Making a Drum Sander – Part 2 – Tilting Table

I took Sunday off and on Monday I had other things to do but yesterday and today I could work on the drum sander some more and I progressed significantly. First I finished and attached the propulsion wheel. I started that right at the beginning but it progressed slowly because I glued it from several layers of old plywood and I had to wait for the glue to dry a few times. Just before the two-day break, I soaked the surface with epoxy resin to make it harder and on Tuesday I turned and sanded it until it was passably round. I will probably give it another layer of epoxy once everything is finished, I will use the epoxy on other parts too to improve their surface hardness and strength.

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The wheel is attached to the axis with an M4 screw going through a thread drilled and cut into the axis. I hope it is strong enough and won’t get sheared off in work because I do not have any better idea how to do it. I need to be able to eventually remove this wheel in case a ball bearing gets busted and needs replacing. I am also leaving myself a bit of the axe poking out so I can power the thing with my drill in case powering it with the belt grinder does not work.

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On the right side, I added a fence with a shelf to lift the base 55 mm; on the left side, I simply added a 55 prism. Then I screwed two spruce boards on it to reinforce the structure. Though I screwed them on with the wrong grain direction of the core but it seems to hold strongly enough. Should a problem occur, I will reinforce it later or replace it with properly oriented boards.

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The base under the propelling wheel is unsupported. This has a reason – I need to be able to slide this side over the base of the belt grinder because I need to align this wheel with the motor and the spanning wheels of the belt grinder. It should not be under too much stress but I did reinforce it with steel under the wheel where there will be most of it. Again, I might add some more support later, for now, I think this suffices.

That was Tuesday done. I attached it improvised to the belt grinder and it worked, albeit it was loud as hell. I think that can’t be helped, the ball bearings are not perfectly aligned and the drum is not concentric yet and I can only solve the second of these two issues.

Today I made the tilting table to adjust the sanded thickness. And here I must thank to rsmith for pointing me to a page with useful information about how to make a very simple one.

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I started by cutting-out a piece from the lifted base. This was the plan all along, to use this space for some sort of mechanism to lift the table. On the front, I added a 55 x 20 mm beech board across. Beech is reasonably strong hardwood, it should be able to support the table. In the middle of the board is inserted a 24 mm long M8 nut with a sufficiently long rod through it. To operate the screw I tightened on it a hex nut and a winged nut against each other.

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I decided to make the table from a 15 mm particle board because the piece I had had a very smooth surface and it is straight. However, particle boards are not exactly known for their strength, so I had to reinforce it. I reinforced the rear end with stripes of beech wood for the hinges to have better and stronger anchor points. I put it under weight and went for lunch while it was setting

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After lunch, I continued reinforcing it. On the front end, I added an offcut of angle iron. That also provides a hard surface for the screw to lift the table.

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For longitudinal support, I screwed on two beech strips. I forgot the exact measurements, somewhere around 25×15 mm or somesuch. I tested it and it seemed to be sturdy enough against bending, but not against twisting due to the table being supported by a single point on the front. It should not be a huge problem if the sander is loaded in the center as it should be, nevertheless, I decided to reinforce it further with three offcuts from the same particle board intended for firewood.

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One continuous piece would be better and I had a suitable one – the one that I cut out of the base in the morning – but I completely forgot about it until these were screwed on and I did not want to go through the hassle of trimming it and drilling all the holes again. I think it is strong enough and if not, I can add more support later. I say that a lot.

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And this is where I finished today. I think the work is progressing nicely. I have a tilting table with a range of about 35 mm, which is plenty for my purposes. It takes about 80 half turns to lift from zero to full. That is enough sensitivity to sand off only tiny layers of material when needed. The whole assembly so far is sufficiently light and compact that I can easily lift it and put it under the table next to the table saw when not in use. I am reluctant to be optimistic but I do feel ever so slightly positive about this project.

Making a Drum Sander – Part 1 – Base

How the time flies – it is two years since I wrote a series of blog posts „Showing off my wood“ where I have shown various woods at my disposal for crafting. I have so much material in fact that it is not improbable but downright impossible for me to use it all up making knife handles and knife blocks, I just cannot make that many different knives alone. So I would like to make some high-quality end-grain cutting boards to convert at least some of that massive amount of material into something useful.

I started last year but I hit a snag. I need to mate wooden surfaces together perfectly, but there is no convenient way for me to flatten wooden surfaces in reasonable time and in scale. My manual method is precise, but also tiring and time-consuming. I need a drum sander to make even a few end-grain cutting boards. And I cannot buy one for two reasons. Firstly I don’t have the money. Second, I don’t have the space needed for one.

But since I have managed to build myself a belt sander, I decided this year to spend some time trying to build a drum sander too. I had more than a year to think about it and with the money these things cost, even if I spend a whole month building one, it would still be worth it.

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I started by gluing three large pieces of black locust wood together to form a large prism through whose center I put a 10 mm threaded rod. I cut the edges off on a circular saw and then I stood in front of a bit of a problem – how to turn a large-ish wooden cylinder without a lathe. I rigged up a temporary wooden structure that allowed me to span the prism in such a way that it could run against the edge of the circular saw whilst being continuously rotated with hand-held akku drill. I hope the picture makes it clear what I mean.

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It made an absolutely unholy mess and I was terrified the whole time but I succeeded in making a rough cylinder round enough to progress to other works. I will make the cylinder perfectly round and concentric with its rotational axis later.

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I swapped the threaded shaft for a smooth 10 mm one and to secure it to the cylinder I drilled 3 mm holes throughout it and the shaft on both ends and I drove 3 mm hard steel through the hole. I hope it’s strong enough for the forces needed, if not and it shears off during work, I will have to think up something better. I also cut grooves in the shafts to secure one ball bearing on each side with circlips. I later decided to use two ball bearings, with the second one being put near the first one and not being secured with circlips. As you can clearly see, I am making things up as I go along and I do not always know what I am doing.

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A 15 mm particle board from an old PC table serves as a base to build upon. To hold the ball bearings I cut short boards from hardwood (beech) and I made cutouts for the ball bearings between two pieces and screwed them together with long wood screws. It appeared to be reasonably strong and it held the ball bearings firmly, but it was a bit wobbly. So I glued 15 mm particle boards to the beech boards to widen the bases a bit.

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While the glue was setting on that, I trimmed the edges of the cylinder. I used the boards that held it in the circular saw jig and a hand-held drill as the source of rotation again. That left me with only one hand free to trim the edges but a hacksaw blade proved to be quite efficient at that. Setting the initial groove was a bit fiddly but once started, it went easily, albeit slowly. The edges are not perfectly square and flat but they do not need to be.

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Once the boards for holding the ball bearings were glued together, I glued them to the base with five-minute epoxy. Epoxy is expensive, but I needed a strong bond to make subsequent works easier.

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Once the epoxy cured, I added 4 80 mm wood screws through the beech cores and then also multiple 6 mm bamboo dowels glued in with PVA glue. I do hope that is strong enough in itself but it was additionally reinforced with the last step.

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 There are strong anchor points on the base for the ball bearings and I changed the way they are held between the boards from the temporary wood screws to the final solution – I put two M8 rods through the whole thing with pronged nuts hammered into the particle board base and wing nuts on top. It holds the ball bearings firmly in place and the cylinder can rotate freely.

And this is where I am right now. Next, I can start working on the propulsion part.

During all this work I am also spending a lot of time just thinking not only about each step but also about what might be the main challenge of this project – the adjustable sanding thickness. I have several ideas but they all are fiddly and complicated and I would like to keep things as simple as possible. The simpler the mechanism, the fewer potential points of failure. I won’t even attempt to make some sort of automatic feeding – the wood will be fed through the machine manually (if I manage to make it work).

I Don’t Need No Gym

I am doing my best to publish at least one article a week on my knife blogge, but I had trouble managing that and I could not write much for Affinity as you might have noticed. The main reason is my huge garden, which kept me occupied for two months almost continuously.

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Whilst re-potting my bonsai, I tried this year also to plant new poplar trees in my coppice since the water voles did such a number on them a few years ago. I found an easy way this time to plant them -instead of digging holes, I drilled them with a long carbide-tipped 12 mm masonry drill. It went comparatively easy and fast and after just a few days work I managed to plant several rows of trees. Then came warm weather and everything started to grow, the trees took root and it looked promising. And after that came abnormally deep frost (-5°C) most of the trees died and my work was thus wasted. The frost also killed one of my most beautiful outdoor bonsai trees – my only hornbeam – the roots froze in the bowl. What a beautiful spring start!

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I did manage to get about 2 cubic meters of firewood from my coppice this year, which is good, about a month’s worth of heating right there, with minimal money expenditure. I also cut a lot of dead wood from my apple tree, which is slowly dying from water vole damage. The tree still lives, but only just. The odds are that next year it will all be firewood since it also received additional damage from the late frost. What a beautiful spring start!

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When planting potatoes this year, I added a lot of charcoal to the soil that I prepared over winter. Then I covered the potatoes with only a thin layer of soil and a thick layer of grass clippings to try at a larger scale the experiment from last year. After that came a short drought and abnormally high winds, which blew the grass away in some parts, and the potatoes froze due to the strong late frost that followed shortly after. About 10 % of the potato patch thus did not sprout at all and another 10% look weak and sickly even now. What a beautiful spring start!

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Here used to be several huge compost heaps. I flattened them out into one huge new patch, which took me several weeks of hard work. I planted pumpkins on there after the strong frost was over. But the weather after that was so cold and miserable that they did not grow at all for about a month and slugs destroyed about half of them despite my best efforts, using both manual and chemical tools at my disposal to kill those buggers. On some evenings I collected as much as about 1kg of slugs from the vegetable patches. This week some of the pumpkins finally started to grow as the night temperatures are over 10°C at last, but some are still tiny and there is a huge question mark over whether I will or will not have any use from all this work at all. What a beautiful spring start!

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The seeding potatoes were very small and thus there was more of them than I expected. I had to prepare a small new patch near my second greenhouse to plant them. It was a lot of work to haul all that compost there to plant them, but at least these were completely unaffected by the frost and they appear to thrive. Great! When I was at it, I also prepared a second patch, where I planted red beets. Those are still tiny because the weather was so fucking cold overnight that it was on some days in June colder than it was first two weeks in April. I also planted some sweet corn, two packets. One packet did not germinate at all, and the other one produced just several sickly plants that are now still smaller than the grass that I have not mown for a week. Fuck this spring.

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I had so many tomato seedlings that I planted over twenty of them outside. Three got immediately mauled to death by slugs. The rest managed to grow tough enough for the slugs no longer trying to eat them but they did not grow any taller – they are positively tiny. Because the nights were so cold. I am curious if we get an extremely hot and dry summer after the extremely wet and cold spring. So, like last year, first nothing grows because it is too cold, and subsequently nothing grows because it is too hot. I hate this year’s weather.

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I did not sift the compost heaps but I did at least pick bigger stones manually, as I do all year throughout my vegetable patches. I got several buckets worth. If you remember, I used most of these accumulated stones last year to repair the walking path to my home. Well, I got about 20% of what I used up last year back again. Stones are not a renewable resource, but my garden has a seemingly unlimited supply of them.

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When planting the trees, I hit something hard twice. Once a bigger stone and once a buried brick. And when planting beans and working on the compost heaps I suddenly hit a really large stone, that I subsequently had to dig out. These are big slabs of phyllite that were used as paving stones in the past around here. I have a pile of them both from digging them up in my garden in seemingly random places and from the time when we too had walking paths paved with them, which I replaced with modern concrete paving a few years ago. At least these stones can be useful in the garden, but hitting one with a gardening fork or a shovel is not fun. Neither is hauling them solo onto the wheelbarrow. I procrastinate moving this one for three weeks because I sprained my back with the previous one.

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Apart from slugs, grass also thrives in the fucking cold weather. I have to mow it to be able to access all the areas of my garden where I need to work. At least there are no HOAs here so when I want to leave a patch with pretty flowers on it where it does not impede me, I can do that. So I do. Yay for pretty flowers!

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Tomatoes inside the greenhouse do look promising this year. I put a lot of compost and some fertilizer in there in the fall and I mixed it with the soil thoroughly. Inside the greenhouse, the climate was warm enough, albeit possibly too humid. The plants had wet leaves each morning because they had to actively pump out water. I used a chemical spray to prevent Phytophthora infestans. I hope it works because if they do not get sick, they really do look promising. Fingers crossed, I had enough setbacks this year already, and I need some wins.

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The fig trees are growing like mad. I cut them down to about 70-90 cm in height and they are double that already. They were overshadowing the tomatoes and I had to prune them. They put out some fruit already, so I might get some this year too despite the really heavy pruning in early spring. The figs really liked the warm and tepid winter and the greenhouse shielded them from the negative impacts of the cold spring, so they are the only plants that truly thrive. The grapes and pomegranates thrive too, but I did not take pictures of those since I have been ranting long enough already.

Often in the past, I said that I do not need to go to the gym, I get enough workouts in the garden and it is more useful. Well, this year the bad weather and extreme slug infestation are doing their best to make the second part of that statement untrue. At least I don’t have to pay for it. Oh wait, I do pay for it – the molluscicides, fungicides, and seeds…  Well, I might still come out with a profit, but it is not sure. I need at least 150 kg of potatoes to come even. Every other vegetable on top of that would be a bonus. That is not impossible, even with this bad start of the year.

Spiderslug!

Today in the morning I went to my greenhouse to plant some tomatoes and I was greeted by something I had never seen before – a slug hanging from the ceiling on a thread something looking very much like spider silk. It was not easy to snap a picture with my phone but I managed to get the bugger into focus twice and the thread is visible if you look closely. I do not know if it was bitten by a radioactive spider or somesuch. I suspect more that it was a freak accident where the slug fell from the ceiling and the humidity and temperature were just right for it to remain hanging on a thread of desiccated slug slime.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The slug did not survive its attempt at an aerial assault on my tomatoes. No slug that gets caught within the greenhouse survives long enough to tell the tale I am afraid, and neither do many that I encounter in the garden. I do not like killing living creatures but I am not working my ass off so slugs can have a feast and I learned a long time ago that one can be on the side of either the slugs or the veggies, but not both.

Moar Easter Gingerbreads

My mother made these on Sunday and only just now I got around to post them.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

2023 Christmass Gingerbreads

Here are some of my mother’s creations she made for last Christmas. I forgot to post them at the time.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

2024 Eeaster Gingrebreads

I completely forgot to post my mother’s creations for the previous Christmas. Would you be interested in seeing them now? Before you answer, here are the gingerbreads she made for this Easter.

Her hands are shaky but they are still beautiful. And delicious. And most importantly – making them brings her joy.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

My Creative Process

Marcus’s recent posts about AI got me thinking and as a part of my thoughts on the issue, I want to start today by writing about my creative process, using my most recent art pieces. Those pieces being knives, because why not.

For me, the idea of how to create something usually pops into my mind without any conscious effort. I can be sleeping, eating my lunch, or driving my car, mulling over this and that and I get the starting of an idea about how to create something. And then it grows from there organically during the process itself.

Of course, all my knives are influenced by my experiences with using and making knives, as well as the designs I saw, whether conscious of that influence or not. But with these two knives, I can be a bit more specific. One of them started nearly thirty years ago and it is inspired by another knifemaker’s blade that I saw in one of my books. I changed both the outline and the grind profile, but the inspiration from someone else’s work was the starting point. For the other knife though, it started with my first failed attempt at a machete (-click-), thus the inspiration for this specific design was an accident.

When I started to make the two blades, I had no concrete plans for them and I had originally intended to make them with ordinary wooden scales. But as the works progressed, I started to think more and more that they would look splendid with engraved bone scales and I left them lying for a year with that idea at the back of my mind. During that year, I worked on other things, as the ideas for what to do with these two slowly matured in my mind. The bigger one got me on a line of thinking that ended up with the idea of engraving a picture of an auroch on the scale, but I still had no idea about the smaller one.

Then in the fall of last year, I successfully sold a knife with a picture of a roe deer on the sheath and when talking with my mother about what animal to use next, she suggested a wild boar. And whilst I have declined the idea for a sheath decoration (for now), I did think that it would look well on a bone scale, thus I finally got the idea for the second knife. Again, inspiration for one came out of some murky associations in my subconscious, the other one came from a nudge by another person’s ideas.

So with a rough idea in my head about what I wanted to accomplish, I started outfitting the knives. And as I wrote in my previous post, during the manufacture I decided to make the handle scales with hidden pins, which gave me an even bigger area to embellish. And when the knives were finally finished, I could start on the designs for the engravings.

With animal designs, I normally start by looking through my books and the interwebs for photos and drawings for inspiration. Not to copy – not the lest because to find a picture with the exact pose that I could use would be a stroke of luck indeed – but to use it as a guideline for a picture that is not egregiously anatomically incorrect. When I find a picture that is roughly what I want the end result to be, I start sketching. Most of that process can be seen in this picture:

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Nowadays I start with biro sketches on paper that I subsequently refine on PC. In the past, I would go with pencils on paper all the way to the finished product. I wanted to use a whole pig, but I had trouble fitting that on the scale due to its shape, so I decided to use just the head.

When I fine-tuned both designs on PC to my satisfaction, I decided to test whether the boar head would look acceptable, so I made a test piece on an offcut of bone.

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As you can see I made again changes from the previous sketches. Not only because I am not a copy machine, but also because each medium imposes its own limits on the creative process and thus each medium demands some changes in attitude to get a usable result. At this stage, I thought I was finished with designing and ready to set out to work, but my mind kept working. It kept nagging me that the scales looked too empty. There were no visible pins and thus there was ample space to fill. I added a rope pattern as framing around the head, but it still was not enough. I tried to fish my mother’s mind for ideas and she delivered – I should add some spruce twigs. I initially dismissed the idea because I did not know how to implement it, but when I tried to google “spruce twig pattern”, I got an idea for how to do it, I drew it and I was finally satisfied.

Nevertheless, I still only had decorative designs for the right side of each knife. I decided to leave the left side on the auroch blade blank, but I felt somehow that the boar needed to have something on the other side too. And without prompting, an idea came to me in the evening just before sleep – to continue the rope frame around the boar head to the other side and engrave a decorative knot there. As far as which knot to use, this time I did not look for inspiration to others, I simply took two pieces of paracord and arranged them into knots for about an hour until I got a result I liked.

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I have redrawn the design on the PC into a shape that fits the scale and thus my designs were finished. I printed them out on paper labels and set out to work.

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The actual realization is more about craft and technique than about the creative process. If you are interested in that, tomorrow there will be a short article on my Knife Blogge about it.

Next time I would like to write about how this all connects to generative AI. I do not know when, but hopefully next weekend.

Preparing for Winter

Busy, busy, busy. I am tired and there’s still more work to be done than I can manage. Currently, the theme of the day is preparing the garden for winter.

You may remember that this year I have been experimenting with growing potatoes under grass clippings, without tilling the ground or preparing it in any other way. And given that I have planted only about 1 kg of pea-sized potatoes, it was a huge success, I harvested about 40 kg of reasonably large potatoes, although the blasted voles did again do some damage. Here is a picture of a small sample.

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Because of this, I have decided to repeat the experiment on a larger scale, on our proper vegetable bed, about 40 square meters. It was several working day’s worth of work to gather all the old and recent grass clippings from piles around the garden and spread them all over.

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It would be better to dry the clippings first, but alas that was no longer possible for the last mowing of the grass since the weather is now cold and wet and the days are too short for the sun to do much even when it shines. So about half is covered in dry clippings and half in fresh ones. I do hope it won’t cause problems, it should have enough time over the winter to settle. I hope. In the spring I will probably add a few bags of woodchips and shredded reeds from the sewage cleaning facility.

All in all this year was a mixed bag, gardening-wise. We had very few tomatoes and patypans. The weather at the beginning of the summer was way too hot and the plants, although they are warmth-loving, had stunted growth despite being watered enough. And when the weather subsequently cooled in July, it was again way too cold for these. In short – most of the summer the temperatures were either above or below the tomatoes’ metabolic optimum.

The beans that grew this year on the big vegetable bed as well as behind the house were a moderate success. The voles destroyed some plants early on but the rest grew vigorously and I harvested nearly 6 kg of beans and about twice as much of green bean pods that my mother canned in vinegar for later use. It is less than we could have under better conditions, but enough for our needs.

My only apple tree fell victim to water voles and continues to slowly die. I expect that it won’t wake up next spring. But I got over 30 kg of strawberries, over 10 kg of pears, and several kg of raspberries. Most of those were dried for winter too, some were made into marmalade. The plums and figs harvest was small, only a few kg, but it was enough for me to sit one whole day and make all-natural, sugar-free plum butter and to dry a few jars of figs. Plum butter is the best filler for pies, IMO, and it too should be enough for a few years. And lastly, we got again enough walnuts to give them away. The cellar reserved for preserved food and vegetables is full.

And I also had to replace the bird feeder, since it was starting to slowly fall apart. I have made a completely new one, from a few wood offcuts sorted out of my firewood. I hope it will last at least as long as the previous one. To help it last longer, I have charred all surfaces with a propane torch and I soaked it with old boiled linseed oil. That should make it somewhat resistant to humidity and fungi.

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Basically, it is the same design as the previous one, only the central column is not round and made from plastic tubing but square and made from wood. And the roof is a bit higher so the birds have slightly more space to sit and still have a good view of their surroundings. I did not include any perches so far, maybe I will do that later.

I have also made an additional feeder, a kind of gibbet for hanging walnuts, suet dumplings, and various other things.

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The weather is still warm and I did not see very many birds on the feeder yet. But the food keeps disappearing so they are definitively coming. I hope to get some pretty bird pictures again this winter. I did not use my camera for way too long this year.

The last step in winter preparations is to move indoors all plants and flowers that cannot stay in the greenhouses and put the bonsai below the benches to protect them against frosty winds. And to re-plant in the pollard all walnuts, hazels, and oaks that sprout all around the garden from nuts hidden by jays. And several other things. Busy, busy, busy…

 

My Lucky Pear Tree

About a decade ago, a pear tree sprouted just outside my garden in a patch near the fence where the meadow owner can’t mow the grass with a tractor so he does not bother with it at all and it is up to me to keep the growth there in check. The tree did have some tiny pears last year, edible, but nothing to write home about. I thus thought the tree wouldn’t be worth anything and I left it to grow in order to fell it for firewood when it is big enough to be worth it, like I always do with trees that sprout near the outside of my fence.

This year the tree was covered in pears, many small, but also many fist-sized. I forgot to take a picture of that, so here is one with my ladder against the tree and some last pears on the topmost branches. I had to take those off with a stick, I could not safely reach them.

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The tree was so covered in fruit, that one branch unfortunately snapped under the weight before I got some time to pick it. And the fruit is dee-licious! I do not know what the odds are of getting a good-quality fruit from a pear seedling but I do strongly suspect that they are not in favor. Thus I consider this my lucky pear tree.

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When left to ripen, they become incredibly sweet. Indeed there were many -not in this picture – that were damaged by wasps. But even when still green they are very tasty. This suits me since I do in fact prefer fruits when they are still ever so slightly unripe.

There is no way to eat this many pears before they spoil so we are processing them by cutting them up and putting them in a dehumidifier. We had to buy a second one this year so we could process all the fruit from the garden and mushrooms I brought home from the forest more expediently. We will go into this winter with an overabundance of dried pears, apples, strawberries, raspberries, and prunes. And walnuts. I intend to experiment with making my own bowel-scouring müsli from all of it and also I will try and mix some of the dried fruit in teabags to see if I can manage to make tasty homemade fruit tea.