Woodworking Fun

Thank you, very kindly

Fun contest and amazing signs. Nice Roman style.

Grrr, Imrahil

 

@Imrahil : Thanks a lot!

Christmas Presents and Other Gifts 2021 A.D.

These are some simple, and most importantly cheap Christmas presents and other gifts made out of plywood and wood for various family members and friends during 2021.

Hohoho!

Note that the two wild cat presents are based on this lucky photograph.

 

I have been working on my game room.

This is my current project. The wall between the game room and the laundry room.
Sliding doors will be on the shorter cabinets, normal swing doors on the ones with the board games (and ideally, whiteboard materials for the doors for both if I can manage it, for gaming purposes). Note that the shelves are already in use despite not being finished - this is what happens when you have more stuff than storage space.
To the left, where that plywood is, I'm going to install a bank of drawers, and someday the top of this entire cabinet run will have a long shelf on it about a foot deep to hold my Lego train layout.

The green flooring off to the left under the plywood is the new VCT I'm installing. Old stuff is being ripped up in sections and replaced. It is finally getting warmer out, so I can go back to work on that part soon.

This is an early photo of the VCT install job. It looks very nice once installed and sealed. Very shiny, warmer than the concrete, and easy to keep clean. I have a lot of plans for this space. Storage racking for bins full of Lego, wall-mounted cabinets to hold tools, all sorts of stuff. My wife is both annoyed and happy that I'm doing something constructive that makes the house less cluttered-looking.



Not the current, finished product, but part of the Lego storage system. I'm making more of this to the right of the minifridge, but it has to wait until the flooring is installed. Yes, all of those yellow- and red-handled bins are full of Lego, as is the cabinet up top with the white corrugated plastic sliding doors. Books on the shelf above the Lego bins are from various tabletop RPGs. My game room is a multipurpose space.

 

So at my work, there is a contractor who does specialty cabinet work, and he orders bunks of hardwood plywood. To save money/materials, the shipper makes the shipping shell around the good plywood out of sheets of damaged plywood of the same type. Now, the customer can't load the entire bunk in his truck at once, so he removes this shell and hand-loads what he wants. 99% of the time, he does not want the shell. There is nothing WRONG with the boards that make up the shell. A few gouges or some small cracks, that kind of thing. Since it is already paid for, we cannot put it in the cull bin to sell (not legally, anyway) so we take turns as to who gets to take those shell boards home. There is a list that management keeps track of. Very fair.

I got my turn during the winter. 2 sheets of walnut (!!!) plywood, 20" wide and 8' long. I had the lumber DH cut them down to 20"x48" pieces for me. Today, it was finally - FINALLY - warm enough in my garage to set up the table-saw and rip those down into sizes suitable for making bookcases, which I did:

Very nice stuff. Clean edges, very uniform plies, and it turns out the sawdust is good for sopping up oil spills over where we park the car, so I even managed to clean the garage floor some. Only... notice those dark spots on the ends of the top boards? I noticed that the saw wasn't cutting as evenly or cleanly by the time I got to the end of the task. Those dark spots are 'burn' spots from where the blade didn't do as clean a job as it overheated. That is when I learned something I already KNEW, but had forgotten, about walnut plywood.

This is the blade on my tablesaw, after making those cuts. Took about half of the teeth clean off the blade! Walnut plywood be dense, yo...

So while the boards are cut, I could not actually assemble the new shelf units. Instead I went to the store for a new sawblade, and some sandpaper since I happened to be out of it anyway.

 

Yeah, about those walnut plywood boards I cut...

BEHOLD, SHELVING!!!



Holds a lot of gaming stuff. I like sorting army components into those plastic shoeboxes. Two for Troggoths, two for Seraphon, two for Skaven (not next to each other - they'd fight constantly), and so on. Sorting bins on the left-hand second shelf up are for de-sprue'd bitz. Ignore the boxes labeled "Todd," they belong to a friend of mine who needed some storage space while he is between apartments.

 

Awesome!

 

@Tk'ya'pyk : Very good shelving! Nice carpentry there.

Paint Your Tools

Being something of a handyman that people often turn to for help with simple manual labour, you could confidently classify me as a tool user. A colleague would rather have it as a slave, which is reasonable since I mostly work for free, all things considered. My hands will be active at tools, writing on keyboard or turning pages in a book most of my waking time.

Why not bring some joyful colour into the toolkit you're going to use so much?

Even if your life will be filled with mass produced factory wares, you can still put a personal touch on some long-lasting things in your surroundings, as our ancestors have done since time immemorial. Crafting patterns and ornamenting things has a therapeutic quality to it, for good reason. Minimalist modern man is a pauper in regard to decorating his own stuff, compared to his forebears, though there are still places where people dare to pimp their rides, as evidenced by South Asian jingle trucks and Japanese dekotora trucks.

The idea to paint tool shafts was born after viewing through AMELIANVS' late antique and medieval Roman artworks. This artist brings a great deal of lively period detail into garb and gear. Striped spear shafts appear on the famous mosaic of emperor Justinian, and provides a simple idea for upgrading the looks of common tools.

The means were provided after I was gifted left-over facade paints of various kinds, which were put to use first on homemade lightsabers and wooden toy weapons, and then on the tool shafts. Plastic and metal shafts have been spray painted.The recent set of tools painted this week were given a matt varnish spray as an experiment in endurance.

Yes, paint will fade, wear out, flake off and get dirty when you use the tools. That's part of the charm and lifecycle. Viking runestones and classical Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Assyrian statues were also painted, yet all that remains now is the carved stone, seemingly eternal. As grey as an unpainted miniature collection.

I can recommend painting your tools in your favourite colour and colour combinations. I painted those I am going to use red and blue, the colours of Karak Norn, which are my Warhammer army colours and incidentally also the Carolean regimental colours of my landscape province.

 

Christmas Presents and Other Gifts 2022 A.D.

These are some simple, and most importantly cheap Christmas presents and other gifts made out of plywood and wood for various family members and friends during 2022.

 

Christmas Presents and Other Gifts 2023 A.D.

These are some simple, and most importantly cheap Christmas presents and other gifts made out of wood for various family members and friends during 2023.

The cat portraits are based on this photograph.





Here is the background for the Astro-Ungarian officer:

Portrait of an Astro-Ungarian Lieutenant Colonel

Depicted here is Lieutenant Colonel Arpad Heinz Josef Milan von Badenschtoss, a noble officer of the Imperial and Royal armed forces of Astro-Ungaria. Sworn to serve the Duarch and the Emperor, von Badenschtoss is an honest-to-Chorus Ringestrasse soldier, an upstanding exemplar of his dear homeworld's corset army, according to serpent-tongued detractors. A hard-drinking man fond of gambling, dancing at balls and other forms of highborn socializing, Lieutenant Colonel Arpad cannot be expected to attend to his military duties with the utmost zeal. Standards must be maintained, after all!

And so, a sloppy schlamperei conduct of operations in the field follows wherever von Badenschtoss leads. Yes, the logistics and worn-out uniforms of the men might be in shambles, but at least the bravery, infantry marksmanship and artillery is in fine shape. Too bad about the costly butcher's bill, but that is a problem for General von Dorfenhötz to solve by shovelling in more reinforcements. It is just the way of things, better not think too much about it. Death must be Ljietranese, after all. It is better instead to drink up and be merry!

A toast for the splendid homeworld! A toast for the Duarch! A toast for the divine Chorus! And a toast for the God-Emperor of Holy Terra!

To waltz! Now let us swagger about and drink like good Loyalists should. Last one to finish their drink is feed for the moon wolves. Cheers!

Ave Imperatore Dei.

- - -

Christmas present made for my friend Jaberoo.

Note the suspicious symbols and purity seal writ on the Astro-Ungarian officer. Astro-Ungaria has somehow managed to retain the Divine Chorus (also known as Saint Horus) as not only a revered figure from its past, but as its patron saint. Clearly, the Imperial Cult must have already been festering on Compliant Astro-Ungaria when its star system became isolated by Warp storms at the onset of the Horus Heresy. This background twist serve twofold purposes:


First, it showcases the confused mess of the Imperium of Man in comedic fashion (just imagine the parade of random shenanigans through the ages that has made Loyalist Astro-Ungaria escape great purges for its unwitting heresy). Second, this ancient reverence for the Luna Wolves of yore is a reference to the Austro-Hungarian soldiers that were eaten by wolves in the Carpathian mountains in 1915, during Franz Konrad von Hötzendorf's threefold offensive to relieve the besieged fortress city of Przemyśl.