshe might put it. The spinning wheel was a fun piece of work.
The hardest part of the spinning wheel is the wheel itself. And here it is under construction, held up by the inevitable hemostat. All of it, as I recall, was alder wood. The hub was turned on the Taig. The spokes were then put into drilled holes in the hub. When I have nothing else to post, I will do a post on "the poor man's dividing engine", or how to divide a circle into equal parts with a minimum of equipment. The rim was planed down from a strip of alder, maybe willow -- I couldn't tell them apart then, I can now -- steamed, and bent around the spokes.
Shallow holes were drilled in the rim to take the spokes. The rest of it was easy:
Here you see Weaver poised at her spinning wheel. I wish I could get the bobbin to rotate. Too much to ask at this scale; the wheel is about 40mm long. But the belt does go around!

Next detail is Woodworker's tools. He had to have a saw and a plane, of course.
I happen to have a fretsaw with an impressive collection of blades. One of them was about 1mm wide, and it broke. It did very well for woodworker's saw blade. When it came down to pegging it in pace, I chickened out and used super-glue! It is a perfectly functional saw, about 20mm of blade. I put the tensioning rope ( read threads) on it later.

Woodworker's plane actually works. The blade was microforged from a finishing nail. Amazingly, the nail actually hardened. Off day at the nail factory, I suppose. So I tempered it and put an edge on it. Later I made a chisel for him, another nail. It does chisel! And finally I made a bench for woodworker. Can't do woodworking without a bench. I regret that I didn't put a vise on the bench. Well, "history of the piece," as my son says.

And there ends the saga of the crafts tableau. On to the Music Tableau!

Crafts Tableau II: the Nano Loom

The saga of the Crafts Tableau continues with the making of the loom. This thing took more time than all the rest of it put together. It all began with Roy Underhill's book, The Woodwright's Eclectic Workshop. In there are the plans for a full-size loom. So, for once, I had a plan. Usually I go by eye, and one or two sketches. Roy's stuff is all RGU, feet and inches. So, after some playing around, I decided on (as I recall) 1 foot = 1 cm. This is about 1:30. A big reduction. Roy suggests you use mill-sawn timber. Well, no nano-scale lumberyards are available here, so I set up my own and got timber from odd pieces of birch branch stock.
All this was ripped from branches with my trusty miniature Ryoba saw. The timbers are roughly 6mm square. They are sitting on my equally trusty bench hook, and do note the microforged holdfast in the middle of the hook. Very useful contraption and easy to forge. Just like full size.

Roy's loom is held together with mortise and tenon joints. I thought I could do no less, but the mortises are 2mm wide. Just try to buy a 2mm mortise chisel. (Actually, if you have a cooperative dentist, you might find that one of his or her dental scrapers will do the trick.) So I took time out and made such a chisel.
Above, the chisel sitting on the vise. My first mortise was really a dado (I have since learned to make real mortises) but hey, it's a pretty good fit! After a lot of this stuff, I had one side of the loom.
A bit blurry. I drilled very small holes and pushed "pins" made out of wire into the holes. I really couldn't peg them; at this scale pegs would be about 0.5mm and that's just too small for wood. I am using drills somewhere around #60 Morse, held in a jeweller's drill. Here's the exploded view, so to speak.

The pegs may look thick in this close-up. They are in fact tiny, about 0.5mm, the size of a thin pencil lead.

So the frame came together. Somewhere in here I decided I wanted a working loom. So I made heddles. A heddle is either string or steel with a loop or hole in the middle. It is attached to a frame, which lowers or raises a group of strings. Again, no way I could see to do this in wood, with tiny loops. So I did the heddle pins in steel with a wooden frame. I can find no pictures of this process. I wasn't sure it would work! But eventually...
... the heddle frames and heddles were finished. Here I have actually warped the loom. The warps are the long threads running through the heddles. The white threads all go on one frame, the red ones on the other. The threads are ordinary sewing thread; I had to use a needle to get them through the eyes. Excruciating! You can see that I have put on the beams. These are rollers -- the one in front rolls up the completed cloth; the one in back holds the thread.

At this point, spring and summer intervened. So I put the loom and friends up on the drying rack on top of my furnace. And one dark and stormy night I bumped into the rack and dumped the whole thing on the floor. The threads got tangled beyond repair. I decided to weave anyway. All I wanted was a few rows, to show the loom would work if I didn't have all those tangles. To do so, I had to make a loom elevator jig. I had to get under it to operate the heddles. One's fingers are not scaled 1:30. Indeed, they are not scalable. I could have also re-warped the whole thing. I decided not to. Unwise, perhaps; but it takes about two hours and a lot of cursing to do. Everything tangles up.
I raised the loom up on four branchwood posts. This wasn't enough. The loom tended to jump out of the posts. So I improvised a hold-down based on a spanish windlass. And here is loom in (almost) weave mode.
Here you see the hold-down and the warp threads being tied to the warp beam. With this, I actually wove three rows. Had to use a needle as a shuttle. But it did, in the end, work. In retrospect I should have tied one end of the warps directly to the cloth beam. That would have cut down on the amount of work I had to do, and also reduced the tangle factor. Wise after the event.

Maybe the project was too ambitious. Maybe not. You don't know what you can do until you really push, and not just in loom-making, either.

Pegging out

In a previous post (the Nacimiento) I complained about not being able to make very small pegs. Fortunately, my bedtime reading includes that marvellous classic, The Anatomy of Nelson's Ships by C. Nepean Longridge, fortunately published anew by the US Naval Institute. Dr Nepean was a past master at making very small things. He needed zillions of tiny pegs, 2mm and less, to secure the planking and decking of his "small" model of HMS Victory, and how did he do it? With a drawplate, of course.
As soon as I read Dr Nepean's wise words, I felt silly. Why, I use a drawplate myself in full size! I use much thicker metal, of course, and I still have to tackle drilling a 13mm hole through a big thick piece of metal for full-size to be really useful, but never mind. For this job, even a tin can would do as a plate. But I have a stiffer piece of sheet metal off some long-discarded appliance, and I used that. What you do is drill a series of successively smaller holes in it. I started at 4mm and went down by 0.5mm, all the way down to 1mm. I have a set of machinist's drills, 6mm to 1mm by tenths, which makes this easy. I think that to get down to 1mm I'd have to start at 2mm and go down by 0.2 or so -- a 1mm peg is skinny indeed.

So, what you do is what I am doing in the pic above. Start by knifing down so your future peg is a wee bit larger than your largest hole. Hammer it through. Pick it out of where it fell (these things have an amazing attraction for floors. Maybe that's how Newton thought up gravity; he kept on dropping things on the floor and had to crawl around looking for them. Don't give me that apple tree stuff). Then you hammer it down the next hole, and so on till you reach the desired diameter. The drawplate is amazingly effective. Good to 2mm easily on Lilac scraps. One mm is just a wee bit too small; I think I could go to 1.5 mm without trouble.

I have, by the way, a lilac tree that, like Darth Vader, wants to conquer the known universe in general and my house in particular. So this summer I restrained his expansionist tendencies. I pruned him. I kept the prunings and I'm glad I did. It is a very nice wood for things like pegs and canoe ribs (in miniature; see Tippecanoe posts). It bends well, can be shaved down to nothing. And the Finns use it for rake tines! A much underrated wood. And a much better thing to do with wood than to burn it.

The Nano-Xtable

We have now concluded the Christmas presents section of this program and can get back to our regularly scheduled projects.

I have my moto-tool (which is not a Dremel (tm)) mounted in a homemade stand. There are pictures of it all over the blog so I won't repeat. All well and good, but I need a support when I do grinding. I used wooden blocks for a while. They are difficult to clamp, so freehand is just about as good. But an idea came to me, inspired by David Wingrove's books on car modeling. I could make an X-Y table! Then I could do miniature milling with the moto-tool! An X-Y table is a flat piece (the table) that slides on ways in two directions: X and Y. It is turned by screws. So, depending on the accuracy of your srews, you can adjust the table any way you like. I have one, actually, but it is much too big for what I want. Now X-Y movement is what we engineers call "two degrees of freedom." So I thought I would warm up by making a table with but one degree of freedom, an X-table. And I did.
This is the table in its current incarnation, all 85mm of it. Every piece except the ways and bolts was found material from my summer walks. Probably fell off snow machines. Good. The table is a block of aluminum alloy with two grooves cut in it. Providentially the grooves are a perfect fit for the aluminum ways, bought at Lowe's for $1.59 or similiarly low price, and I still have lots left. As you turn the screw, the table moves majestically across the ways. The screw is another objet trouvé -- amazing what people throw away. The white supports are some very dense plastic. I hope it was crucial to the snow machine's operation, said he spitefully. So now on to building it. The first thing I had to do was cut the rabbet (or rebate, a much better word for it) in the plastic supports.
I am using Trusty Taig, the lathe. Thanks to Model Engineering magazine, I find that chucking the end mill right into the 3-jaw chuck gives very nice results. I don't have big enough collets to take 12mm end mills. The plastic, whatever it is, machines beautifully. And note my milling table. This is another find, a right-angle piece of ally alloy that I screwed right down into the primitive vise on the Taig milling attachment. (The Taig atachment is beautiful, but has no vise to speak of. They will sell you one for over fifty bucks. Pah.) I can then clamp to the milling table, as in the picture. I did not make a pass over the bottom of the piece. I will pay for that omission.

The next thing was the feed screw. This is the screw that carries the table (that JRC built). It took some time for me to figure out the obvious. Usually you turn a screw, it moves, right? But this is exactly the opposite. You do not want the screw to move. It has to stay in place. That way, the nut (attached to the table) will move instead. So how do we do this? By removing the thread from the screw where it goes through the support and then securing it with collars. First, a straight turning job to remove threads:
Actually, A groove would be enough, one at each end. But I took off the threads all the way, which leaves lots of room to put in collars. The big-leaguers use circlips, spring-steel circular clips which are guaranteed to reach earth orbit if you don't handle them correctly. Ping! No more circlip. Don't have any. So I cut collars from some of the stiff plastic that came with my brand-new moto-tool packing.
The collars are the white, more-or-less round things at the ends of the screw. Any shape would so, really. Cut them, drill them so's they fit the turned-down section of the screw; split them, force them in. It works! Note the nut attached to the table with JB-Weld, marvellous gunk that sticks to anything. So I can "weld" a steel nut to an aluminum block. Can't do that with your MiG outfit.

I keep looking at this thing and wondering if somewhow I can con it out of another degree of freedom. Then I'd have a true Nano XY-table. Maybe I can. We will see. Not much room left to maneuver. Can't foul the feed screw!

On the net, there is a wonderful article (or was) called "The Fonly Lathe," written by some model railroaders who needed a lathe. They adapted a moto-tool into a lathe. If you google on fonly lathe you should find it. I am slowly working my way up to a Fonly mill. Fonly lathe, of course, is short for "if only I had a lathe."

The ultimate table, Nirvana, is an XYZ-table. Three full degrees of freedom. Hey, maybe I could do X-Z... hmmm. Got to think about this.

The Nacimiento

A Nacimiento in Venezuela is what is called a creche in English. It is a representation of the Nativity scene. The mother, father, son, and of course the three Kings and as many animals as you can pack in there. In my younger days, Christmas trees were practically unknown, and Nacimientos were the order of the day. Some stores, I seem to remember the now-defunct Almacén Inglés, had enormous window displays including model railroads. Not an accurate historical representation, perhaps, but lots of fun to see. Nowadays, the ubiquitous Christmas Tree has largely supplanted them, much to the dismay of traditionalists.

Anyhow, I know someone who ought to like a Nacimiento. So a year ago now I set out to build one. The first order of business is to carve the figures.
The hardest one was the infant Jesus. This is because infants are very small! I could just suggest the features. There is one King, or Magus, in the group. His crown gave me fits. Again, small is difficult. Here's another King under construction:
The saw work is done, King has been roughed out. Now the knife work begins. Also gouges. Both knife and gouges were made by me; microforging is the label to search for.

Then we had to make the manger. Now this is the subject of another post. I passed it off as a model of next summer's woodshed, which is true. I would have given the show away for sure if I had labeled it for what it is! So the manger then looked like this:
I am in the process of thatching the roof, using real straw from the oats I grew last summer. A bit out of scale. The joints on the manger are all genuine (but unpegged) mortise and tenon; not a single fastener in the whole thing. I made the joints tight so as not to peg them. Making 1 mm pegs was just too difficult. And at last, the completed manger:
I have comandeered a slice of log for a base. I try to make some of these when I have the chain saw at hand. And at long last it is done.
Remains to put it in a box and ship it off. There is a donkey colt and a calf in there, but hard to see in the picture. The ass and the ox bit would take up too much real estate. Thus art compromises with reality.

The Nacimiento was well received. It was a long-running project, a year or so in the making. But worth the effort. I am a much better carver now than I was when I started it!

A Tableau in Progress

Looking through my labels, I see no entry under tableau. Most disconcerting. The closest is "miniatures". Now tableau is a French word, it can mean, for example, "blackboard" or "table", as in a spreadsheet. Dreaded words from the French Teacher in a Venezuelan bachillerato (high school): "Monsieur Rivero, au tableau!" Meaning I had to go up to the blackboard and perform. However, it can also mean a small-scale display, sort of a "diorama" so beloved by museums. I have posted on two of my tableaux (French plural used) before. But this is a work in progress and I am posting on it now, so you can see how it grows. This is the Crafts Tableau.
This is a tableau that is meant to represent various crafts. Going clockwise from right, we have Woodworker. He will eventually be planing a board on his brand-new workbench. The workbench was one of this week's project. It is made out of fireworks. Yes, fireworks. This fourth of July, the locals set off a vast amount of fireworks, which I abhor; they left the detritus scattered about. There were some very nice 6mm square pieces of wood left over and I took them. They made a nice frame. The top is birch, I must have cut it on the bandsaw because it is a couple mm thick. Much more work to be done; he needs some tools and especially a real plane.

Then comes Smith. His anvil is the sharp piece of an Alaska railroad spike, used to fasten track to sleepers (or ties). Hammer made from a piece of rod filed hexagonal. This was a lot of filing! If you want to work metal, you must learn to file. Eventually he will get tongs (to hold his work) and some work to pound on.

Finally we have Weaver. She is posed at the spinning wheel, because her loom is a major project all by itself. But no matter, the spinning wheel is awfully nice if I do say so myself. It was very difficult; I thought I could make it work, but alas, the scale is too small. I can't get the small axle to spin. The wheel was difficult, and here it is under construction:

The rim is a piece of alder which I steamed; humb is birch, and the spokes are one of my favorite materials, 3mm barbecue skewers from the grocery store.

This week I made the blade for the plane which Woodworker will use to plane his board. It was once a nail. It actually shaves wood. Amazing.

You may also see that Smith's hat is missing a top. Wood does not always accomodate art. We'll deal with that later.

Tippecanoe (no Tyler) II

Well, I have done enough miniature plane work (nonsense. I am rebuilding the rabbet plane now) so it is time to return to Tippecanoe, or Tip for short. My digression with planes was due to the fact that I had to plane the ribs of the canoe to 1x3 mm. This is kinda small. As it turned out, the only way to get the ribs in place is to steam them. The evolved procedure is (1) make a paper pattern. This will give you the right length. Otherwise you will have to take out and recut (and worse, put in) the silly things until they snap into place. Paper is much easier to do than strips of wood. (2) Rig a steamer. My steamer is a piece of plastic pipe with a wire-mesh plug (keep the strips out of the water) stuck into my teakettle. Works. (3) Extract the strip from the steamer. Very hot. Try to pre-bend it. (4) With tweezers and a hemostat get the rib placed. This is an exercise in patience. Being springy it loves to spring out; start all over. (5) Be high-tech. Anchor it with super glue. Forget regular glue. Takes too long to dry.
Above, Tip's ribs are in place. I have made two thwarts -- all canoes have thwarts, and some people sit on them, but long ago I learned to kneel to paddle a canoe. After that, it is all needlework. I made a curved needle for the purpose; I heated it and bent it (if you do that cold, it will break!). So I had a U-shaped needle. Don't need it amidships, but you sure do at bow and stern. After that, it's all stitching. I finally got smart and anchored the stiches with superglue. Tip has about a dollar's worth of superglue in him.
There he is, complete with paddle. The tools of the trade lie about. You can just see the curved needle stuck in the spool of thread.

I was trying to learn how a birchbark canoe is put together and I learned a good deal. Tip's bottom is far from flat. I did not use a bottom former, so Tip would float but not be too stable. The next canoe model will try to account for this, bottom former and all. But it's all good fun, except when your rib snaps out after you have put it in. I wonder how you say %^&_%** in Ojibway?

My troubles are not unique. Dr. C. Nepean Longridge built a 1/4 scale model of the Victory, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar (preserved at Portsmouth UK). He wrote a book on it, The Anatomy of Nelson's Ships, which I have (q.g.). It took him 12,000 hours or so. The model is some 7 ft long; over 2 meters. And even on such a monster, he had a lot of troubles! The book is wonderful, jam-packed with tips and tricks, and withal very modest. The trouble is that our fingers are not to scale!

And as a final note on the marvels of modern marketing, hemostats (made in Pakistan) are available at Wal-Mart. Yes, Wal-Mart. You have to go to the fishing section, where you find them sold at $3.50, labeled "fly-tying pliers." Sure. I have to tie some flies this winter too. Hemostats will come in very handy.

Miniatures again

Astronomically, winter is still some ways away. But this is Alaska. Early morning temperatures below freezing. Time to move indoors and do winter projects. It is time to work on Christmas presents. Unfortunately I cannot mention the subject in full, because the recipient is all too likely to be reading this. So let us say that it is a miniature of my future woodshed, which happens to be true! It is not the done thing to tell lies on a blog. The woodshed is held together by mortise-and tenon joints. So after some trial and error, I decided I needed a new mortising chisel.
So off to the microforge, and out came a 3.5mm chisel, seen stuck into a future mortise. The calipers at the left are 80mm long, to give you the scale. The chisel turned out at 3.7mm but I do not mind this; too loose is much better than too narrow!

I am using round pieces of wood for the woodshed. I could square them. That is a lot of work. The "logs" are prunings from my lilac tree (no bush, that one; it is as tall as the house!) and from ditto Japanese Maple. The lilac has a nasty pith; Japanese Maple is better. But one's prunings are what they are; selection is limited. Anyway, it is useful to have a centerline on the "logs" and thereby hangs a tale. In real life, you take a chalk line or a Japanese india ink line and snap it. I spent a whole morning trying to duplicate this system. I used sewing thread for a line, a pin to anchor the works, and tried inking and snapping. Alas, my ink is alcohol-based and dries much too fast. Plus snapping -- well, your fingers are not to scale. Very difficult to snap a 10-cm thread. In the end, I went to water color on the thread, and rubbed the thread with a chisel instead of snapping.
You can just see the thread, you can easily see the brush I used to color the line, and the line down the log. Now, I can line my tenons up. If you don't have a reference line it is all to easy to get the tenons out of line. Then they don't fit the mortises, or if they do, the thing ain't coplanar. The shed consists of two "sides" which are called bents in the trade. They will be tied together by two beams. I have to think as to how I will do this.

I microforged a couple of holdfasts, seen above, and cobbled up supports for the log from a split birch twig. I have to say that microforging is wondeful. Need a tool? Make it! Harder, of course, at full scale.