Featuring the Woodworking of Jim Voss
By Jim
After a very long delay, I finished the set of walnut salad bowls for Andy and Danielle. It wasn’t quite in time to be a wedding gift, but it was only a couple of days late for a house-warming gift.
It turns out the walnut logs from my uncle weren’t properly dried and had severe checking. At least 5 bowls exploded on me. I ended up buying a 8/4 kiln dried walnut board for the bowls. I was able to get the serving bowl out of one of the logs though. You can see how much better the figure is in wood and how much deeper the color is (it’s the one with the natural edge).
They’re finished with three coats Behlen’s Salad Bowl Finish so I don’t poison my friends with the heavy metal driers in other finishes.
Now I can move on to other projects guilt free!
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
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By Jim
Just finished ripping the 8/4 bubinga stock for the legs. Fhew! It’s so hard and dense, the saw blew the breaker 4 times. There’s a bit of burning (as I expected), but i ripped them slightly wide to allow for a quick pass through the jointer or a couple of passes with a hand plane to clean them up. Based on tonight’s experience, I’m guessing I’ll have to sharpen my chisels a few times while squaring up the mortises.
By Jim
While I’ve been hard at work on the walnut bowl set, I’ve taken a few minutes out (mostly when frustrated) to make a few quick projects. I found some interesting wood jewelry on http://www.esty.com and thought I’d give it a try.
Here’s a cross made from chakte viga that I wear. And, two rings made from bloodwood and gaboon ebony. Chakte Viga is quickly becoming my favorite wood.
I opened a store on esty under the name lignified, but I haven’t listed anything yet. If you want me to make you something, just put in a private alchemy request :).Â
Also, this was a good post for me to test out my new portable lightbox.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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By Jim
I started working a walnut salad bowl set for a wedding present for my close friends Andy & Danielle. My Uncle Charlie gave me a couple of walnut log sections he’s had air drying for a decade or so. There’s a bit of end checking as you can see, but with careful layout, I should have enough good wood to make 6 or 8 bowls.
By Jim
I just took a commision from cousin Marvin to make four nesting tables to display his knife collection. He wanted to see drawings first, so I had an excuse to learn how to use Google SketchUp. Very cool. Here are the drawings I produced on my first attempt with the program. More to come on the tables as I progress.
By Jim
I’ve recently been able to get back in to the shop. While working on a toybox for my neice that I started almost two years ago, I stole some time to make a wooden handplane. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while since I found these plans.
After shopping for a while, I found blades for wooden planes from Lee Valley. They gave enough information for me to realize it was basically just a rectangular piece of metal with a bevel ground on one end. Being cheapfrugal, I searched and found a similarly sized piece of the same O1 tool steel from onlinemetals.com. This cost about the same price for a length that would yeild at least three plane blades.
I made the body and wedge out of hard maple, and the sole and pin out of bloodwood. Both hard and dense woods that should last for a long time. As you can see, my metal-working skills aren’t quite up to par, but the blade should do.
There are a couple of other different sets of plans for wooden hand planes that I want to make too:
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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By Jim
I bought a book a while back called Making Mechanical Marvels in Wood and I finally got around to actually building some of them. I’ve made the first two – the cam & follower and the eccentric drive. They’re quick to make, you can use scraps and people love to play with them. I also finally got to start using the fifteen pound box of hardwood scraps I got from Eisenbran’s.
The bases are red oak. The cam is purpleheart. The follower is ebony (I think). The pillow block is maple burl (again, I think). On the eccentric drive, the disc is kingwood. The ring is lacewood. The piston and crank handle are chakte-kok. The rotating pillow block at the top is, um, uh, I don’t know.
These projects call for a lot of dowels – some as small as 1/8″. So, I remembered hearing about how to make your own dowels on the cheap. I took a piece of scratch stock (sheet metal) and drilled a hole for each size dowel I wanted to make. Leave the burr on the exit side, as this will be used to cut the dowel. Cut a strip of wood square slightly larger than the diameter of the dowel. Chuck up the square in your hand drill and push the stick through the hole while rotating it with the drill. You can hold some sandpaper on the dowel while spinning it in the drill to make it a bit smoother. I did turn some of the larger diameter pieces on my lathe, but the smaller ones were quick to make with the method described above.
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