Never underestimate what you can find at an estate sales, you can still find good old American made drills, forstner bits and hand files for cents. Better than the imports which now flooding the markets.
Ayup.
Ayup. Hauled mine out earlier this afternoon, though. I don't need to use it often, but when I do it's darn handy to have.
That's why I bought mine used on eBay instead of new at the Woodworking Show.
Ayup.
Yeah, well, for the price of a used one I'm pretty happy with the Z-vise. :-)
-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)
Get a copy of my NEW AND IMPROVED TrollFilter for NewsProxy/Nfilter by sending email to autoresponder at filterinfo-at-milmac-dot-com You must use your REAL email address to get a response.
... snip
Nah, we've tried that here, too. Gets the OT police too up in arms (which, is kind of anti-thetical to world peace in its own way).
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Now we'll just use some glue to hold things in place until the brads dry +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Wreck history, I guess, and a good measure of humor too, I imagine.
Lowe's sells Kobalt benches? Must be in bigger stores or something.
You can get by with not much. I don't recommend this by any stretch, but my workbench is just some crappy construction grade lumber jobsite kit I picked up when I got my house, and my first dedicated shop space, and I wanted to have a workbench in it, even though I had no real idea what I was going to use it for.
There's a picture of what it used to look like on my stupid little website somewhere. When I got into this hand plane tomfoolery a coupla years or so ago, I gave it a makeover, rather than going to the trouble, expense, and really downright inconvenience of building a real bench. I planed the top pretty flat, then I bolted some pieces of a curbisde salvage walnut veneered poplar table to it; making sure everything went down pretty darn close to flat. Then I bored a full grid of 3/4" dog holes in it.
No tail vise, and one end of it is still a metalworking station with a couple of anvils and a 4" pipe vise, so it's anything but ideal. It works though. I'm limited to smallish projects as a practical matter in that teensy shop anyway, and it's a suitable bench for suitably smallish projects. Two face vises, one of which has a pop-up dog. Some dog holes, some 3/4" oak dowels for dogs, and some other shop-cobbled work holding gadgetry, and it gets the job done.
You can do MUCH better than this, but you can get by with something pretty seriously crappy as long as it's flat and has a place to put your vise, and a place to stick something to keep the wood from scooting out from under your planes.
I always assumed that was a nom de web, like "keeter," "Duke of URLs," "Unisaw A100."
- - LRod
Master Woodbutcher and seasoned termite
Shamelessly whoring my website since 1999
OK, Here's the REPRINT of Steve's original. I guess we need to reprint it, and a few other things, about once a year. How's about the turd barge or the Klown Hammah.
Dave in Fairfax ==================================================== Stephen LaMantia Nov 1 1995, 12:00 am
Newsgroups: rec.woodworking From: snipped-for-privacy@u.washington.edu (Stephen LaMantia) Date: 1995/11/01 Subject: Sandpaper Sharpening [No, you can't sharpen sandpaper. And please don't ask me how I know that.]
[Required warnings:] [If you don't like sharpening tales, or sandpaper, or handplanes, or any deviation from simple declarative sentences, please don't read this post. Also, it's a process gloat, and it's windbaggy, so be forewarned.] [And if you prefer one-clause synopses, here: "I sharpened a plane blade with sandpaper." Now move along now.]For anyone else:
I recently emailed a few folks about some attempts I made at sharpening a plane iron with sandpaper. Some suggested I post my story to the group. So here it is.
(Rich and David, I've pretty much rehashed my email to you guys here, so you can move on out now, too.)
Let's see. Who's left? Oh.
Dear Mom,
I've recently been experimenting with using sandpaper for honing. I had been getting tired out with the oilstones getting unflat and glazed and needing to be lapped all the time, tired of oil all over the place and on my hands so I couldn't even scratch, tired of having to clean the stones after each use, tired of having to keep a conscious effort going to distribute wear on the stones evenly. So tired of all of this.
So I started thinking about abrasives and abrasive action in general, and read up a bit, and asked around, and found out that there's nothing different, in principle, between sandpaper and an oilstone. Silicon carbide sandpaper (i.e., wet-or-dry) goes up to
600 grit in the hardware and woodworking stores, but up to 2000 grit in the automotive finishing stores, as I learned from David Opincarne, a local rec.woodworker and admitted metalhead who works right here at the school and who sent me some 1200-and 2000-grit samples and who's recently been helping me greatly to understand the secrets of metal. For example, did you know that to produce high-carbon steel, crushed bone from the skull of an infidel is an excellent carburizing agent? Me, neither. Or that hardening the steel in cutting blades is achieved by the sudden and even cooling of the blade, and that the best known way to achieve these dual goals is to quench the blade in the still-living body of an enemy warrior? Same here; I had no idea. David's been teaching me a lot.Me and him and some other wreck.the.woodwork folks had been talking lately about this abrasive business, and it got onto sandpaper somehow, and so I decided to test something out. For the sharpening-with-sandpaper experiment, I used a slightly-pitted 2" wide jack plane blade that came with an old beat-up Stanley Bedrock #605 I bought last year at a tool swap. The bevel on the plane iron had been somehow ground *concave* by the previous owner (or else it just wore that way), so I first straightened the edge out on the grinding wheel, grinding in straight at first so as not to create a thin edge that would burn, and then grinding in a bevel but stopping a bit short of a real edge, again to prevent burning. Because of this care not to burn the steel, this grinding goes slow and light, but it's time well spent.
Time now to lap the back behind the cutting bevel. I took a page out of the plane-sole lapping book -- figuratively speaking of course, you should never tear pages out of a book -- and used very light coatings of 3M "77" spray adhesive to temporarily glue small
1-1/2" x 3-1/2" rectangular pieces of sandpaper along the edge of a sheet of 1/4" plate-glass. The paper I used was Aluminum Oxide in grits 50, 80, and 100, and Silicon Carbide (wet-or-dry to you laypeople) in grits of 150, 180, 220, 320, 400, 600, 1200, and 2000. The plate glass was placed with its edge flush to the edge of the workbench.I lapped the end one inch of the back of the iron on each grit in turn. I didn't use any water; I just went at it dry. So as I lapped -- can you call it lapping if it's dry? -- anyway, about every ten seconds or so I'd stop and brush off the sandpaper with a whisk broom and wipe the blade off on my shirt. (On the coarser grits, I found that a dustbuster vacuum actually cleaned up the paper quite thoroughly, much better than sweeping it off, but this sucking advantage disappeared at around 220 grit.) Since I progressed through the grits so gradually, I found I had to spend only about a minute or so on each grit, including the suck-down and sweep-off and shirt-wipe time.
One trick to efficiency is knowing when you've lapped the back sufficiently on each progressive grit. I had previously had trouble gauging this, and didn't know how
I just reposted the original. Take a look at the e-mail addy. Sure looks like a real name to me.
Dave in Fairfax
thanks. Steve it was.
and on the subject of scary sharp, I have a minor gloat.
road score the other day. glass. not tempered- it has a chip out of one corner. about 2 foot by 2-1/2 foot. by about an inch thick.
think *that* will stay flat enough?
Just maybe, but the price was right. %-)
Dave in Fairfax
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