October 2015 – goatboys woodshop

After a great deal of thought into the design of my auger box, I was faced with a choice between a flat box, rather like the one I built to house my mortice chisels, and a tall box which would store the augers in an upright position. Since the flat box was something I had already built, and since it would need several spring clips (30+) to hold the augers in position, I decided on the tall box. The design I came up with was a dovetailed box with a lid cut at an angle, the lower half of the box being solid with a series of holes to take the augers. I wanted to keep the weight down so I decided to use balsa for the majority of the solid core, topped with a panel of the same material as the box itself, which in this case is chestnut. Continue reading “Auger box” →

Many moons ago, when I decided to give unplugged woodworking a whirl, the first order of business was to amass a modest collection of the appropriate tools. I quickly identified six main areas to consider: measuring, marking, chiseling, planing, sawing and boring.

The measuring side of things wasn’t an issue as I already had tape measures and rulers and suchlike; and the marking was taken care of relatively cheaply with the purchase of a small Stanley fold away knife and a second-hand marking gauge. My bench chisels were a present from my children on Father’s Day last year, followed up with my mortice chisels this year. That just left the planes, hand saws and hand drills.

I quickly built up a reasonable collection of hand planes (nos #3 – 7) which have served me very well so far, and it wasn’t long before I had half a dozen saws, both panel and tenon, rip and crosscut. These were all found on eBay, for very reasonable prices, and with a little restorative tinkering were pressed into service very quickly. It was the hand drills that posed the biggest problem. Continue reading “For the sake of completeness” →