Plane old Padauk

There's been a bit of an African invasion in my workshop this week. First of all is the African Blackwood that found its way into a nice little hand plane. I made this plane to take with me places like the lumber yard and the weight of the ABW has really turned it into something special. A real nice little plane that has me thinking about how I can incorporate the ABW into some more hand planes.

The other part of the invasion is this big hunk of Padauk. I'm planning on turning it into a deskand hopefully it should be ready for the show I'm planning for the end of October.

A Show! With Cake!!!

I've been talking about doing a little show for a while now and I finally got around to booking a space and setting a date. It's going to be on Friday October 23rd, in the evening sometime. Details still need to be sorted out, but I'll be sharing the space with a friend of mine, Peter, who's a painter. It should be an interesting show and at the very least there will be some cake!

Walnut Table Done (mostly)

...and finally, a fully built, legs on, right-side up table:

Now I just need to put on a couple more coats of oil, take the legs off, move it, and put the legs back on! Simple.

Walnut Side Table

I finished this walnut side table a couple months ago, but never got a chance to take a good picture. I just sanded it and wiped on some oil so I thought I'd better pull out my camera. Amazing curl and colours in this piece...just wonderful wood.

Levitating Table

Okay Matt, enough with all the pictures of your Spiers smoother...

...and a new shot of the table with the legs magically attached:

Like a well oiled...

...walnut table! Well, it's not quite well oiled yet, there's only one coat on, but you really get a great sense of the walnut contrast to the sapwood and the curly maple butterflies. Here's half oil, half no oil:

...and the full monty:

..and a close up of one of the butterflies:

Even More Walnut Table

I worked on putting in some butterfly joints today and they came out really well. I got to use my "punisher" mallet which was a lot of fun too!

I still need to track down a router plane to help smooth the bottom of my mortises and rabbets, overall I was quite happy with the way the curly maple butterflies turned out.

And here's the wide shot:

Walnut Table Top

More walnut table top pictures...first the top of the table which I used my smoother to finish.

...and the bottom of the table which I used my sander to finish...

Walnut Table Update

I've been working on jointing a walnut table and got some good use out of my 5 1/2 Bailey. Sharpening has always been a weak point in my plane skills, but today everything seemed to be working just right.

After all that planing I got a shot that nicely summarized all that hard work. I had already made a new handle for this plane, but I just added the new "knob" after I got a blister the other day. A bit of a different design, but I'm really liking it so far. The plane's now definitely right handed, but it's a lot more comfortable and it fits my hands a lot better. Taking the time to make things fit is definitely worth it.

And here's the table top ready to be glued up with some biscuit joints.

Wonderful Walnut

I got some great looking walnut slabs in today that will be turned into a dining room table and some benches. These pieces are right from the center of the tree and are just amazingly clear. Wonderful pieces of wood, but they pretty much take up my whole shop ;)

I still need to figure out what pieces go into what things, but I couldn't resist planing down one end of a slab to see how things would turn out.

After a couple minutes with my 5 1/2 and my Spiers (and a rub of tung oil) I wound up with something like this:

Plane Improvisation

I had picked up this Spiers smoother a couple of months ago and I had only got to use it a little bit. It needed a new blade and I haven't scraped enough money together to get one yet, so today I decided to figure something out with what was in the shop. I had a 3/16" thick, 2 1/4" blade that didn't fit with the Spiers chipbreaker, but since I had success with faking it with a wooden chipbreaker in the jointer plane I just made I thought I'd give it a try. It worked out great and has me thinking about some new plane designs to try in the future.