ben lowery

San Pel in Glass

Ben — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:36:14 +0000

Playing with WordPress for Android 2.

Through the Looking Glass

A Sign of Accurate Sawing

Ben — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:18:33 +0000

The kerf

A few nights back I was sawing the side aprons for my Stickley Lost Side Table to length. My procedure is to mark all of the faces using a knife, nip out a small starter notch for the backsaw, and then saw away the waste; it’s pretty standard stuff.

Knifing in the lines does a few things: it gives you a clean entry line on the shoulder, it makes it easier to track the saw, and if you cut things fat, it gives you a nice place to register a chisel when paring. One thing I discovered is that it also lets the waste piece break away before the saw gets to the bottom of the work piece.

In the picture above, notice the little shelf of wood left on this piece of waste? The top of the shelf is where my knife scored the wood fibers. The width is the width of the kerf on my backsaw. I looked through my other waste pieces, and this only appears when your cut is square and plumb, that is, when you’re exiting the cut with the saw right against the marking lines.

If you see the shelf, you made a good cut.

Building a shower that won’t leak

Ben — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:02:36 +0000

Great writeup by Bob Borson on building a shower that won’t leak.

Inside Ikea

Ben — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:32:58 +0000

A creepy fun look at what happens when you turn the page.

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The Essential Woodworker for $10

Ben — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 01:13:32 +0000

If you have any interest in hand work in woodworking, a wonderful introduction is The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing. This formerly out-of-print book was brought back by Lost Art Press a while back and is now being offered as a DRM-free ePub for $10 with a Kindle version coming soon.

This book is my go to reference whenever I have a question on how to build a piece of carcase furniture. It also includes some nice exercises to help learn essential hand tool skills, like planing a board flat and sawing accurately. It’s finely written, well edited and quite clear. For $10, you cannot go wrong.

The hard cover edition is also available for $23.

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Two New Vises

Ben — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:32:08 +0000

Fancy New Tail Vise

While my bench has been useable for a while now, I’ve wanted to add a tail vise to help when milling up stock. When milling by hand, you have to be able to go across the board, perpendicular to the grain, diagonal to the grain, and along the grain with your planes. While I can get this done with a planing stop and battens, a tail vise and dogs make it really easy.

After I scabbed on a spacer block, I chiseled out the mortise for the inner vise plate, so it would sit flush(ish) with the end of the bench. Word to the wise, don’t do this with a 1/4″ mortise chisel; it takes a couple of hours.

Next, I attached the vise and made up a quick chop from some 12/4 poplar left over from the bench top.

Vise Chop and Dog Holes

All that was left was to drill the dog holes and make some dogs to go in them. I ordered some 3/4″ maple dowel and it showed up a bit oversize. Sadly, oversize means it doesn’t fit, so I had to break out the 80 grit and atomize a couple hundredths of an inch of maple. Fit with a bullet catch, a small leather face, and a coat of wax, the dog is ready to go.

Chips and Dogs

I had mentioned two new vises. The other is my edition of a Moxon with hardware from Benchcrafted. This build is really pretty simple, though you do get to practice a bit of fancy mortising for the nuts. Next time, I’d hold the nuts down with a holdfast while marking them. They shifted a bit under finger pressure and things got a bit sloppy. Still works though. Oh, and I’d gang up the two pieces when drilling the through holes. That way, any slight deviation from plumb and square carries through. Or I’d use a drill press. Still, a damn pretty bit of kit and it works beautifully.

Moxon Vise

Sharp Solves Everything

Ben — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:32:01 +0000

by zimpenfish

One of the first things you run into with both woodworking and cooking is figuring out how to keep your tools sharp. Chisels, saws, planes and knives all get dull after using them for a bit and need to be sharpened to perform well. Lots of people, myself included, start off pretty confused about sharpening, but if you’re willing to spend some time learning and practicing, sharpening tools is actually quite easy.

Now, I’m not about to launch into a diatribe on how to sharpen things. Many others have already done that, so I’m just pointing out what helped me get over the hump.

First, Christopher Schwarz’s video The Last Word on Sharpening is a great place to start for general sharpening. He explains the various sharpening tools you’ll need and how to use them to get back to work.

Second, if you’re using hand saws, Ron Herman’s video Sharpen Your Handsaws is the place to start. I use Ron’s technique to sharpen my handsaws and have had great results.

Last, neither of these guys talks about sharpening kitchen knives, but once you know how to sharpen a plane blade or a chisel, a knife is child’s play.

(and no, I’m not being compensated for either of these recommendations)

Thickolson: Half of the top glued up

WordPress Permalinks on IIS6

Ben — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:03:27 +0000

Not even permalinks

Recently, I had to set up WordPress on an IIS6 machine. Yes, WordPress does work on IIS6, believe it not. The only really tricky bit is getting fancy permalinks to work, so that urls looks like www.foo.com/2011/06/my-awesome-post instead of www.foo.com/index.php?p=6. I used IIRF to get mod_rewrite like functionality, as the supported IIS Rewrite isn’t available until IIS7. It’ll take the same .htaccess configuration as mod_rewrite on Apache, with one very important difference; you have to add a U to the [L] in the final redirect. This passes along a HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL header to PHP, which WordPress uses internally to decide what to show. Your IIRF.ini will end up looking like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / #whatever your virtual root is
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* /index.php [L,U]

(image found on tattoodesigns-design.com)

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Divided and Conquered

Ben — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 19:37:29 +0000

Organization is sexy

Sometimes, it’s the little things that keep you going through the big things. I’ve got a couple big projects in the shop looming over me, the Stickley Lost Side Table and a new porch swing. Both of these projects are things that are going to take a fair bit of time, which can be a drag on your motivation.

Mandy has been reorganizing the kitchen and wanted a new place to store all our spices. They had hung out in a drawer in our pantry, but it was hard to see what we had and was always messy. We have a nice, wide shallow drawer under the range that would be perfect, but it’s just a wide open expanse of space. Spices would roll all over and it didn’t keep things neat and tidy.

I happened to have some 1/2″ poplar lying around and thought, hey, I’m a woodworker. I can make drawer dividers! Two hours of work later, most of that planing the stock and fiddling with divider placement, we had a nicely divided drawer.

I sized the area so that the individual spice jars cannot spin, for the most part. That way, when the drawer opens and closes, everything stays in place and doesn’t roll around. As bad as their spices are, the space jars from McCormick, with their octagonal sides, are really nice here. They just stick in place.

The piece is just 1/2″ poplar, planed down to about 3/8″. The short arms are fit into notches in the long arms, so I can easily adjust the width of each horizontal space, but not the height. This is fine in this case.

No finish on this, just nicely planed poplar. Fits right in.

New design

Ben — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:03:02 +0000

Update: Decided I didn’t like the narrow look. Back to the old design.

Trying out a new site design, much narrower than my old design. It’s only about half done, but I had enough to push forward with it.

The main motivation was narrowing down the text column, which should make it easier to read. I might try jumping the font size up to something slightly silly for body text, like 16pt, just so its easier to have big images. That’s the only thing I really do not like about the current iteration, images have gotten too small, as well as videos.

I’d like to let them overflow the text column, but I can’t find a way to do that with CSS. A negative left margin of 50% does not line up quite right.