Slow and steady

Had an old dial indicator and lots of left over MDF. so......



A Charles Fox style thickness gauge. Thank you Kathy Matsushita for the idea.

I found some rosewood for a fretboard, and for a bridge. Onto the ukulele top.

Bench #1 done!!!

So I finished my first workbench. Its 49 x 24 with a 7" vise. The top has a array of 3/4" holes for hold-downs and bench dogs. The front jaw of the vise as well.



The top is 3 3/4" layers of MDF skinned with 1/4" hardboard.

The thing is on casters so it can be moved around our small shop/laundry.


Finally, I found a used 15" drill press, so not more excuses.



I have the requisite minimum set of power tools to build. So.. Onward!!!!! Oh, and the Ikea counter top is now, of course, dead flat. It will end up being the top of bench #2, whenever that happens

Well........

Its been raining here in the greater DC area for several days (or has it been weeks). I cut the two MDF boards to size for the top of the bench and picked up the 5/8" IKEA top to cut it and found...



I mean serious warped. The center the bulge is about 1/4" high (low). The MDF is fine. I suspect the nice people at IKEA oiled the top surface and not the bottom (which is the side that swelled).

I've decided to go with a third layer of MDF and laminate 1/8" hardboard all around to finish it.

Maybe the hardwood will flatten and can be used for a table. Or a bowl.

Rolling benches

So four hours later, the frame has retractable casters. Essentially, there are a set of rails



inset inside the legs (from 2 x 4s) and a pair of 2 x 4 hinged with two 2 1/2 swivel casters. The picture on top is the caster plate folded under the frame, lifting the bench about 3/4 inches off the floor. All held together and to the legs with lag bolts. To engage/disengage the caster, lift up an end and grab or kick the casters with your foot. Lower tech than the table saw base. But it works well.




Next, gluing up the top. But first, need a cutting guide for the circular saw. Meta projects.

Benched

I've been off-line for a bit. Suffering from the dog-in-Rome syndrome. I started getting parts in for my drum sander (24" width). Then I got a bunch of great cigar boxes and thought, "I'll make a CB ukulele". Then came a dial guage and I thought, "I'll make a thickness guage". I then realized, " I have too many projects started and nowhere to carry them out."

So the current project is the bench above. Its 24 x 49 and ~35" high. It will have a 7" vise under the overhang. The top is two layers of 3/4" MDF and an IKEA 5/8" counter-top. The base of 4x4 legs with 2x4 spreaders and 3/8" threaded rod to hold it together. I plan to put casters that fold out of the way so I can move this around.

The Bends, and the Bender

So here is Big Bertha, the side bender.

I abandoned the idea of using the hot plate controller when 1) I realized the little nichrome coil is a "booster" that compensates for the heat loss of the huge aluminum bracket that thermally connects the heating element to the bimetallic strip contact. So it would not have really worked. Since the charcoal-starter was 500 Watts, a simple 600 watt dimmer works just fine and is more compact. And a mere 6 dollars

Bending the heater was tricky and in fact, I overbent it producing a "crack" in the outer copper, which is filled with a long nichrome coil and sand.

The exposed coil was not shorted to the copper shield and still heats evenly so I stuffed it down the 2" pipe, supporting the terminal ends with a wad of aluminum foil to keep the leads centered and not shorting each other. This was wired to the dimmer. The whole things sits on rescue plywood.

I plugged it in and...... no go. So out with the multimeter. And it was fine, but I had the "on" and "off "confused. The exposed nichrome makes a handy initial heads up for whether the coil is heating. I'll borrow a IR temperature gauge from work on Tuesday and calibrate.

Meanwhile, I had to try it. I trotted off to the local Woodcraft and bought a couple of pieces of 1/16" walnut. On and "sizzling", I tried to start bending. This is an incredibly tactile process. Initially, nothing was happening even with the wood drying out and sizzling. At some currently unknown temperature, the springy, stiff board yielded like soft metal, wrapping itself around the 2" diameter pipe almost effortlessly. Its a magical feeling to hold this sinuous piece of wood that was just moments before a straight board.

The wood was 1/16" which is a little thin for guitar side (0.090" to 0.085"). I am planning to build a thickness sander next from plans I got off the web (that will take a while), so I am looking around locally for a place to get some wood (mail order) and thickness it elsewhere.

Off to Baltimore for fireworks tonight and Community Forklift tomorrow (a Federal holiday) to look for rescue wood, steel rods and pulleys for the sander. TTFN and a Happy 4th.

Scrounging parts - The physical chemist's trade

I've started to build the bending iron from a design on the web shown here. I bought a foot and a half of 2" diameter steel pipe, 3 feet of 5/16" threaded rod and an appropriate number of nuts and washers. The poor dead beast above just needs the heating element and to be attached to a platform. The electric charcoal starter is on the way (Home Despot no longer sells them). I've got ridiculous amounts of scrap 3/4" plywood to make a base. One remaining question. How to control the temperature?

Being an out of practice physical chemist, I thought, buy a temperature programmer, but $150 later, it seemed less appealing. The the idea of a 1000W dimmer seemed crude. No good way to get reproducible settings. Then I remembered the words of my Ph.D. advisor: "scrounge". I dug out the old Thermolyne hot plate behind my power tools collecting dust (so much for the grand organizational effort).

I opened it up and found the answer, a bimetallic heat control in parallel with the hot plate surface. So all I need to do is disconnect the hot plate element (the red wires) and connect the charcoal starter. Voila! The best part is, it doesn't destroy the hot plate so I can use if for heating other goodies at a later date.

Stay tuned!!!