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Hi all, newbie here. First homemade tool, following the great Paul Sellers' instructions (although modified as I could only get 12mm steel). I'm very pleased, and it even cuts well! (excuse the state of the workshop....)
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Very nice,
I'm getting into turning now. Yes I have a cheap Clarke CWL1000 lathe and the cheap tools it came with. View attachment 123145
Cheap don't always mean bad, gotta start somewhere, at the minute I only have a bowl gouge, spindle roughing gouge and a skew, as I get better and sell a few bits I will be able to buy more tools and improve my skills and what I'm able to produce 😀
 
Model of Al-Khazneh, Petra. 23 x 32 inches. I did it because I first saw the structure in a photo magazine ~40 years ago and wanted to model it in the light of sunrise. I could not find instructions on posting pictures to your site so please delete my submission if it violates your directives.

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Model of Al-Khazneh, Petra. 23 x 32 inches. I did it because I first saw the structure in a photo magazine ~40 years ago and wanted to model it in the light of sunrise. I could not find instructions on posting pictures to your site so please delete my submission if it violates your directives.View attachment 123251
Thats beautiful, how long did it take you?
 
Thats beautiful, how long did it take you?
Thank you! It took forever. I began in late 2019 expecting to complete it by August 2020 and enter it in the Minnesota State Fair. The fair is a big deal here, with 2 million-plus attendees in 2019. When it was canceled because of COVID, I took a needed break. When I resumed work I realized I was out of my depth but plodded on, learning how to make the turret from plaster cloth gauze and the surround from extruded polystyrene insulation. The color was especially difficult. My first effort was a drab brown. My wife vetted it and told me "no". I bought many 8 oz. cans of acrylic paint samples, mixed and matched them and when I got a hue I liked, had a couple of cans custom mixed. The color was "right" but the piece still had no depth until I used Earth Pigments, dry and nontoxic powders from France (very reasonably priced in the US), which I dusted on with a brush to get an orangish overtone which I applied selectively to the left side of the model to get a simulation of directed light. I finished in mid-August 2021. The State Fair was an anticlimax for me. We and our friends from the East Coast, all in our 70s, were scared of the Delta version of Covid although we were fully vaccinated with boosters too. We did not attend. When I claimed the model after the Fair I saw it had been placed behind 3 full-sized canoes in poor visibility. It now lives on the mail table in our front hallway.
 
The first of five rosewood handled parers. I love the feel of rosewood with the pores filled. These don't look like anything unusual, but I attached a picture of the side of the grind so you can see the profile of the parers that I hammer and grind out - it's nice when they are "the old way", with curves, like nature. This chisel tapers a couple of hundredths in width so that when it's deep in a dado, it doesn't bind, and the front is a little over a tenth of an inch and the tang thickness is about 0.23 - the thickness taper is fast at first (curved) and then leaves the bulk of the business end of the chisel relatively thin (they're only about 0.13-.14 thickness in the middle when the bevel end is .11" or so.
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After the bits of handling here, it needs one last refresh on the metal and wood and then it'll be off. You can see some distortion on the filed bolster - I've never seen those finished really well on an old chisel but the finish level on the rest of the blade is maybe a little overboard.

I'll test pare with this chisel in rosewood shortly. It shouldn't really be bothered by anything as it's tempered to C64 in the same steel I like to use for all of the chisels now - 26c3. The steel is fine grained and there are no big carbides roaming around in it and it hardens to a very high hardness out of the quench (about 68) coming back to a nice temper at light straw.

As mentioned, the other four will look about the same with handles decreasing in size slightly as the width of the chisel decreases. They sharpen relatively easily despite the hardness due to the fact that there's no chromium or vanadium running around in them to resist a sharpening stone.
 
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Nothing new made for the last couple of days but have been roughing a few bits of silver birch to shape and filling cracks with glue, I use a Locktite brand of gel glue that dries/sets to a flexible rubber like substance, today I finished one of them and turned a very small oak dish, both sanded to 320 and friction polished with furniture wax
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finished the parers. it may look like the handle on the next to smallest is too short compared to the smallest, but it's a trick - I never evened the length of the chisels out, so I slid it down a little else the bevel end looks like a finger that got in a jointer.

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grinding blades back to make them all identical length isn't my specialty.

Total cost to make a set of chisels like this (after you make some that you have to throw away - I don't know, that part goes away with some experience) is about $125. It depends on how much grinding and what handles.

I know the tradition was to use relatively inexpensive wood for handles, so I don't make handles out of ebony (I have a lot of it, it just starts to border on being prissy at some point, and these aren't that).

There is one step left on these before I box them and send them off - tape off the bolsters and finish a thin french polish on the handles until the pores are mostly gone. then if they're used ( I sure hope they get used), the person using them just needs to touch up shellac every decade or so of actual use to keep them nice (and the pores will stay filled).

I did put a maker's mark on them, but it's on the underside, stamped into the metal, not printed on (I hate that). I guess an etch would be permanent, but etch or laser would be very undude on this style of chisel.
 
Not the last thing I've made, rather the first thing I made that is in active service in the house instead of the workshop; a small hack of an Ikea shoe cupboard where the shelf is too narrow to be of any use. The plan was to put a front on the drawer but I don't really want to cover it up :)

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I haven't yet got started with hand tools, although I want to, so the joints were made on this jig for my homemade router table:

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Asymmetrical turning.
Decided to something with a lump of hawthorn I was given and had a go at Asymmetrical turning.
Some general observations.
Definitely not for "entry level"
The name finger breaker for this style is apt! I didn't break anything but had a nasty thump due to a moments inattention!
It's a little unnerving when the bowl gouge hits wood then air then wood continually but with gentle slow, small tool movements it gets the job done.
I experienced difficulty in seeing the shape where the gaps in the wood was as it was turning and used chalk (as the wood was dark) to highlight the high spots which worked quite well.
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