I've been working on a new tool cabinet since March and I am finally calling it done. It holds all of the hand tools that I use regularly. I'm mostly posting here to thank everyone who has posted so many pictures of their own cabinets (Dominic) because those pictures are where I almost every tool holding idea on mine.
If you would like to see pictures, look here.
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.p...mplete!!!!

If you have any questions, fire away!


fixt!

Quite some time ago, a thread was started concerning the "Blokkz Clamp". I'm not sure, but I think it got poofed.



I thought they looked pretty useful, but refused to pay $25 a pair for them.

I've been doing some stuff that requires some acute angles, and thought the Blokkz Clamps were just what was needed to clamp the pieces. But being the tightwad that I am, I decided to try and make some clones.

Here is what I came up with. EXTREMELY simple, they cost me nothing, and by golly, they work.



I took a piece of 1/4" oak, 1-1/2" wide, and cut it to about 6" in length. I then epoxied a piece of 3/4" dowel rod to one end and attached a piece of 80 grit sand paper to the other side. That's all there is to it. They work like a charm.

In my photo, although the angle looks to be a 45°, it is actually 36°. I have tried it on very steep angles such as 72°, and they work equally as well.

45's and 90's are easy enough to clamp with about any conventional clamp. But the more acute angles are a little tougher. Maybe this will be of use to some others here.

Jim

For my ten thousandth post, I'd like to present my completed cedar strip canoe.

   

   

She was built using the Ranger 15 plans from Bear Mountain Boats and the book Canoecraft.   It took over a year to build and I've hundreds of hours into the project.  

   

The shell of the canoe is mostly built from Western Red Cedar obtained from Lowes.  The football (center bottom section of the hull) is pine.  Mahogany was used for the decks and plugs.  

   

The feature strip is made from Mahogany, Spruce and Walnut (diamonds).  You'll notice I used the sapwood in the walnut to give and arrow effect.  

   

The mahogany for the decks is quarter sawn and shows different colors depending on the angle you're looking at it.

   

The gunwales, seats and carrying yolk are made of ash.

   

The inner gunwale is scuppered (slots cut to let water out when you're done for the day).

   

A painters hole was turned out of mahogany and provides a place to tie down the canoe.

   

A closeup of the feature strip.  You can see the arrow effect on the diamonds from the sapwood in the walnut.

   

And here is the proud owner.   We paddled it about 5 miles on it's maiden voyage.

Perfect, as we've come to expect from you.
That 'Star' that you use for your avatar, is that yours, do you have any pictures you could share?

Toby

RolHammer said:

---

Is a tilt bed as useful as it seems it'd be? Any other advice as to things I should consider in selecting a trailer for myself for the use outlined above?

---

Hello all,

It was not too long ago that I realized that I wanted to tackle my personal "mount everest" as a woodworker.  I felt and still feel that now is the perfect time to challenge myself to the hardest project that I can think of.  It just so happens that it is also a project that I really have wanted to make for myself since I first saw its graceful and alluring curves.

So this past week I started making myself a Bombe Secretary.  I am using air dried black walnut and popular as a secondary wood.

This 12/4 thick 23" wide and about 52" long slab...
<img src="/ssl_proxy.php?

and these (similar sizes) will be the case sides, the serpentine drawer fronts, and the four boston style ball and claw feet.

that caused so much saw dust and tears...  (it was emotionally difficult to take a huge slab of such beauty and turn most of it into dust.  I ended up with about 150 gallons of dust from all the milling of these case sides and a fair bit of other 8/4, 5/4 and 4/4 walnut)

They wanted to bow so I clamped them to stop the cupping.

I cut the DTs for the bottom and I'm almost done with the DTs for the top (all done by hand).
I'll post pictures of that when they are together.

I started carving the feet
<img src="/ssl_proxy.php?

That is going to take me the most time.  It is hard and I think the first one that I've started will be a "practice" foot.  But I have enough cuttoffs from the slabs to get another one or two quarter saw 3"x"3"x7" block.

As the week went on I stopped taking pictures but I will once I get to work in my shop here in CT.  I did this when I was away on vacation.  This is what I do to relax.
My hope is that in two years I'll have this done. [img]/ssl_proxy.php?url=/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/yellowyes.gif" />

I also hope to keep this thread going with regular updates.  I do  think I'll finally start a woodworking blog to record my progress as well.

Enjoy... I know that I will.

Oh and BTW it seems that one of the pictures gives away where I was on vacation

My compliments to Dave's wife.  She did her best to fatten me up with cookies, rice crispy treats, and meals like this


Not only did Dave let me use all of his tools, teach me new things constantly, he even let me put bluegrass music on the satellite radio in the shop... he and his wife were very good to me

What a timely post. I'm looking for just such a guide myself.

I've been wanting to build a full sized rip and crosscut saw for a while now. Until recently I didn't have access to large widths of 0.042" steel. But that changed about a month ago.

Along with that steel I also picked up a Beverly Slitting Shear. This little gen allows me to cut spring steel like it was paper. Now that all the pieces were in place I decided it was time to layout a rip and cross cut saw prototype. I used Autocad to design the saw plates to meet the hang line of a couple of my favorite saw handles. The Wheeler Madden &amp; Clemson as well as the old Disston D-7. Once I had these laid out I printed out the plans and went to town on the saw plates.





Using a trick I picked up from Issac, I used blue painters tape to provide a background for my marking lines. Then it was a simple matter to get the slitting shear set up,...



And start cutting. It went a lot easier than I would have thought! It was a lot like cutting paper.



It only took me about 10 to 15 minutes (really took my time here) to cut the saw plates to size



After that I spent some time smoothing out the edges and curves with a combination of files and my grinding wheel.

Before I punched the teeth out I decided I wanted to run a test with a small piece of 0.042" thk scrap. Thanks to JoeMac (and Wilbur for transporting them) I no have a couple additional Foley retoothers. So I decided to use the oldest (and most sturdy looking of the bunch) to perform this test. It was a manual retoother but that posed no problem. It worked GREAT! One by product of this is now I have a small saw plate punched to 9ppi rip. I plan to use this to help me cut the slots in the handles.

Now that this is out of the way I moved onto cleaning/debluing the saw plates with Citric Acid. Hopefully I can punch the teeth tonight

More progress photos to come.

My goodness! that thing looks sharp. I'm still learning how to sharpen these things. Nice looking saw, sir.

A recent conversation with BJ about SS gifts on my bench build thread got me to thinking of another SS gift. A SS in a different year - who remained nameless - sent a note that he had read my posts and noticed I liked old B &amp; W books and magazine articles. So he sent several things along with 2 old B &amp; W books. Here's the pic from the old "after SS gift thread":



Now that I kinda sorta have a bench and a lot of suggestions to build something, I thought a re-read of these particular two was in order. I am almost thru with the first one "How to Work with Tools and Wood". It is the official Stanley publication copyrighted in 1942. It has the original Stanley adv pamphlet "The Joy of Accomplishment" with a list "Selecting Tools for a Home Workshop" at the end and ads for "Stanley Tool Guide, Stanley Plans and Book (this book), and more Stanley Plans". While it is at the beginner level, it is 174 pages of very complete descriptions.

I guess it's been enough years now that I can say again, what I think is lost in the current crop of full color book and magazine articles is that much or most of the communication of detail is left up to the pics and color drawings. I do this myself every day in my business and am thankful that a pic can show more than a thousand words. But I don't do ww'ing for a business and when I read the old materials before color printing, the B &amp; W text and drawings had to go the whole nine yards to try to describe whatever complex technique was at hand. That is, while the language is a bit stilted, I find the language much more descriptive (without the color) and really enjoy soaking up the essence of the era at leisure.

What makes the biggest impression now on a re-read is that in there nowhere does it mention how something could be done some other way with power tools. It assumes that if you're going to work your way all the way up to the most difficult joints that you would be using a #55 to do them with....

Next up I'm looking forward to reading again "A Manual for Hand Woodworking" by DeWitt Hunt, copyright 1925. While it only has 141 pages by comparison to the Stanley book, the subjects it does cover are in greater detail. To that nameless SS, once again, thanks very much! Here they are with their brethren back then: