Beautiful!
Wow. Wish I could afford your work.
Stunning.
Don’t we all
That is a Very Beautiful Thing, Bobster. Be a damn shame to ever put anything actually on it.
That just needs a good, hard looking-at
thanks very much guys, onwards with the dining table, nearly finished the top now…
Going to be editing this post heavily over the next hour or so, will let you know when finished.
Going to start with a description of this linisher. It’s a Sorby machine, a motor drives a roller which in turn rotates a looped belt of grit round an idler wheel at a single speed, with a flat bed provided against which tools can be sharpened using various attachments. That’s it in a nutshell
This is the setting mechanism for setting the angle of the tool post, once set it can be locked in place with a simple lever.
Clear description of the various angles achievable and how to set them
The tool post, with the addition of a sliding element with adjustable fence. This is essential to achieve a parallel grind. The are many reasons why the machine won’t achieve this without an adjustable fence: Compound errors due to angled set of belt, set of tool post and both against belt and 90 degree to imaginary perpendicular from belt, inaccuracies in the tool itself with sides not being parallel, tapered sides of tool be design etc. Just trust me, you need this adjustable fence, pivots round the top fixing allen screw, with a slot provided for the bottom one.
lever cam for releasing idler wheel allowing belts to be changed and screw adjuster for centering belt on wheels.
Before I get into how I use the linisher as part of my sharpening routine its probably best to say a bit about the steels used for the tools.
For the vast majority of woodwork tools we use in the West tools steels designed for cold working are the order of the day and 3 in particular are the mainstay of modern woodworking tools; namely O1 and O2 along with A2 tool steels. In common with all tool steels they have a raised carbon content over other steels and are optimised for a combination of hardness, toughness and abrasion resistance. The O series are oil quenched in production, the A series are air cooled. They all have slightly different properties and a hardness in the region of 61 to 66 Rockwell. Tools such as plane blades are produced by cold rolling these days, the last hot rolled blades available were made for Clifton and petered out in the noughties. Post war most were hot rolled and before that they were cast and forged. Chisels are forged from rolled bar, I’m sure other methods are used, but as an example…
I will mention Japanese tool steel at this stage, not in any great detail, suffice to say the major difference is a higher carbon content (1.5% compared to 0.9%), a greater hardness at the expense of toughness (one of the reasons they end up laminated with other steels) and will hold an edge for longer but take a lot longer to sharpen. They are modern tool steels and most emanate from a foundry owned by Hitachi in Yasugi. There are over a dozen of them and they are well understood from a metallurgy perspective. Some names you will recognise such as Aogami, many others you wont. For some strange reason we tend to group them into Blue and White steel categories based on the bloody paper they are wrapped in and there is more than a little nonsense written about these steels on the web. I invite you to look through the Hitachi catalogue if interested and if interested in the Japanese woodworking tradition I invite you to spend a lifetime learning about it:)
More later…tbc
Obligatory TL;DR at the ready
It takes great skill to bypass this forum’s auto save function
accidently highlighting the text, typing one letter and deleting it and there being no undo function will do the trick. Any way, onwards with the edit now.
Do you not get the undo option if you right click on the text box?
Ctrl+Z
Go away, I hate you all.
Just another 494 words to go …
To know us, is to hate us
Finally finished squaring up and sizing all of the Oak for the table, just the joints to cut next.
The top,
The frame laid out
An idea of how the uprights will fit
I can make out 6 faces of various creatures in that top one, and that’s just the right way up. Amazing figuring.
They look lovely, Bob.
What do you fill voids/cracks with?