As it sometimes goes the last couple of weeks in the shop have been focused on a series of small projects.
The first one was two more pocket knives that I wanted to put wooden scales onto. One of the knives was from a box of small knife bodies and other leather hardware that came from Noymer Leather back when my father was alive and worked there. Probably 30 years or more ago, it is the small rectangular one. It didn’t have any scales and was probably going to be covered in leather at the factory. The other was an old Swiss Army knife which I just popped the scales off of and used the originals as a template to cut out the veneers. I cut the scales on my scroll saw and did the fine shaping on my sanding station. The finish was just natural danish oil and then paste wax. I attached them to the knife bodies with J.B. Weld epoxy that I carefully brushed on in a distribution so that it wouldn’t squeeze out very much.
The second project was a cart for my beautiful and talented wife’s new shop tool, an electric drum carder. A drum carder is used to process fibers from sheep, plants, and other animals into clean organized rolls of fiber that can be spun into yarn. I built the cart for her “shop” the same way as I do for my shop, screwed together out of 3/4” natural birch plywood with a single fixed shelf inside for rigidity and a 1/4” natural birch plywood back. It is on locking heavy duty casters.
I went ahead and sanded the edges and corners so they wouldn’t snag the fiber and I put some handles on each end made from some ash scrapwood that I had from another project.
The third project was a small Niddy Noddy which is a tool for winding yard after you have spun it. It both organizes the yarn and because each winding around the device is a specific length allows you to figure out how many yards of yarn you’ve spun. This one is a 1 yard Niddy Noddy. It is designed to disassemble into three pieces so that it can be packed in a carrying sack for bringing to spinning and weaving classes. I dubbed it the “Mini Noddy.” I sanded everything to 320 grit and applied a couple of coats of paste wax.
The final project was a Lazy Kate which is a series of spindles on a platform that bobbins with yarn can be placed on while plying. Plying is the activity of taking one or more single ply yarns and combining them by winding them together into a new multi-ply yarn. This particular one is made to fold up for portability to weaving and spinning classes.
The platform is a glue up of Sappele and Rock Maple and I was able to use my new Jointer/Planer on this and it put a wonderful surface on it as well as making the glue-up near perfect. The pivot points are 1/2” dowels and I got a special drill bit to drill the holes 1/64” oversize to allow clearance for the dowels to pivot. I put 1/4” - 20 threads onto brass rods for the spindles and threaded 1/4” - 20 thread size holes in the dowels to screw them into. It took many tries to use the tapping die to cut the threads on the brass rods straight but I got it. I didn’t want to just glue them into the dowels because I feared in the process of gluing them the squeeze out would also glue the dowel to the hole. We’ll see how this all holds up in use. I cut the channels for the rods to lay down in with my router with the side fence on it.
I just sanded everything to 320 grit and then put a couple of coats of paste wax on it which I find works good with weaving tools.
That’s the update for now…