Old stuff from the Spanish Pyrenees. Iron

This time a compilation of all kinds of old iron. Door knockers, bolts, hinges, stuff like that. I don't remember which was where exactly, so, without comment. Most have interesting decorations.

Old stuff from the Spanish Pyrenees, wood.

My wife and me visited the Spanish Pyrenees for about three weeks, trekking around, walking in the mountains and visiting a bunch of very old little villages and towns. In this blog I'd like to share some pictures from some wooden stuff I found down there.

First the wooden stuff, in the next blog some iron. You can click the images to enlarge them.

Always nice, wooden doors, this one in a 11th century hermit's chappel at Tella, The door itself surely isn't that old! But it fits nice in the surroundings.

Could use a paint brush... (Benasque).

A  nicely carved bench in the Basilica de la Pena in Graus.

In Alquezar, also a medieval town, this decorated cabinet in the Church of Santa Maria.

In the same church a very long cabinet with plenty of drawers. It sure looked like it was made of pine. Nice decorations.

A similar cabinet in Roda de Isabona, in the Cathedral.

In the same cathedral a joined stool of "some importance".

And a detail (the armrest doesn't look very original).

Hey, staked furniture! A bench in the courtyard of the same cathedral.

In the Val de Boi, there are a couple of Romanic parish churches that are quite original yet. In one of them I found this replica of a medieval church bench.

And some typically Romanic (10th-11th century) statues of Jesus on the cross and Maria with Jesus.

The door frames

In my last post I wrote that I started a new project, a bathroom cabinet. I didn't really introduce this new project, so here is a short intro.

I've always been smitten by the looks of the 17 century English carved chests. But I don't have any need for a chest like that. But those chests really look like they could be converted to a cabinet with small doors in the front instead of those panels. The lid doesn't need to be a lid anymore in a cabinet like that, it can be a fixed top with plenty of room for a sink, making it suitable for our bathroom.

I don't know if it is very visible in this picture but here are the drawings I am working from. (click on the picture to enlarge it)

The way I started ths project is a bit haphazard. First the bottom boards, now the doors. The doors are good to make now, so they are a reference for the size of the rest of the frontpanel. These are standard frame and panel doors, so I dressed the wood for the rails and styles. Here are a few pictures of the mortise and tenon construction proces.

Chopping out the mortises. I like to work like this. A clamp to prevent the wood from splitting, working above a leg of the bench and fixing the style in position with a holdfast. Diagonally so I can stand in line with the style to keep the chisel nicely vertical. I chop the mortise with one of my Dutch mortise chisels, allthough this one is made in Germany, way back in the 19th century.

Mortising isn't that much work, tenoning takes me more time. Here are a few little tricks. When I saw the shoulders, I like to undercut on purpose. This makes fitting the tenon easier. Especially when the inside shoulder is a bit gappy. A gap on the inside makes it much easier to get the visible outside shoulder really tight.

Oh, and another usefull little trick. My eyes are slowly but surely loosing their youthfull strength. I can't always see the knife lines very well anymore. It really helps to switch off the overhead lights and only work with light from the side, which throws a dark, very visible shadow line. Hard to see in the top picture, much better in the picture below, as far as my Iphone captures this.

I do saw the shoulders, but I split the cheeks.  The grain of this cherry wood isn't very straight, but when I take small bites, the split rarely wanders in the wrong direction. I do these cheeks in 3 or 4 splits. First split to see in which direction the split is going to wander, second or third split to remove most of the wood and the last split in the marking gauge line.

And that's 3 door frames. Mortise and tenon joints done. I still need to run some grooves and cut of the horns.

Sharpening a saw really helps!

Yes yes, I know. No apologies about neglecting my blog. I am just one of these victims of Instagram (for a link, look above). But a blog is a better place to pause a bit longer on certain subjects. Anyway, after doing loads of jobs around the house, upgrading the entrance of the garage, lots of painting etc, I am back to normal woodworking. The bathroom cabinet needs to be build.

For the bottom boards of this cabinet I still had some leftover wallnut from the dining room table project. It's mostly sap wood, but perfectly suitable for something like this. One problem though, it still was one massive piece about 5 cm thick. Crosscutting in smaller sections made it more managable.

My humble workshop friends, the planer and tablesaw, helped to square these boards. Then I  used the tablesaw to rip into the board's edges as far as the blade allowed. 6 cm from both sides.

That left me with 12 cm in the middle to cut away with my trusty 4 1/2 tpi rip saw. A job I have been avoiding for quite some time allready.

Well, in the end it was all half as bad. It's hard work, but goes relatively quickly. But, as the title sais, it really helps to sharpen your saw first! I did the first board without resharpening the saw. It has been used quite a lot but still didn't seem too bad. It took me almost 20 minutes.

Then I decided to give the saw a quick once-over. A light jointing, then filing the teeth until they were razor sharp again.

The next board went quite a bit quicker. I cut the time in two, only 10 minutes for a 54 cm long, 12 cm deep resaw in wallnut! Not bad.

The last board is a little narrower and took even less time of course. So, all in all, in less then two hour I was through the entire stack, including extended tea breaks and sharpening the saw. I do feel my arms though!

A board split open and the sawdust on the workbench

And all the boards together, ready for further processing.

Making strike knob buttons

On old English planes, especially the longer ones, you often find a strike knob on the front part of the stock, made from wood. On Dutch planes you find similar strike buttons, but they are invariably made from steel. I had an old, worn out plane, and I sacrificed it to get hold of the button so I could replicate it. Here is how I go about making them.

First on the lathe I turn a spike-like shape, but still in the round. I don't turn to a point, that comes later.

Then I use a large bastard file to create the flats, so the result goes from round to square. Still in the lathe, not rotating of course! The four jaw chuck gives a nice visual to make the square as square as possible, allthough I don't pretent it turns out perfectly. Counting file strokes helps to keep everything more or less symetric. First I file the straight part.

And then I file the tapered part. this also brings the spike to a point. When you don't leave enough material when turning, this step will strongly shorten the spike.

Then I turn it around in the chuck and shape the head. Rough shape with the lathe tools, then refining the shape with a file. (a sacrificial washer behind the head to protect the chuck).

When I am happy with the shape I bring it to the vise and use a hammer to give the head a hammer finish. Which means hammering the surface to create small facets all around.

And that's one finished strike button. After this I will heat it up with a propane torch to cherry red and let it cool slowly to give it a nice black color. Finish with linseed oil.

Here is a strike button on the front of my new jointer plane. You hit it to retract the blade or you hit it very hard to loosen the wedge.

The smoother is finished!

Making the coffin shape wasn't very difficult. Cut the corners with a ripsaw, smooth the curve with a chisel and a block plane and finish with a scraper. More difficult were the chamfers on this rounded shape. I really strugled. I'm also not too happy with the round corners at the rear of th eplane, they are not very well defined, a bit too much sandpaper!

But the plane works very well!

I must reduce the camber a little bit, story of my life...

Today I started with the next plane, a tryplane. First I did the metal work, a 2 1/4" blade for the tryplane and a 2 1/2" for a jointer plane. It was the usual hard work to get everything flat and coplanar, but I succeeded in the end. Can't get my nails clean anymore.

And I cut into this billet of beech to find some wood in between the end checks on one side and the worm holes on the other side. I didn't succeed entirely, I will have to hide two wormholes somehow later on.

Tuning the smoother

Today I got around finally to work on the smoother again. First problem to tackle were problems with the feeding of the shavings through the mouth of the plane. Better said, no shavings actually wanted to feed through the mouth. The plane clogged immediately with the shaving wrinkling up like an accordeon between capiron and wear of the plane.

It took some itterations to fix the problem. First I polished the edge of the capiron, making sure there was absolutely no burr left on the edge. The fit between capiron an cutting blade is very good, so no problem there,

Next was the wear, There still were some rough spots, so I polished everything up as good as possible. This of course opened up the mouth a bit more. At the end the mouth was around 1mm, starting to get rather large. With the capiron set further from the edge the plane now worked very well. But with the cap set close to the edge, still no joy!

I decided to compare with another wooden smoother, a Nooitgedagt. This one has a wear angle of 80 degrees, while mine was 75. So, another round with the chisel, and this finally did the trick.

Thick shavings, thin shavings, doesn't matter, it feeds through the mouth effortlessly. So the mouth is a little wider then first intended, but I'd rather have a plane working correctly then a theroretical perfect design.

Actually, the plane is now very much like the smoothing plane in the Seaton Chest. That one has a mouth of 0.9mm (calculated from the descriptions) and a wear angle of 89 degrees (almost vertical). So I feel in good company.

Tight mouths and a capiron set close to the edge is a troublesome combination in a wooden plane.