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…

I was just thinking about how pleasurable it is to have a shop, tools, materials, and hardware and be able to have an idea for a solution to a problem and be able to implement it in a day or less.

The shoe rack above was inspired by needing to keep our shoes with laces organized in our foyer which has a door that closes on the inside. This is critical because one of our cats, who we’ll call “the nibbler,” has taken to snipping shoe laces by nibbling them when you least expect it. I can’t emphasize how much fun it is to be about to go somewhere, pull on your shoes, and have the laces come away in your hands. I’m sure it amuses the cat.

I built it in an hour or so out of off-cuts from previous projects and using only hardware I had in the shop already.

Sometimes you just see materials around the shop and an idea will enter your mind and you can have a short side quest following that inspiration. This pocket knife was like that. I was cleaning up the shop and I moved a box that had a bunch of small knives with no scales on them that I inherited when we cleaned out my father’s shop years ago. My father was a mechanic who maintained industrial sewing machines at a leather goods factory in what is now called the Seaport District in Boston. He brought these home from work, I guess they were supposed to be covered in leather.

I had some beautiful veneers made out of wenge wood and curly maple left over from my recent clock project and I realized that they would make cool scales for one of these knives.

A little bit of gluing, cutting, sanding, finishing and I had created a pocket knife that I carry now.

It can also be motivated by finally overcoming inertia and fixing a problem that has been lingering for years. Like the sand paper organizer above. I’ve been stuffing sand paper containers into a jumbled drawer and having them pop open and jam the drawer or spill their contents forcing me to re-sort them by grit when they all mix together. This has always irritated me, but I put off doing “the right thing” for a very long time. Recently, I recovered a bunch of 1/2” plywood from a wine storage case that we no longer use ( turns out we are wine drinkers, not collectors ). I saw this blank space on the back of this bench, and had just experienced the frustration again and in a couple of hours I had fabricated this organizer.

Or someone else has an idea and I can help them execute the idea. My neighbor had the piece of wood with a hole cut in it ( was left over from a kitchen remodel ) and wanted to use it as the lid for a cold frame to start plants outside.

We were talking about it and I volunteered to build the cold frame and also use up some scrap wood and other materials that I had around the shop. Even the primer was from a prior project.

It took less than a day if you don’t count paint drying time….

And finally you might be married to a beautiful and talented woman who does spinning and weaving. In this case there are many “tools of the trade” like the “temple” above which is an expandable bar that can be used to keep the width of a weaving project consistent by gripping the edges in this case with spiky teeth and applying outward tension.

It is fun making functional items and seeing them used to make beautiful things. Also many of these tools have a history that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years.

I love having a shop and being able to do these kinds of projects, they may not be elaborate or difficult, but they deliver a solution and a great deal of satisfaction.

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