Clocking with plywood

Long ago now, while I was in Juneau, I bought a book by John Wilding, FBHI entitled The Construction of a Wooden Clock. You may google on it. It seems like an auspicious project for the new year. I really want to make a clock; I had the book. It seemed like a nice way to break into the business. It came with full-size templates for absolutely everything. You can, in fact, make the thing out of plywood. You do not even need power tools. You can cut everything out with a coping saw, even. But, after some experience, I would not advise it. There is awful lot of cutting to do, and for once power tools are indicated. Either a bandsaw or a scroll saw or even both,  and even then it is a bit of a via crucis.

So here goes. There are many useful videos on YouTube that will amplify my directions. Look under "wooden clock". The general order of work is this: first, you make copies of the plans that came with the book. Absolutely necessary. If you make a mistake you have not only ruined your piece, you cannot get back to it. Lots of places these days will make copies for you, even in Alaska.

So far I am following Mr Wilding's directions to the letter. He has made more clocks, as we used to say in the Air Force, than I have passed telephone poles. So you find a suitable sheet of plywood. Here I am limited to what I can find at Home Depot/Lowes. We will see how it works out. Then you glue the templates on to the plywood with contact spray. Then you cut the stuff out on the bandsaw. I have no scroll saw.

I began with the plates. These are the frame of the clock. Above, fresh off the bandsaw. This is the front plate. The back plate is identical, but has no holes cut in it. The purpose of the holes is to display the works. The clock would work just as well without them. But if you're building a clock, might as well watch all the gears go round. So we cut the holes in the front plate.

I  used a circle cuttter on the drill press and it was awful. We will either figure out how to fix it or re-make the front plate. Next we smooth
 things with our faithful Dremel.

 Now we have something resembling a front plate. Do the same thing for the back plate. Now we have the pillars to make. This is lathe work. I used dowels and the Taig lathe.
 
This is relatively simple work. The key points are that the plates have a separation of 135mm and that must be exact. Second, the ends of the pillars must fit through a half-inch (say 12mm) hole in the plates. I decorated the pillars a bit by turning a groove in them. I may get around to making them fancy later.

Next part, and by far the hardest, is to cut the gears. Now clockmakers call these things "wheels" and not gears. So let us use clockspeak. We cut these wheels out on the bandsaw.

This is mind-bending work. It is very finicky. If you did not know what a bandsaw can do, by the end of this clock you will be a bandsaw expert. Mr Wilding gives you very clear instructions on how to do it. Also see numerous YouTube videos. At the end of the day, we have a pile of wheels.

As you can see, I have a lot of wheels done and two to go. The hard part is the teeth, of course. One slip and you have lost the wheel. Or the pinion as the case may be. A "pinion" is a small-radius gear, and that is clockspeak too.

So at this point I have all done but two wheels. Then I have to "cross out" the main wheels. That is clockspeak again, meaning I have to saw out all but the spokes of the wheels. Then I have to sand them. And there is much more, but it will have to wait.

However I am quite pleased with progress so far. I find this bandsaw business quite tedious. But it works. Stay, as they say in the TV biz, tuned.

A new poppet regime

Well, I have a new camera -- much like the old one, only more expensive -- so here are the new poppets for the lathe, made this weekend.
The poppets, which replace the old 2x4 items, were made from a section of birch log, split in half, and smoothed out on the good old shaving horse. Then they were sawed to shape, and I used the bandsaw for that purpose; finally shaved again to fit the bed. The headstock is so tight it requires no wedging; the tailstock is wedged in place. I now have a screw-in tightener on the tailstock (or tail puppet). It is a piece of threaded rod from the hardware store. Needs to be cut down, but it works as is. The poppets put the center height over 15cm. or 6" if you must.

All this required making a new tool rest. I am experimenting with the height of the rest. I have always found it works better a bit below center height. I am using a set of ordinary carpenter's gouges as turning tools. They work fine, but do need honing.

A pole lathe is a lot like a treadmill, only you have something to show for the effort at the end of the workout! So voila (or is that voici?) pole lathe 1.1.

A sundial at work

I'm still in sundial mode. I recently completed an adjustable equatorial. Now that we are approaching the vernal equinox, the sun actually stays up for a reasonable time; it comes through my south-facing kitchen window at about 12 noon on that monstrous contrivance called "Daylight Savings Time," which saves no daylight, much less energy. However everyone is convinced that it does (save energy). They must have been watching TV. I have no TV, thus allowing me to make more sundials. Pardon the rant. Anyway, here is the equatorial sundial doing its thing:
The sundial is set -- as best I can by protractor -- to my latitude, 61deg 47m. Or sixty-two deg. give or take. The post in the center is called a stylus; or style; sometimes a gnomon. It is also the polar axis -- which is parallel to the earth's axis of rotation -- and the shadow gives the solar time. [I am actually lying over the polar axis bit. This is a sundial, not a telescope. But I don't want to complicate matters just now.] Not the zone time; although I suppose you could rotate the dial to give you AKST or whatever. I like equatorials because the marking-out is trivial: 15 deg for each hour. With my newly made burin, I actually did the obligatory Latin motto on this sundial: tempus fugit, or "time flies."

It is hard for us moderns to believe, but in the pre-industrial revolution world, watches were for the very, very, rich. Poorer folk used pocket sundials to tell time. Some even came with a built-in magnetic compass to help you find south. The stylus, however, must point to true south, not mag south. In Willow the magnetic compass points 20 deg and a bit east of true north, towards Hudson bay in Canada, a substantial magnetic declination, as this offset is called. Having consulted the U.S. Naval Observatory, however, I know when the sun will cross the meridian and I find true south that way. See previous sundial post.

I may add that sundials use no batteries, deplete no resources, are fun to make, and, provided that you orient them properly, actually tell time. But if it's cloudy, then you will see why watchmakers made their fortune!

Fun in the sun-dials

I never know where my reading will take me. I am re-reading Lybian Sands, a book by Brigadier R.A. Bagnold, OBE who was also a Fellow of the Royal Society and author of just about the only book on sand dunes that there is: The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, reprinted (fortunately) by Dover and easily available. Also be warned that it is very technical. Bagnold was a sapper, as the British say; a military engineer. He was bitten by the bug of desert exploration by automobile in the 1920s-1930s. In the process he invented (or reinvented) the sun compass, a device that substitutes for a magnetic compass, which is of little use in a steel automobile. There are all kinds of branches to this story, but my first thought was "oooh, I gotta build one!" It is, after all, a 360 degree protractor with a big needle in the middle. Yes, but the sun's azimuth changes during the day. so you have to adjust for that. And so I came to sundials (pushed, I may add, by an article in my favorite magazine, Model Engineer, which you may Google).

Sundials are fascinating beasts. For a long time, they were the poor (and middle class) man's only way of telling time. I have found a lot of information on the web. Not all (if any) of it is correct and complete. A lot of it is "buy our sundial" or "download our unchecked software and print out a sundial" type stuff. There are two sites which are commendable: one in the UK, the British Sundial Society,
and the other a NASA link. Now a sundial is just a disk or square with marks on it to tell you what time the sun thinks it is, so where do you put the marks?

Unfortunately, there is complete disagreement by these authorities on how you mark up a simple horizontal sundial. I have now made several sundials; they are not exactly difficult:
You could make them out of plastic, cardboard, or almost anything. Almost needless to say, I made them out of wood. The one on the left is called an equatorial sundial. when properly oriented, its axis should be parallel to the polar axis. This was inspired by the British Sundial (BSS) people. The way their project is stated, it won't work unless the rectangle is transparent. Very hard to find transparent wood, so I had to reverse it a lot. The net of it is that when the pointer is exactly facing true south, it will show solar time. There is no question about the marks: one hour is 15 degrees protractor-wise.

The other dials are all horizontal. They differ in the markings, which correspond to the various authorities. I think the authorities all all wrong. I happen to have a copy of Astronomical Algorithms, by Jan Meeus, unfortunately out of print but available used. Tomorrow's project is to make a sundial per Meeus. By the way, the little triangular piece, called a stylus by Meeus and a style by others, needs to be in proportion to the sundial. The equatorial sundial is about 14 cm across; the others are pieces of a branch and about 6 cm across.

I have found out a great deal about sundials in this week. All this will come in very handy when I build a real sun compass!

An indoor bench

I own five stationary power tools. A baby drill press, a wet grinder, a Taig minilathe, a jigsaw and a bandsaw. The bandsaw lives in the shop, and is unusable during the winter; the other three live inside the house. The jigsaw sits on the kitchen table. Until recently, they sat on Workmates -- the greatest UK invention since the steam engine. But that meant that when I had to use the Workmates, the tools had to go on the floor. Besides, the lathe bench blocked my refrigerator door. So it's time to build a new bench. By careful measurement, I contrived to guild a bench that would just hold all-but-the-jigsaw. It is also an exercise in drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints. I have made many mortise-tenon joints, but always tight fits, secured with glue. Not until I read Peter Folansbee's blog did I realize how these joints really work. They are made for a loose fit. The hole in the tenon is offset towards the shoulder of the mortise. You drive a peg through it, and it pulls the tenon into the mortise. It is bomb-proof. Peter's blog (and website) have some pictures of the process, and see John Alexander's green woodworking website.

Anyway, off we went. I should have taken more pictures. Here's the bench under construction:Observe the Workmate, holding a piece of wood so I can cut the tenon. I don't show the floor, but it looks like chaos. All the wood is scrap, found lying around. I wanted a top made out of 2x6 but couldn't find them in the snow. Maybe next spring... so I used plywood to make the top. The result is
Cost USD 0.00. Now let's put some power tools in their place:
Much nicer. And I have two freed-up workmates, sitting on the porch ready for action. And I can now open the refrigerator door all the way! Long live drawbored joints. It is much easier to make a loose joint than a tight one.

The Case of the Rotating Porch, part I

The house on Chalupy Acres came with a cantilevered porch, as you can see in the following photo.
As you may see, there is no support under the porch. That is the meaning of "cantilever," although in this case there is no counter-lever, the back support is attached to a 2x4 nailed to the wall of the house. This is fine in summer, but in winter we must consider snow loads. The effect of a load on the roof is to cause the cantilever to rotate around its support. The load is taken, in my case, by three (3) nails per rafter pounded into some 2x4 pieces. Not enough, as I found out last winter. So the porch pulled out about 10cm of nails and was hanging, as it were, from a thread. This had to be fixed, and it was my big summer project. The first step was to prop up the porch by temporary supports -- some 4x4 stuff I had hanging about, plus some boards as a bottom support.

Then it was time to think about what to do next. There are two problems: (1) the cantilever design is inadequate for a real snow load and (2) the scheme adopted to hold the rafters to the plate (the topmost beam in the house) was totally inadequate.
The previous inhabitants must have spent a great deal of effort shoveling snow off the porch, or (more likely) did not encounter extended snow loads. Or both.

So the solution is twofold: (1) make some decent brackets to tie the rafters to the plate and (2) put some permanent supports under the porch. Bye-bye, cantilever.

So this post deals with brackets. At the hardware store I got some 3/8" (about 8mm) steel strap, and proceeded to forge L-shaped brackets -- perhaps "hot-bending" is a better word -- but not only must the brackets be L-shaped, the short arm of the L has to be twisted to match the pitch of the roof. Then holes for lag bolts must be drilled. The strap cost $10 and the lag bolts about the same, so I am $20 in the hole. However, compared to what a contractor would charge this is chump change.

Now, bending an 8mm piece of steel may sound simple, but it is not. Just try it. I rigged an improvised forge for the purpose:
At the left you can see the Dragon Lady, another Chalupy Icon. This is a propane torch connected to a midsize propane tank -- 10 Kg (20 lb) of propane. I use the Dragon Lady for a great many purposes: melting ice in the winter, flaming weeds, starting charcoal fires, starting the garbage-burning fires, forging... a useful Lady she is. Here she is stoking the oven made of firebrick and an abandoned barbecue . The pliers substitute for blacksmith tongs. On top of the oven, some brackets finished up. In essence, heat bracket (drilled) to red-hot; then stick it in a vise and start twisting. Mistakes are not fatal: heat it up and do it over.

And here is a bracket (several, in fact) in place:

Once I had the brackets, I thought I could crank the rafters back to touch the plate with a socket wrench. Ha! Not a chance. After several false starts, I went to the hardware store, bought two eyebolts (horrors, another $5), drilled some holes, screwed in the eyebolts, and employed the come-along, a device essential to bush Alaska, AKA a hand (ratcheted) winch. You see above the come-along pulling the rafter back to the plate. Your come-along can also extract your car from a snow drift, move a log when you can't get the tractor in there, and any time a heavy object can be pulled into place. It was a little hairy operating the come-along from a ladder; after the tension gets up it tends to pull you off the ladder. Most of the time, the ladder was unusable without extra support:

So we lost quite a lot of time nailing up ladder supports. But at last we had the rafters come-alonged to the plate and our labouriously twisted brackets in place, and lag-bolted to the plate and rafter.

The next installment is getting suports under the porch.

A bullrake

In the old days, you cut your hay with a scythe. The scythe is a marvellous tool. See, for instance, the videos and pictures on :: Scythe Supply :: Scythe blades, snaths, equipment.
I have no hay to cut, but I do have a great deal of brush. So, after much soul-searching I bought a scythe with a brush blade on it (45 cm long) from the above link. Their kit comes with scythe blade, custom-fit European-style handle, a peening kit (anvil and dies, you supply the hammer), instructions, and The Scythe Book by David Tresemer and Peter Vido. This was definitely a Good Idea (tm). Oh, yes, a whetstone and a waterproof sheath (called a Steinfass in Drew Langsner's book Handmade). The stone is a wet stone, so your sheath must be waterproof.

It takes a bit of doing to master the thing, and I do not consider myself an expert scytheperson. See some of the videos that are lined form ScytheSupply.com, above.
But I will say this: I have tried everything to remove brush, short of a brush hog (USD 5000, more or less) mounted on a tractor. I have tried machetes, or what passes for a machete in this country. They are not real machetes, they are long flat knives with no backhook. After half an hour my back aches. I have tried the motorized trimmers with Lexan blades. After half an hour I feel like a milkshake. They vibrate, make an awful racket, and run out of gas all too soon. And one big sapling breaks the blade. A lawn mower is totally outclassed by the Alaska brush, a mixture of fireweed, small birches, small aspen, and the never-ending alder. And you have to push the blasted thing. No way.

With a scythe, I can go for two hours and feel tired but not exhausted. So far so good, but what's this bullrake thing? Well, the scythe piles the brush up in neat windrows. Now you have to do something with the windrows. For this we use a bullrake.


A bullrake is just a very large rake. This one was made up out of bits and pieces of logs I had lying around, shaved on the shaving horse, of course, and whacked into holes drilled into the crosspiece. I have a double handle on this thing, because it is heavy; I also left lots of room on the tines on top because I thought it would behave like a garden leaf rake. It didn't.

What it does instead is to roll the brush windrows up onto cylinders. So I don't need the tines on top; I will cut them off. Sometime. So now I had these long tubes of "straw." What to do with them? Why, build a compost pile, of course!
According to Eliot Coleman, straw is the best material for a compost heap, because it decomposes eventually and all the air space promotes circulation, and I think this is pure serendipity.

The bullrake is another example of a tool that has been (almost) lost. In the old days you would have had many of them, for your crew to get in the hay. Nowadays nobody knows what a bullrake is, because hay is made with giant tractors and equally gigantic equipment that produces vast amounts of low-quality hay. It is low quality because it is not allowed to dry properly ("tedded" is the word). It is not allowed to dry properly because the machinery doesn't always work if you do. The more old-fashioned your equipment, the better the hay.

In my case I'm after brush clearing, but it's nice to get straw for free. Oh, yes, and you can use your bull rake to gather your grains, such as oats, after you harvest them with your scythe. Plans for the future. My plans (unlike Darth Spader's) are not yet complete.