This blog is all about working in a small apartment, mostly with hand tools.
My workshop occupies fifteen square feet of floor space in my apartment. It does not fold up and go away. It takes up a wall to hold a whack of tools, and includes a six foot long workbench I made about thirty years ago. If I felt like hiding it I could get a couple of room divider screens to hide it away. But I don't care to do that, it looks fine to me, and any visitors can suck rocks if they don't like to see it.
The workbench is more or less bullet proof. It is solid maple, weighs more than I do, but under three hundred pounds. You can see it in the picture to the right holding the work in one of its multitude of ways. Click on the picture for a bigger view.
Do I know what I am talking about?
Sort of.
I am self taught from magazines like Fine Woodworking, and even sold that magazine some little tips of the trade after I learned a thing or two. I worked in the film industry in the carp shop building sets, and ran an antiques conservation and restoring business for many years. I have made furniture and reproduced antiques of various kinds.
I worked in a modern furniture factory that was set up to manufacture office furniture in solid oak. I also produced a television series called No Room at the Dump about using the workshop to recycle discarded objects.
By inclination I am a recycler and modifier of tools, so here I will be talking about the rules, how to break them, and how to get excellent results most of the time, while having fun.
So let me lead off with a tiny bit about wood carving. I have a bunch of chisels, and mostly one merely pushes the very sharp chisel through the wood to make the shapes desired. Sometimes it takes a bit more than a good shove.
Between smacking it with an eight pound sledge, or the palm of your hand, is a range of other options. Wood mallets of various dimensions, and woods, are usual. Claw hammers are not made for this kind of work, nor are ball peen and other mechanic's hammers.
But.
I made a striking mass for wood carving from a piece of bearing bronze about an inch and a half long, and two inch diameter.
It weighs roughly 800 grams, or a pound and a half.
It is small enough to hold in the fingertips and tap lightly but with authority.
I epoxied a piece of leather to one side to make it a softer strike for some instances. It is more comfortable in the hand when hitting harder to have the leather in your palm. It can strike with all three faces. The round one, the flat one and the leather one. It is a step up from cave man tools but essentially the same as a rock.
The bronze is worth about ten bucks, the leather a few cents, and a few more for the epoxy.
See the pretty picture? Click on it and see it enlarge. The striking mass is the round thingy with the brown leather top.
The carving just beginning, and I am using a large curved chisel to make the outline of the flag. It takes a big collection of chisels to be able to make a wide array of shapes with crisp clean edges. I have been collecting for forty years, and that big curved chisel is from the nineteenth century, with a handle added using a hose fitting as a ferrule some time probably in the twentieth century before I got it in an auction.
Posts
