The trickiest thing we did this weekend was steam bend the stems. The trial run that I did with the oak turned out okay, with just a little bit of splitting. When I bent the mahogany, the outer piece split at the tightest part of the turn. I thought perhaps the wood was too dry, so I looked for a place to soak it overnight that wouldn't merit the disapproval of my family. That ruled out the sink, bath and washing machine. I thought about the fish pond, but was pretty certain that my wood would get pitched into the forest without a second thought by the fishkeeper. I settled on the filter pond. Tomorrow I will try to re-bend the stems.
After the first run of planking dried, I tried my hand at planing it down. First of all, having the molds only loosely clamped in place didn't help things-- It was moving all over the place! I also learned the importance of machining the planks for edge grain. The boards with face grain were tearing out like crazy!
The final lesson of the day was that I can only do about four planks at a time. Towards the top of the run, I wasn't getting enough clamping pressure and the boards didn't seat completely. You don't see it at first, but when you start to plane past the edges of the cove, big gaps start to appear.
All in all, I'm not upset. I fully expected things to go wrong. The whole point of this exercise was to find out what would fail and how we could improve on it later.
No comments:
Post a Comment