At work we recently moved into a new office, which was celebrated by everyone getting actually decent chairs that normal people can sit on for more than fifteen seconds without developing back-ache. Unfortunately my neck-ache persisted, and I eventually worked out that it was because I was sitting funny 'cause my work laptop is far, far too low to realistically use it to work on at a desk.
Now, a while ago, a timber yard near where I live unfortunately went into administration, and in one of the various ensuing liquidation auctions I picked up half a van of random lengths of ash staves for a song:
My partner and I both quite like ash, so I expected it would be pretty easy to find something to do with it. (The sycamore in the same picture is earmarked for a wardrobe, but I have a lot of work ahead before I can get close to that project. In the interim the offcuts from cutting it into roughly-a-bit-bigger-than-necessary-size fed the barbecue all summer.)
Diversion number two: I also needed to build this:
which allows me to actually glue up things larger than the workbench. It's a 5x4' semi-torsion-box table that lowers down from the ceiling on a series of pulleys, which I've found invaluable since installing it for glue-ups and finishing and so on. I'm still tempted to buy a cheap electric winch to do the raising and lowering, though. It turns out that 6:1 is a fine mechanical advantage for the table itself, but not for the table plus a square metre of 20mm laminated ash and all my longest clamps!
Anyway, that made it much easier to laminate the ash into boards that I could make actual things with:
(This is one of the narrower ones - I've been laminating a lot of the staves up and preparing boards with them just 'cause I know I'll find things to do with them sooner or later and they're a lot easier to store like that! There's been a couple of pleasant (olive ash) and half-pleasant (ripple grain) surprises as I go.
While I was there, I took a bit of the ash off-cuts to do something fun:
I'm afraid I was a bit negligent in not taking photos of the in-between stages of this next bit, but I was concentrating on the half-blind dovetail sockets, which I'd not done before - it seemed like a good practice project, since ultimately it just has to hold a laptop twenty centimetres off the desk and will be covered up nearly all the time anyway. The previously-laminated ash board - having been planed and scraped smooth - was cut to the correct height and some sockets chiselled into it, leaving me with this:
...which I was dead chuffed with until I realised that the laptop has a docking station that I have to fit it to every morning, and there's no way that I could balance the damn thing on just one of these slats, so I had to add another one in the middle after the fact:
(At this point I also damaged one of the slats with over-enthusiastic sanding while under the fading influence of Special Hospital Drugs, but while I'm a lot more confident about cutting a socket to fit a dovetail, I'm not sure I could do it the other way around, so the mistake will have to stay.)
I then took it to work and dry-fit it together on my desk to test it out for a week. Satisfied with the result (and with a less-sore neck) I brought it home, added a couple of runners for a hypothetical future drawer addition, and finished it off:
Now, a while ago, a timber yard near where I live unfortunately went into administration, and in one of the various ensuing liquidation auctions I picked up half a van of random lengths of ash staves for a song:
My partner and I both quite like ash, so I expected it would be pretty easy to find something to do with it. (The sycamore in the same picture is earmarked for a wardrobe, but I have a lot of work ahead before I can get close to that project. In the interim the offcuts from cutting it into roughly-a-bit-bigger-than-necessary-size fed the barbecue all summer.)
Diversion number two: I also needed to build this:
which allows me to actually glue up things larger than the workbench. It's a 5x4' semi-torsion-box table that lowers down from the ceiling on a series of pulleys, which I've found invaluable since installing it for glue-ups and finishing and so on. I'm still tempted to buy a cheap electric winch to do the raising and lowering, though. It turns out that 6:1 is a fine mechanical advantage for the table itself, but not for the table plus a square metre of 20mm laminated ash and all my longest clamps!
Anyway, that made it much easier to laminate the ash into boards that I could make actual things with:
(This is one of the narrower ones - I've been laminating a lot of the staves up and preparing boards with them just 'cause I know I'll find things to do with them sooner or later and they're a lot easier to store like that! There's been a couple of pleasant (olive ash) and half-pleasant (ripple grain) surprises as I go.
While I was there, I took a bit of the ash off-cuts to do something fun:
I'm afraid I was a bit negligent in not taking photos of the in-between stages of this next bit, but I was concentrating on the half-blind dovetail sockets, which I'd not done before - it seemed like a good practice project, since ultimately it just has to hold a laptop twenty centimetres off the desk and will be covered up nearly all the time anyway. The previously-laminated ash board - having been planed and scraped smooth - was cut to the correct height and some sockets chiselled into it, leaving me with this:
...which I was dead chuffed with until I realised that the laptop has a docking station that I have to fit it to every morning, and there's no way that I could balance the damn thing on just one of these slats, so I had to add another one in the middle after the fact:
(At this point I also damaged one of the slats with over-enthusiastic sanding while under the fading influence of Special Hospital Drugs, but while I'm a lot more confident about cutting a socket to fit a dovetail, I'm not sure I could do it the other way around, so the mistake will have to stay.)
I then took it to work and dry-fit it together on my desk to test it out for a week. Satisfied with the result (and with a less-sore neck) I brought it home, added a couple of runners for a hypothetical future drawer addition, and finished it off:
