This coming Tuesday evening September 16, at 7:00 PM, you will find me in Dallas, at the North Texas Woodworkers Assc. Meeting. I will be there letting off some steam! Seriously, I will be demonstrating steam bending techniques during this presentation. I will be going over several topics, from choosing your wood and building your […]
See our previous posts on how to choose a sharpening stone. In view of what I’ve learned from many years of experience using different sharpening stone systems, I’ve settled on using the diamond stones mentioned in the previous post, following the finest diamond stone with a hard translucent oil stone. I’ve chosen this stone because it’s hard, […]
See our previous posts on how to choose a sharpening stone. Similar to the other types of stones, diamond stones come in different grits. One thing to keep in mind with all sharpening stones is that the Japanese grit system is different from the American grit system. So when I talk about an 8,000-grit water stone, it’s different […]
See our previous post on water stones. Now we move on to oil stones. There are many different types of oil stones available, from man-made to natural oil stones. They’re harder than the water stones but they also wear out. They also do need to be flattened from time to time, especially the coarser ones as […]
I think that sharpening is one of the most important aspects to hand tool woodworking. As my tools become dull, I’ve found that the quality of my work also goes down. So therefore, it’s extremely important that your tools are razor sharp. In this blog tutorial series, we’re going to go over sharpening all edge tools: […]
Thursday: last day of the class. We bolted the bases together and lag bolted the base to the top. The project finally started to look like a workbench! We then installed the front vises, glued and fit the dogs, glued and screwed the runners on for the shelf and tool tray, and sanded the dovetails. […]
Wednesday: We marked and drilled with a 3/8 bit for the oak pegs that strengthen the mortise and tenon joints. Putting in the pegs, we then used a Japanese saw to cut the pegs down to just proud of the surface. Then we made sure the place were the tail-vise attached the the bench was […]
Tuesday, Day 8 of our workbench class: Scraped each piece that was going to be glued on but that couldn’t be easily accessed after gluing. Next we glued on the outside edges of the bench, the end-caps and dovetailed pieces. We constantly double checked to make sure nothing was glued on backwards or upside-down–easy to […]
We have finished the workbench class and got a little behind on keeping you up to date on what was accomplished each day. So we will be posting over the next few days some of the different steps that it took to finish the benches. It was really a great class and everyone left with […]