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.

Tiny Tools

Ah, winter is here. Your friendly mercury, or its digital equivalent, hit -22C today. So we go skiing, but that leaves a lot of hours in the day. So this sourdough makes, as you are well aware, miniatures. But making miniatures requires miniature tools. I have some I have bought; I could not survive without my miniature Japanese saws from Lee Valley. Mainly I have learned to make them. I have posted on miniature planes before, but here's a hitherto-unposted bunch.
You will recognize, in the northwest and southeast corners, the tiny planes. New fellows, on the SW-NE diagonal, are the try square, used of course to square things up. The blade is sheet metal, and the top needs some more filing to get it truly square, but it is already useful. Above him is a very small froe, used to split, for example, the ribs on Tip the canoe. The yellow thing is a 45 degree triangle, useful for the tiny planes, which are all bedded at 45 deg. Above that, an awl made from a broken needle (it broke while sewing up Tip Canoe, which prompted me to rebend a needle). Useful for clearing out Morse #50 drill holes, for instance. And above that, my pièce de résistance, the tiny clamp. It is made on the pattern of a machinist's clamp. The jaws are wood -- same wood as the plow plane in the SE corner. I found out that I could tap it as if it were steel! I went to our Willow hardware store and found some longish 6-32 screws; the nice circular handles are made on the Taig lathe out of hardware store rod. I drilled the the handles on the Taig with a tailstock drill, so they are concentric with the cylinder. Tapping small holes is a nail-biting exercise. Taps are very hard. Have to be; they are cutting steel most of the time. That's like glass -- very hard, but shatters on impact. So it is very easy to break a tap. The smaller the tap, the easier it is to break. But I tapped the handles. Now I need to find my thread locker goop so I can lock the handles to the screws (which are hardware store, beheaded). And this brings up al kinds of possibilities; I could use aluminum instead of wood to make clamps, for instance. We will see. It is fun to make a tool; you feel independent. But I'd love a micro bandsaw to resaw my planes. Proxxon makes one, but alas, it is very expensive.

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.

Plow Plane, 0.2

In the last episode, we had plow plane v0.0 complete with flaws. Must make a new one. Now a plane, full-size or miniature -- I should say, a wooden plane -- is a block of wood with a peculiar hole in the middle. One side (back) is a ramp, at a precise angle, that supports the blade; the bed as it is called. The front side is another ramp, at a different angle. There are two ways (that I know about) to cut these holes. One is to drill, by hand or by press, some pilot holes at the correct angles. (The correct angle depends on what kind of plane it is. Typically the back ramp is 45 deg.). Then you hollow out the hole, with chisel or, better, a planemaker's float, which is a cross between a rasp and a chisel. The other way, popularized by the late and great James Krenov, cabinetmaker extraordinary, is to take a block of wood, saw it into three pieces longwise (rip), cut the middle piece to shape -- a simple task -- and glue it all back together again.

So I decided to do it the Krenov way. The rabbet plane of the previous post was done the first way; it was very difficult! I had, of course, no planemaker's floats. Fortunately, courtesy of my daughter, I have an old table. I cannot say what kind of wood it is, but it looks very much like some relative of mahogany, stained walnut. It's nice wood. First job is to cut the basic block to size.
Sorry about the background. I've put newspaper down on my all-purpose dining, crafts, and arts table. But there's the block. How big? Interesting. What I did was measure Mr. Liu Ban, introduced in the last post. Then I played around with my old slide rule until I got a decent scale. (How old-fashioned! A slide rule! But it is much more convenient than a calculator. You can move the cursor around until you get a nice set of numbers far, far faster than punching numbers into a calculator.) The scale turned out to be 0.4; so the new plow is 66 mm long. All other numbers are nice whole mm. You can see that the block has been marked out into three parts. The middle is where the blade goes. So I made a new blade, microforge stuff, 4mm wide. The middle stripe is 4mm wide and it should have been wider, because you need some clearance. Hindsight is wonderful.

Next step is to drill some registration holes. This is so that when you put the thing back together again, it all lines up. It is a sandwich, you see. Then we cut the sandwich apart along the dotted lines. A classic rip cut. Mr. Krenov used a bandsaw for this, but he was working full size. If I had a small enough bandsaw I'd use it too; these cuts are critical.
For this I used my miniature Dozuki saw. A Dozuki saw is a crosscut saw, but I used it because it has a paper-thin kerf. Above, the three pieces of the sandwich. In retrospect I should have drilled another two registration holes; not fatal. Now we mark out and cut the front ramp. I used the Krenov Kanonical angle, 62 deg. Liu Ban is 90 deg. I didn't like that, although it works perfectly well. I wanted a ramp.

So there, cut out, is the filling of the sandwich. All angles correct, no fuss with floats. The registration holes were drilled such that they acommodate supermarket bamboo skewers, used for barbecues. I use them for dowel stock; they are about 2.8mm. So we push the skewers through the holes and assemble our sandwich.
It might be a plane! The blade is much thicker than in v0.0; it is a piece of Sawz-all blade; makes magnificent blades (or knives!) Took a while to make and sharpen; worth it. Note the super micro machinist's clamps. Available from Lee Valley. At this point I realized I should have cut the center section a tad thicker. Sigh. So I filed the blade down a bit. Tedious. Moral: cut outside the scribed lines! Or scribe a little wider. In this scale a tenth mm is too much. Next step is to glue the sandwich together.
When gluing, there is no such thing as "too many clamps." You never have enough clamps, much like friends and money. After unclamping, we have to cut a groove in the bottom of the plane to accomodate the skate. Plow planes ride a skate, probably because wood would wear out in no time. Cutting the groove was very difficult. If I did this for a living I'd figure out some kind of a jig. But the result is now
The skate is a piece of scrap sheet metal I found somewhere. It is in place, but not glued. A temporary wedge has been made for the blade. A pin to hold the wedge (in fact a common brad) has been added. At this point you have to fuss around until it all lines up. I epoxied the skate to the groove, screws are out of the question. The epoxy is drying as I write. I even filed a registration groove into the back of the blade to mate with the skate. That was a very difficult thing to do, but I did it. Swiss files are wonderful. Preliminary tests of v0.2 are are very favorable.

I have gone into all this detail (practically a tutorial) because I wanted to show how a Krenov plane is made. It is much easier than the traditional way. It is even easier if you work full size, because a tenth millimeter error won't hurt. Of course, you should read all of Krenov's books. You can Google him to good effect. The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking is the one you need if you want to make planes. Also very good is David Finck's Making & Mastering Wooden Planes (q.g.). Finck is one of Krenov's pupils. And if you are making full-size smoothing planes and don't do forging, you will need irons (blades) for your planes. See the Hock company's web page. You could also cut down regular plane blades, as Krenov did.

And I have introduced a new abbreviation, q.g. Patterned after q.v. which is Latin for quod vide (which see), it means quod google. Punch it in and go.

Two very small planes

While I was planing down lilac branches for Tip the birchbark canoe, I found (and am still finding) that holding the wood down is the hard part. This is true whether you are planing big stuff or miniature --- if the wood will stay put, you can plane it. If it does not, you will have major trouble. So, I thought, how nice it would be if I could cut a groove in a board. That would hold the strip down much better than my hand. Now cutting grooves is a job for a plow plane. And since most of my Christmas presents are done, why not make a miniature plow plane? I happen to own a perfectly good Liu Ban plow plane, made in Hong Kong, but it is much too large for what I want to do. So I hauled out my book, Making Traditional Wooden Planes by James Whelan and imitated.
At right is the full-size article by Mr. Liu Ban, and very handsome it is too in Chinese rosewood. It takes some adjusting and fussing but it plows very nice grooves. At left, a 70mm plow plane made out of brand X wood (found somewhere) with a 3mm cutter made out of a retired hacksaw blade. Does it work? After a fashion. Plow planes are strange creatures (you can Google "plow plane" if you're interested). They ride on a skate, a thin piece of metal that also supports the blade. The skate has to be centered on the blade. The skate gave me catfits. I wound up padding a piece of sheet metal with old circular saw blade pieces; the whole thing epoxied. Real planes are allowed to use screws. But at 70 mm you'd need watchmaker's screws. Well, it shows promise but needs more work. If Liu Ban is fussy, midget plane is amazingly fussy. It is hard to get the right cutter depth. The blade is too flexible. The bedding angle is wrong (I used 45 deg, the usual angle for a plane; it is too steep). So now underway is plow plane v0.5. Much thicker blade, thick skate. Different angles.

This is my second miniature plane. Sometime last winter I made a miniature rabbet plane. I made it mostly out of birch.
It wouldn't work. This morning I discovered I had the bevel reversed (blush) and it now works very nicely. Here it is planing a rabbet (or rebate) in a piece of pine. Lovely curly shaving; it works! So I am happy. Most planes work bevel down.

I will have some more things to say about plane construction later. The things I will say come from full-size practice, so they are applicable to full-size planes as well.

Silly Partridge, er, Spruce Grouse!

When you're out skiing, you always hope for some wildlife. Fortunately, the bears, which you do not want to encounter under any circumstances, are sound asleep up in the mountains somewhere. Do bears dream? Science is mute on the subject. Moose, of course. Foxes sometimes. When all else fails, there is often the silly partridge.
In reality, this is no partridge. It is an Alaska Spruce Grouse. But I call them Silly Partridges, because their preservationist instinct is well below the norm. Dumb, in fact. This is why in fall, when they are fair game, they wind up in many a village pot. I play a game with these silly birds. How close can I get? The art is to move very, very slowly. And space the intervals. Apparently the silly things have no size sensor, they don't notice I am getting closer... and closer.

So far my record is about one meter. I think I could get even closer. It is all patience, you see. Of course the Russian village uses a .22 or maybe a .410 shotgun. If times get really bad maybe I could hunt them, but I kind of like the dumb clucks.

The one in the picture would fly away for maybe 3 meters. I, of course, advanced the same amount. We played this game for a while, until M. or Mme. Silly P. flew up into a spruce tree. I still could have reached it with a ski pole! One wonders if Darwin got it all. If the Beagle had visited Alaska, maybe he'd change his mind.

Tippecanoe, without Tyler too

I have been setting up the Navajo loom for a new ruglet, and it is really mind-boggling. I'll report on that later. Meanwhile, I came across a reference to birchbark canoes on Bodger's forum. I needed a break from the loom, so why not build a model canoe? Tippecanoe and Tyler too. Now, most boats, from very small to very large, are built on the idea that first you build a frame and then you put on the skin -- planking, sealskin, whatever. But not a birchbark. Here, you are supposed to build a canoe form. Then the birchbark is shaped into the form, probably with the aid of boiling water. The hull is built inside the skin. The frame, gunwales (pronounced "gunnels" for some obscure reason) are sewn on to the skin with spruce root "thread." Well, OK, I said, a "model" will give me an idea of how this goes. So I grabbed a piece of paper, drew a canoe, cut it out, and cut birchbark (of which I have a substantial amount from firewood splitting).
Behold, a pattern and likewise behold the skin. It was obvious that it wasn't going to bend. So I planed it down with my trusty palm plane (at left). At this point I decided, most unwisely, that I didn't need a canoe form. So I started sewing up the skin. As it turns out, this project is mostly needlework!
One of the main reasons you need a canoe form is that it holds the blasted thing while you do things to it. But here is Tip, now a canoe, being stiched. Ordinary needle and thread, because spruce root is obtainable but much too large for this tiny model. Sewing is quite tedious. Once Tip was stiched fore and aft, I made a start on the gunwales. There are two of them, one inboard and one outboard. I made the inner ones first:
These are actually lilac gunwales! Prunings from the lilac tree. I shaped them with knife and miniature planes, then boiled them for a few minutes, Above is the hull plan, which has now morphed into a canoe form. I then sewed the gunwales into the hull.In retrospect I should have been more patient and done the outboard gunwales before sewing; then I wouldn't have to sew twice. Learning experience. Note that I now do indeed have a canoe form. Well, let's do the outboard gunwales. They have a big bend at the bow. At this point the jigs started to multiply.
Here is lilac strip, planed, boiled and shaved so it will bend. The tools of the trade are scattered about; my idea of still life. Next step is to sew Tip's outboard to inboard gunwales. All this sewing requires a very small hole to be bored; you can't go through this stuff with a needle alone. I'm drilling about #35 Morse through two gunwales and one birchbark, using a jeweler's push drill; a marvellous aid to miniature work.
I started Tip on Monday; it is now Wednesday and here's Tip's status picture:

As you can see, the gunwales are in place. Bow to the right. I have started fitting the ribs. It is quite difficult to plane the ribs thin enough to fit in, even with boiling. I'm down to about a mm.

Tip is really not a model. Proportions wrong, for one thing. He is a test bed for construction techniques. It is much easier to build a model than a full size version, and it's -15C outside. Much too cold for a canoe. So I'm enjoying Tip, and will report as I go along.