Plane and fancy

This is a long overdue post. It begins with the fact that I got all wound up over carving after reading Chris Pye's book, Wood Carving, which you may google. Then this morphed into a project of John's, namely making custom picture frames for his paintings. My job is making the frame. Now you may go to the Home Despot and buy commercial moldings and make your frames out of that if you wish. But I soon realized that I would have to make the moldings myself. And I refuse to use a router. So it's back to basics. Let us build shaped planes and use them to shape the moldings on which we will do carvings, out of which we will build frames! Really unwinding the Industrial Revolution.

Back in the pre-router days, people used planes to make moldings. They had all kinds of elaborate shapes. I wanted to start simply. So I decided to make a hollow and a round. One cuts a hollow, the other makes a round out of a raised piece. Now I have made some miniature planes but this is real stuff. Tough. First, you have to make a blade. The blade is the crucial part of the plane. I used an old rusty crosscut saw for the purpose. In retrospect it was much too flimsy. But hindsight is wonderful.

I started out with the rounder. This is a concave blade, an upside-down U.
First problem is to find your raw material. Maybe a circular saw blade. I used a handsaw blade, but I think a circualr saw blade would be better. I cut it roughly to shape, with a hacksaw, and I started out with full metalworking equipment, the milling attachment on the Taig. At least I got the bottom of the thing milled out flat.
But there was no way I could cut a semicircle with the mill. I do not have a rotary table! Nor yet a cutter of exactly the proper radius. So, when you have to cut shapes out of metal, you resort to drilling:
Since I am drilling a semicircle, I stuck a steel pin in the backing board at the proper radius. It fits into a hole in the proper point of the proto-blade. This, at least, ensures you are drilling on the radius of a circle. Do not move the backing board. Clamp it, preferably. You are trying to drill overlapping holes. Then cut off any webs and clean it up with files. At this point I decided to give it a preliminary grind, as I usually do with my hand-made tools.
Terrible mistake. You should not use a flat grinder to sharpen a curved tool. I do not know how Tormek & Co. do this, but their grinder just ground me flat! I ruined the blade.

So I took a deep breath, said some unseemly things in several languages, and decided to make a hollowing plane instead. U-shaped. The iron for this was made exactly the same way as the previous one, but when it came time to grind, I rotated the blade. I made a jig for the purpose. I also use the jig to sharpen gouges. Don't have a picture of this (yet) but it's just like sharpening a gouge, only the blade is flat. At last a nice edge. So I hardened and tempered. I will soon post something on this. And I had a semicircular plane iron, only shaped U instead of upside-down U.

So now we have to make a body for the plane. We are making the Krenov plane style. It is a laminated thing, you saw off the middle and glue it back again. I have been here before and will not repeat it. But here are the pieces of the plane.
Here we have the iron, the sawn-put cheeks, and the middle part, sized to take the iron. We have simply drilled a hole to let the chips escape. The middle part is shaped for a wedge, to hold the iron in. For the record the dimensions are 145 x 50 x 23 mm. The 23 mm is a curious number, it must be something in inches, but I don't do inches.

Observant readers will note a terrible mistake. I did not drill registration pin holes when I sawed it apart. I paid very dearly for this mistake. Almost as bad was the fact that I did not draw layout lines on the outside of the body. When it came time to cut the throat opening of the plane, I cut my own throat. So put down layout lines on the outside -- it saves infinite trouble. You must cut the throat at the smae angle as the bedding angle (45 deg) . In the end (OK, confession is good for the soul) I used plastic wood to remedy my mistakes. Here half a millimeter is crucial. No big deal to cut the throat; but cutting at the proper angle is another matter. You want a very, veye, narrow throat on these things. It has to shave, and the throat opening roughly equals the thickness of the shaving you will take.

Now on to the rounder. I cut a block of wood exactly like the previous one. I remade the blade. It is still in a rough stage. But the curvature is right. Exactly the same radius as the hollow. So now we can use the hollow to shape the rounder.

Note the plastic wood infill on the hollow. But it works. It planes. It is not as smooth as I would wish. I need a fence to keep the hollow straight. It needs a thicker iron. But it planed down the sole of the hollow.

I used a circular rasp at the end, and sandpaper wrapped around a piece of pipe at the end. But the rounder has a nice shape. A few flaws. They are correctable. This time I remembered to drill registration holes. Oh yes, andI have sawed the back end of the hollower to a curve. Else it digs into your hand. Live & learn.

It is time to saw the thing apart. I can hardly wait to make an ogee, q.g. If circles cause all this much toil, I wonder how I will do the ogee. Stay tuned.

The making of a gouge, Episode I

Warning. This is a how-I-do-it post. It is a tutorial on how to do something. If you are not interested in actual craft work, you can skip this post. I will not be in the least offended.

What I intend to do in this post (and in fact at least one more) is to show you how to make a small gouge out of a hacksaw blade. Now, why would you want to do this? Simple. When you are carving out curves, you need a gouge of the same curvature as the detail you need to carve. Real carvers call the curvature a "sweep." OK, I have some gouges, all made here, but none of them will handle the curvature in the current project. So it's time for a new gouge. It must be rather shallow. So I set out to make one. First, the setup.
We have a pair of small vise-grips, a small hammer. It is a Warrenton pattern, a very useful pattern, because it has a flat head and a sort of chisel-like head, called a cross-peen. Also I have a a 50+ mm vise, (note the flat surface behind the vise; it's my anvil), a propane torch (invisible but off to the right; it's set up about 20 cm above workbench level) and a piece of tile on which to put red-hot objects. Do not set your workbench on fire! Now you need a piece of hacksaw blade. It does not need to be new, old and worn is just as good and really, really cheap. Like free. Our specimen is about 10 cm long. You can see it clamped in the vise-grips. Also in the picture, a plastic container with water in it. It is called a quench tub. It will reappear in Episode II, but ignore it for now.

So your first job is to anneal the hacksaw blade piece. This means, heat it up to carrot color. This will take all the spring out of it and that's just what you want. So hold it in the vise-grips, light off the propane torch and get the blade red hot.
Orange hot is better, and yellow better still, but this is a very small piece of metal and your heat source is very concentrated, and only about 600C. So you compromise. Heat it up, "red" hot will do, about two cm at a time. Then let the whole thing cool. After you have done so, it is time to grind off the teeth on the hacksaw blade.
As you can see, I use a Dremel-Type Tool (DTT) with a grinding wheel mounted. The DTT is held in a home-made stand. You could of course use a bench grinder. Or even a belt sander. Or a file. Whatever you do, get those teeth off! Otherwise your masterpiece will crack. Just where you don't want it to; Murphy is hovering over your shoulder as you do this.

Now we come to the fun part. We have to shape this animal. The front part of the blade must be shaped to a rather shallow curvature. What radius? Depends on the carving. This is up to you. The rear part must be completely folded in two, just as you would fold a sheet of paper in two. The folded part will be the shank of the gouge. Anyways, I have to start a curve in the work. My current method is to use a small machinist's V-block.

A bona fide blacksmith would use a swage for this. But I do not pretend to be a real blacksmith, just an artisan in search of a gouge. Now the above is a posed picture (I only have two hands). It illustrates the process, though. In practice I clamp the V-block in the vise. I heat the gouge boiled-carrot orange. This color will recur so often that I will abbreviate it as BCO. Quick as you can, transfer your gouge to the V-block and tap with the cross-peen of the hammer. Right in the middle. You will thus put a curve into your piece. It will take more than one "heat" to do this. The piece will cool off in about ten seconds. No mass, you see. You don't have much time to tap it before it is cool. So you do the whole length of your piece this way. Once I have started the curvature, I resort to long-nose pliers and start squeezing.

The object is to fold the upper part of the blade in two. It is the shank of the tool. Do not worry if it is warped at this point; just get it folded. Heat to BCO as often as you have to. Squeeze it! Also do not worry if it is twisted, bowed, or otherwise distorted. We can fix all that later. Just get the blasted thing folded. Then straighten it out. Here's what we're aiming at:
In order to do this I had to unwarp, unbow, and flatten. For this, it's heat it up to BCO, pound it on the anvil, heat it up to BCO again, use the pliers to unwarp it, ... and so on. It will take quite a number of heats. I cannot predict which way steel will warp and neither can anyone else. We have no complicated machinery at our disposal. But by George (II? III... VI?) we have a gouge blank, with a bit of work. I am into something like an hour and a half worth of work at this point; YMMV.

At this point the gouge might work on soft butter. It's almost time to heat-treat it. This will be the second episode in this drama. But before we do that I find it convenient to put a preliminary grind on the edge. At one time I did this with the Dremel-Type tool. No longer. Once I built the angulometer (see a previous post) I do it on my wet grinder, or TSO (Tormek-Shaped Object).
Now, gouges, chisels, and plane blades need a 25 deg angle. What I have done here is improvised a handle for the tool. Not, to be sure, the final handle. I am using this in a homemade jig to set the angle to 25 deg, aided by my angulometer. I grind up the first approximation to a 25 deg bevel. Next, I have to heat-treat this tool. But that will have to wait; this post is already too long. I really, really recommend wet grinders. They do not ruin tools, which a dry grinder will do at the drop of a hat.

One last item. When you sharpen a gouge on a grinder, you must rotate it. You can't just let the grinder go by itself -- that would put a flat in your gouge. So you gently rotate the gouge as the wheel turns. That way you get a nice even grind.

Enough! See Episode II for more. Coming soon at a blog near you.

How many weeds in a garden?

As I have remarked before, while (some) vegetables grow to enormous proportions in Alaska, so do the weeds. So weeding is a constant chore. All my weeds wind up on the compost pile so nothing goes to waste. Composting, by the way, has its own Alaska twists; I must post on that sometime. Anyway, the results of the last weeding went into the Darthcartt, my homemade garden cart. Here are the results.
Now this is after the weeds had a week to compactify, as the String Theorists in Physics say. I weeded today and filled the cart brimful. The Darthcartt is one meter square exactly. The sides are perhaps 30 cm. So maybe a third of a cubic meter. That's an awful lot of weeds. Just for a comparison, a cubic meter of water weights a tonne (that's a metric ton, for the metrically challenged; close enough to the Avoirdupois ton for practical purposes). Of course weeds are not as dense as water; good thing too or I would break even the sturdy Darthcartt. Today I pulled some turnips. They were enormous. I'll report on them soon.

Melting metal at Chalupy

First of all, this is not my project. It is all John's doing. Second of all, what you will see is not entirely as safe as turning on your kitchen stove. It can be dangerous. In these litigious days be very careful and wear proper safety gear, blah blah. Consider yourself warned. Chalupy Acres disclaims all resposibility, blah blah.

What we are doing is melting Aluminum to (eventually) make castings. Before you do this for yourself, you must read the sources. We acknowledge hereby these sources. The first and most inspirational is the late lamented Dave Gingery's "Build your own Metal Working Shop from Scratch" series, 6 volumes. The first is The Charcoal Foundry, all available from Lindsay Publications. From the same source get Lionel Oliver II's The Flowerpot Crucible Furnace. Very cheap stuff, I may add.

Finally get on the net. Go to Myfordboy's blog; it should appear on the sidebar on this blog. Select his channel on YouTube. There are 30 videos (as of today) on casting; you should watch them all.

OK, on to melting metal. John built the forge. We started out with the idea of a Gingery/Oliver smelter. This runs off grocery store charcoal, the kind you use to barbecue steaks.
The basic forge involves (1) a 5 gallon Kerosene drum, main part of the thing (2) a clay flowerpot. This is imbedded in a concrete lining. The concrete is just Home Depot (or was it Lowe's?) standard stuff. There is a hole cut through all this. A piece of galvanized pipe goes through it all. In forge-speak, this is called a tuyere, the french word for "piping". A hair dryer, long defunct, provides air. With this setup you can melt Aluminum. John soon found that the Dragon Lady is a far preferable substitute. The Dragon Lady has appeared on these pages before. She is a heavy-duty propane torch bought from Harbor Freight for $13 back when. She melts snow, clears out weeds, starts charcoal fires. As it turned out we could have dispensed with the charcoal.
John is very happy. Aided by the Dragon Lady he has melted Aluminum. Lovely stuff, melted Ally. Looks like silver or perhaps like Mercury. The big pipe holds a stainless steel spoon, used to skim off the dross. This is junk, impurities you do not want. Today John will pour Aluminum cupcakes; we are not yet into making real molds.
John added common salt as a flux (makes things flow) and baking soda as a degasser. About a teaspoon each. Very effective and thank you Myfordboy. We are using fireplace tongs to hold the crucible, the container in which you put the metal. This I found long ago at a thrift store for two bucks. It is a plumber's pot originally meant for melting lead. A bit more close to the pouring process we have

At the end of the road we have taken some literally castoff Aluminum-- it was stuff I found by the roadside on a bike ride and went back and salvaged. We produced two cupcakes -- as I have said we are not yet up to casting into molds -- each weighing about 100 grams. Ten cupcakes to a Kilo. The potential is endless. John wants to make the Gingery Lathe. Refer to the sources.

The tablesaur (er, tablesaw) project

This is a strange post. I meant to do it on the garden. But life, as Robin Wood says (see his blog in the sidebar), got in the way. Now as readers of ths blog must know by now, I hate power tools. But I do a lot of metal work. And of all the aspects of metalwork I hate, cutting pieces if metal to shape is probably number one. You must, you see, use the hacksaw. A hacksaw works, and very well, too. But it is slow. Sometimes exasperatingly so. There are (ah, the Devil tempts you) alternatives. One alternative is an angle grinder. I do not own such an object. I do, however, own three powered circular handsaws. Well, one was given to me. Another was so cheap (under ten bucks) at a thrift store I couldn't pass it up. Ditto the third. So on one of these saws, a Makita in brilliant red, I attached an abrasive cutoff wheel. It is an excellent way to cut metal, but it is totally un-maneuverable. Makita-san has no blade guard (that's why he was so cheap) but that does not bother me. Only trouble is it is difficult to use, because you have to figure out how to hold the work somehow while you saw it.. Or grind it. Or whatever it is an abrasive cutoff wheel does.

So yesterday I had an idea. If I mounted Makita-san like a tablesaw, I would have both hands free . I happen to have some use for discarded circular saw blades. Can't say what it is, because recipients are reading the blog, alas. I need to cut up these blades, and Makita-san in tablesaw mode would do the job. So I went out to the shop. It was raining cats and dogs, or, as they say in Venezuela, raining palos de escoba y capuchinos de bronce, broomsticks and bronze capuchins (bronze capuchins: very heavy). No day for a walk, much less a bike ride. So in about an hour I had improvised a table saw.
What I did is take a found board, cut a slot in it, drilled (matching) mounting holes in the saw and the table, and bolted the saw to the board. Hard part is drilling holes in the saw, it is metal and hard to drill. Got to step-drill. Start out 3mm and work up to 6mm+ for 1/4"-20 hardware store bolts. Must countersink bolts on top surface. Circular saws have all sorts of obstructions to this program. There are pieces of saw sticking up just where you would like to put a bolt. The board is clamped to my trusty counterweighted Workmate. This thing has about 50 Kg. of logs added to it, so it will not tip, rotate, or walk off. From below it looks like this:
The strange-looking stick going off to the left is used to depress the trigger on Makita-san. A poor man's on-off toggle. I have since cut it off to a more reasonable length, say 30 cm. It would be nice if Makita-san had a trigger lock. But he doesen't. Note the heavy wood piled across the workmate. This makes the whole thing possible. 50 Kilos is not too much at all. Else the Workmate will tip over.

The hard part of all this is drilling the holes through metal and drilling matching holes in wood. My procedure is now to drill the metal first. From underneath, the sole of the saw. But (a) be sure and center-punch the hole (b) make sure you drill in a spot that is not occupied by some essential feature of the saw. Not as easy as it might be. You have to get a nut on the bolt, remember? If you can't get at the bolt it is a waste of time to drill. (c) Step-drill. Then set the saw in place and use it as a template to drill holes in the wood. Align it carefully with a centerline mark. Countersink these things from the top side. Bolt it in, and Robert est votre oncle. Clamps all the rest of the way.

Today, aided by experience, I went out and made another board just like the one shown here. This is the "wood tablesaw". Just like the one shown here, only with another saw. This will be used for wood. My son will use it far more than I will.

At least, as of this writing, it has stopped raining.

An angle gauge for a wet grinder

I have always admired the Tormek (q.g.) wet grinders, made in Sweden. These things use a 25-cm synthetic sandstone wheel running in a water bath. The water makes it impossible to overheat the tool, which is the curse of the high-speed dry grinders. Tormek has an extensive online presence, with many useful instructional videos. They also have a large number of extremely useful accesories. The drawback is that they are extremely expensive.

So some time ago I acquired from Grizzly.com (q.g.) an Asiatic knock-off of the Tormek. I call this a TSO (Tormek-Shaped Object). It is about a quarter of the Tormek price. But their accesories leave something to be desired. Of all these accesories by far the most necessary is their angle setter. It is necessary to grind tools at precise angles. My grinder comes with a clever, but basically inferior, gauge, which broke when dropped, rendering it useless. The Tormek WM-200 (q.g.) is far superior. So I downloaded the instruction manual for the device, a PDF file, thinking maybe I could emulate it. Lo and behold, on page one of this PDF file is a full size (maybe) drawing of the thing. If it isn't full-size then it it close enough for Chalupy work. Hmmm. What have we here?
What we have is page 1 of the aforesaid instructions. Close scrutiny will reveal that the gauge is a sort-of rectangle with two moveable widgets. At right, the angle setter. At left, an extremely clever cam that allows you to compensate for wheel wear. As you grind, so does your wheel shrink. Do not be deceived by the knobs. They are not at the pivot point of either the setter or the cam. Obviously the widgets pivot somewhere else. You can find the pivot points with a ruler by very carefully extending the graduation marks on the drawing. You do this on the paper copy. So then you have a pivot point. Then you take some clear plastic which I happened to have, and basically trace the outlines of everything on to the plastic. Be sure to mark the pivot points on your cutouts. Cut it out any old way. I used a jigsaw. Cut oversize. Then I started filing. Note that the important things are (1) the angle setter point and the pivot point must be aligned. After that you can shape the angle setter any old way. (2) The cam profile is important. Trace it carefully. It may not be circular. Then drill holes at the pivot points, and use small screws (I used 4-40 hardware store screws) to assemble. By tightening up on these screws, I did away with the original's knobs.
When all was said and done I realized I had cut the angle setter undersize, so I remade it. Plastic, after all, is cheap; especially when it is found. I have traced out the angle and wheel diameter scales onto the plastic. So when you use it, set the cam to the measured dimension of the wheel. Mine is still at 250 mm close enough. Then set the angle to what you want. Here 25 deg.
And now it's all downhill. Set up your jig so it exactly coincides with the underside of the angle setter. Any questions? Refer to the WM-200 literature! It's online. Today I sharpened a rounding plane blade (25 deg) and an axe (45 deg). Without this gadget I would have been lost in space. Most useful gadget I have made in a long time.

And now, to forestall the patent Nazis: It is true that the WM-200 is patented. It is also true that under US patent law it is perfectly legal to make a copy of a patented thingamabob so long as you do not offer it for sale, i.e. for your own use. Please note that I am not in any way, shape, or form offering this thing for sale. So there.

But there does remain the question of what to call it. I don't want to violate trademark laws. So I will call it the angulometer.

The garden grows apace

The gardening season in Alaska is extremely short. End of May to somewhere in September. When the lower 48 is planting, we have snow on the ground. But there is a compensating factor. We have an enormous amount of sunlight. When it's dark in say, Iowa, we can still get around at midnight without a flashlight. So what we do is plant stuff that grows very, very, quickly. This year we planted (for instance) turnips from transplants. My daughter did the actual transplanting. She gets the Golden Turnip Medal.

Day before yesterday I was about my usual chore, weeding. If your plants can grow so can the weeds, so the chore is never-ending. Anyway I pulled off some weeds and beheld a turnip above ground! Large. I pulled it out and took it inside.
The knife blade in the picture is 25cm long, for a scale. With it is some Swiss Chard. Good stuff. Note to self: plant much more chard next year. Nice turnip, very tasty chard. Now today I completed some more weeding and found a lot more turnips.
I also watered the greenhouse. I have two small (and green) tomatoes. But I also found the largest zucchini I have ever grown. It is visible at the right of the picture. A monster. I have a lot of radishes, too, but I didn't pull any up today. Amazing. Chard and radishes can be seeded. Plant in May, ready in July! Cheers for chard and radishes.

On the debit side of the ledger, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli seem slow-pokey this year. We shall hope, and make a few sacrifices to the Garden Gods. I am sure my neighbors would be highly offended if I suggested one of their goats might be a suitable sacrifice! Maybe I'll burn garbage instead. Two goals witn one burn.Got to get rid of garbage, after all.