Vine Knife

This is a mass-market dagger that I bought from a distributor. It originally had a hideous American flag and bald eagle motif painted on the handle and sheath. I sanded the handle and sheath clean of their factory finish and used a dremel tool to carve a vine pattern into both sides of the handle. I had wanted to do something similar to the sheath, but I couldn't think of a suitable design. This knife sat in a drawer, unfinished, for over ten years, before I decided I just needed to be rid of it. So, I painted the handle and sheath white and fixed a silver pentagram applique to the sheath. My hopes for the sheath had been much higher, but I was suffering some sort of creative block and could not think of what I wanted to do with it, so I decided to just be done with it. Perfect is the enemy of finished. 

 

Who You Gonna' Call?

 

     Here we have a small wood end table, painted black that I picked up from a discount store for about $20. Like many other such items that I buy for the store with the intention of modifying and reselling, it sat in the back room for several years untouched. Finally it got bumped up to the front of the line, mostly because it took up too much space and I needed it out of the back room. 

     As I was more interested in clearing it out of storage than I was with creating something wonderful, at first I copped out and just slapped a pentagram on it to try to sell it and get my money back out of it (and the space it was taking up in my workroom). I stenciled and painted a gold pentagram in the center and put it out on the floor to sell, but even then, it didn't look finished. It stayed on the sales floor for about a week before inspiration struck and I knew what I had to do to finish this piece. I needed to make it into an ouija board. 

     I had long intended to start making spirit boards to pair with my planchettes that I was making and which were selling decently well. But I never managed to find the time to do the layout work to get started onn the project. The only spirit board I had ever attempted ended up getting stalled at around the 70% complete mark back in 1993 (and still remains unfinished to this day). I measured the table top and the pentagram and went into my vector image software to create a layout for the spirit board top. Normally I would use masking tape or make a paper template and cut the stencil by hand for something like this, but this time, I decided to use my newest toy, the Silhouette Cameo 4 vinyl cutter. After laying out the image design in Inkscape, I broke it down into sections small enough to cut out on my vinyl cutter and used it to cut the mask.  Once the mask was cut, the sections had to be properly positioned and transferred to the table top. The positioning was a bit tricky, but fortunately the vinyl masking is fairly forgiving. Then it was a fairly simple matter to paint and remove the stencil.

     This is the first spirit board that I ever completed and one of the last items I made for the store before it closed.

Painted Pentagram Sketchbook

I recently visited a local craft store and found some nice 8x10 (ish) sketchbooks with cloth covered boards. They were surprisingly cheap, so I grabbed a couple for a future project. I have stacks and stacks of sketchbooks sitting around waiting to be made into custom books, but, I liked the cloth covers on these ones and, again, they were really cheap.

So, the other day, I was working at the store (my clerk was out for medical reasons), and I got bored. In my boredom, I had an idea for a quick paint job that I thought would look really nice on those new sketchbooks. This is essentially the same paint job that I have done on my kraft paper covered journals in the past, with a few minor differences.

I started by cutting out a paper stencil of the pentagram. I have a huge stack of pentagrams that I photo copied about fifteen years ago, and I have been pulling from that pile ever since. I cut it out with an x-acto knife and used mounting spray (a weak spray adhesive) on one side to fix it to the sketchbook cover. I originally intended to center it, but the stencil was a little too big for the cover, and as I was laying it out, I kind of liked how it looked off-center like this. The stencil wrapped around the spine, so I made sure to stick it down into the french groove with the bone folder.

The second step was to use a sea sponge and dab the cover randomly with dark red acrylic paint. To do this, I opened the covers so that I could paint the front and back at the same time. I let the pages dangle straight down, and used two large cardboard boxes to support the covers. This worked, but it made it difficult to get any paint into the french groove, so on future ones, I just left the book closed and did the front and back covers separately.

Next, I repeated the painting process with a brighter shade of red acrylic paint. I made sure to leave plenty of area where the dark red and even the black of the original cover, showed through.

The fourth step was to remove the paper stencil, revealing the black book cloth beneath. This was more difficult than I had thought it would be. Not that the spray glue grabbed too hard, but the paint soaked the edges of the paper stencil, and so the stencil tore at the edges, leaving behind a very visible white deckled edge along much of the pentagram's border. This I had to carefully scrape with a hobby knife to try to get the remnants of the stencil off, without damaging the paint or the book cover.

I managed to get the paper off, but there were several places that my scraping was very visible. It detracted significantly from the overall appearance of the book. I decided to try to mask the damaged areas with another layer of paint. I used a stiff bristled brush to dab on some copper acrylic paint over the most visible trouble areas. Then I used the sea sponge again with the copper paint to blend in those dab marks and hide them. I used the copper paint very sparingly. I did not want to obscure the pentagram design.

I could have just used the sea sponge with the copper paint, but there was a chance that the problem areas I was trying to hide would fall in a "dead spot" on the sponge and I would have to make several passes over the area with the sponge to get the coverage I needed. This would have made the copper too heavy handed. Using the paint brush first ensured that the worst spots were covered by the copper paint, and then the sponge would hide the deliberateness of those repaired spots. Not only did the copper highlights cover the trouble areas, it really brought the design to life. Now, I can't imaging the book without it.

The last step was to spray the entire cover with a spray sealer. It only took about an hour to paint this book, and I am very pleased with the way it turned out. It has been several years since I have made a modified journal like this. I think I need to get back to it.

Car Ramps into Cart

These, are car ramps. Big, heavy, old, metal car ramps. I never use them. My father never used them. It is extremely unlikely that I will ever need to use them. I'm not sure why we even have them. But for some reason, I can not bring myself to get rid of them. It's one of those, "have it and not need it" vs. "need it and not have it" kind of things. But they are taking up space, and even though my father's workshop is fairly large, I seem to be obsessed with making more room in it.

I was going to try to hang these ramps up on a wall near the ceiling, so they would be out of the way. I plan to do that with a lot of stuff that I want to keep, but expect to rarely/never use. But they are too heavy for that. It would be a serious effort getting them up and down, and if they fell, they would pose a serious safety hazard to anyone under them. So then a thought occurred to me, "If I can't get them off of the floor, what if I could get double duty out of the floor space that they are taking up?" Then I thought about a video I saw about how to make a metal hammer rack.

Actually, I've seen several videos of this type, but this was one of them, and I happened to find this picture of it to illustrate the design. Now, I don't really need a hammer rack. I already have my hammers organized in a way that I like (sort of). OK, not really. They are in several different places around the shop, and I would like to get them all in one place. But I did make a hammer rack about a year ago, that holds most of them, and I kind of like it. But it doesn't hold my wooden mallets, or my rubber mallets, or my sledge hammers. And it takes up wall space, which is kind of at a premium.

So then I started thinking, "what if I could build a hammer rack right on top of these ramps?" I could use the ramps themselves as the frame of the rack, and make some sort of cap to go on top and which will hold the hammers. The handles would just hang down in the empty space between the ramps. It would be big enough to fit all of my hammers and mallets and they would not take up any wall space, and the rack would not take up any additional space that the ramps were not already taking up. Even better, I could set the whole thing on casters and make it mobile, which is more than I can say for the ramps as they currently are. If I ever wanted to use the ramps, all I would have to do is remove the hammers and the cap, and the ramps would be accessible.

So, the first order of business is to build a little cart base with casters that the ramps can sit on. I made it very simply out of scrap 2x4s and some plywood. The casters I used are a little light duty for this, but they were already on hand. The 2x4s are glued and pegged through with oak dowels (I did't trust screws going into end grain), and I cut a rabbet on all four sides to recess a 3/8in. plywood bottom. The bottom is glued and pin nailed, and also screwed for extra strength.

 The casters are the kind that have a post on top that goes up into the leg of the chair, or whatever, so all I had to do was drill out a hole in the 2x4 for the post to fit into. I added a little screw wax to the posts to lubricate them. For my original idea, they would have been plenty  strong enough, but as I build, I keep coming up with other ideas of what I could hang on this make shift cart, so now, I kind of wish they were a little heavier duty.

 Here are the ramps positioned on the cart base. It took quite a bit of finessing with a chisel in order to get them to fit in there. I made it a tight fit, and the ramps are not very square. This was never meant to be a great piece of shop furniture. It was kind of a lark. I don't even know if I will like it or keep it. But it did seem like a good way to make some extra use out of the floor space the ramps take up.

 I cut a little piece of plywood scrap to fit into one of the ramp's natural recesses, which made for a nifty little shelf. It is not fixed in place. I could easily remove it if it is in the way, or if I need to use the ramps. I might make a shelf on both sides, or I might try to fit my sledge hammers on the other side. They have long handles, so I would need the space. The ramps are also not fixed to the cart base [they are now]. They just sit in there snugly. But I might decide to screw them down for more stability. Because they are not square, they wobble just a little. It would not be hard to remove a couple of screws if I needed to use the ramps. 

 Now that the base is pretty much done, I need to make the cap that will hold the hammers. Here I am roughing out the cap frame from more 2x4s. In order to prevent the issues with square that I ran into with the base, I decided to make the cap a custom fit, rather than just make it to particular dimensions. That's why the 2x4s are long on several sides in the picture below.This is a test fit, so I can find and mark the right length for each side. Those little strips of plywood along the top are just there to hold the cap at the right height. They rest on the tips of the ramps. They will not be part of the cap when it is done.

 Once I am happy with the fit, I cut each side to its final length, and then I glue and screw each joint. Then, I sat and thought about how I wanted to build the hammer rack. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that I really don't like the kind of "load from the top" hammer rack in the video above. I like the one that I made, that loads from the side. I can grab each hammer by its handle and pull it straight out. Then I thought "can I just mount the one I already have to the side of the cap?" The answer was- not really. But I could build a new hammer rack, like my old one, that goes around the perimeter of the cap and that would let me put a flat top on the cap and use it to hold some other tool. The only issue that would bring up would be the robustness of the casters. Oh well, let's try it and see how it goes. If necessary, I can tear it all apart. This whole thing is made from scraps so far anyway.

 I found a piece of 5/8" plywood scrap and cut it for the new cap top. It was just a hair too narrow to go from edge to edge, but this thing isn't going to win any beauty pageants, so I used it anyway. I also went ahead and drilled some holes in the bottom flange of the ramps so I could screw them down to the cart base.

 I thought a little bit about what I could put on the top, and decided to mount the remaining bench grinders to it. I am a little concerned about all the vibration from the grinders, but, we'll see how it turns out. The one 8" grinder wasn't bolted down to anything (and walked all over the place) where it was sitting anyway, so it can hardly be worse than it was. In all, I mounted a very wide double ended 8" grinder with a buffing wheel on one end and a grinding wheel on the other; a regular 8" grinder with two grinding wheels; and I had enough room to squeeze one more small one on there, so I dug out a single sided one (just a motor with an arbor) that has a wire wheel attached to it. I may also change out the grinding wheel on the wide one for a brass wire wheel. These are all my dad's old grinders. The motor with the wire wheel did require me wiring a switch into the power cord, but otherwise, all they needed was bolted down.

 In addition to not taking up any more room than the ramps already did (well, maybe a few more inches for the width of the caps), this configuration is also going to allow me to save some floor space. The wide grinder was mounted to a floor stand, which wobbled quite a bit because it is designed to be bolted to the floor, which it wasn't. Now I can get rid of that stand. The smaller grinder was sitting on top of the disused parts washer (where the drill press is sitting in the background), and also walked and wobbled because the parts washer has a metal top, so it couldn't be bolted down either. This gets me one step closer to eliminating the disused parts washer as well, which will free up even more floor space.

This was originally going to be a very quick and simple modification to the ramps, which could very easily and quickly be reversed if they were ever needed. Not so much any more. With the grinders on top, god help anyone who wants to lift the cap off. It probably weighs 75-80 pounds now, and that's without the hammers. And it's a tight fit. I am concerned that the casters are too light duty for all of this weight. ...Shit- I just remembered, I was going to add a washer to the posts of those casters while I had the ramps off to drill them. Damn it. Oh well, not going to tear it apart again now.

I drilled a hole in the cap top to thread down the three power cords from the mounted grinders. Then I zip tied the cables together somewhat neatly and plugged them all into a three way adapter, which I zip tied to one of the cross braces of one of the ramps. Then I selected a mid sized extension cord, of which I have an over abundance, that will remain with the cart (but can be easily unplugged and used elsewhere if need be).  I made a very quick cord wrap/hanger out of a scrap of 2x4 and an old shelf bracket, which I hung from the underside of the cap. The cord coils up and hangs neatly between the two ramps. Once everything was wired up, I tested it out. The vibration is much less than I thought it would be.

  
Now, it's on to hanging the hammers. Just for a test, I stuck my three sledge hammers under one of the ramps. The largest one fits a little awkwardly, but it rarely gets used, so not really a problem. I'll probably just keep all three of these down here.

One thing that does concern me is that if I put hammer racks all the way around the cap, that will increase the footprint of the cart significantly. Right now it is roughly 15"x27". If I add a 4" deep hammer rack on each side, it will become 23"x35". That's quite a bit bigger of a footprint than the car ramps originally took up. Maybe I don't need to build the rack all the way around. Maybe I can get away with just one or two sides for now, and then expand it later, if I decide it is working out. I don't have enough hammers to go all the way around right now anyway.

I decided to use 2x6 scraps that were left over from the wood I used to make the Roubo workbench. I will hang them horizontally under the bottom edge of the cap, which will leave 4" sticking out past the edge of the cap from which to hang the hammers. But I want a little bit of an angle to the horizontal flange, so I used the table saw, with the blade angled very slightly, to cut a slight back-bevel on the first one and a half inches of the board. This will make the leading edge of the board tilt up slightly, helping to keep the hammers seated and prevent them from walking out of their holders when the cart vibrates. I also made sure to use the natural cupping present in the boards to my advantage.

Next, I needed to cut slots into the boards to accept the hammer handles. Each slot is custom fit for a particular hammer. Each of the hammers has very different sized and shaped handles. If I just used one or two or even three universal sized slots, I would have some pretty sloppy fits. I used the slots in the old hammer rack as a template to get started, but then for most of the hammers, I just lined them up on the board and traced them with a pencil.

I made the initial cuts on the band saw, and knocked out the waste with a small chisel. I then used the chisel and a large file to refine the shape of the slot to custom fit each handle. Most just needed a slight taper or a chamfer on the top or bottom of the slot, but some of them required some odd geometry.

Because they are relatively thin pieces of cross grained soft wood, there is a risk that these fingers that stick out between the hammers could crack off if hit the wrong way. To combat this, I pre-drilled and sunk a 4" screw down the center of each one. That should give it more strength, and even if it cracks, it shouldn't fall off.

Once the board was ready, I used about a dozen 4" screws to attach it to the underside of the cap edge. I thought about gluing it also, but I may want or need to remove it at some point, so I just used a lot of screws. 

I wanted to see how it was going to work out before I made the second side, so I loaded up the majority of the hammers along the front rack to get a good look at it. This was also helpful for seeing how I wanted the side rack to fit with the front rack. and how the hammers would flow around the corner.

I wanted the side rack to come out all the way to the front edge of the front rack, so I had to cut a notch in it so that it would fit. because of the tilt, they don't match up perfectly, but that's OK.

Then the process of tracing, cutting and filing the slots was repeated for the mallets that would go on the side rack. Then add the 4" screws to the fingers, and mount the board, just like the front rack.

 And that's it! for now anyway. I don't have enough hammers at the moment to warrant putting up a third of fourth side right now. I have a few planishing hammers but they are in a case, and rarely if ever get used. At least until I start doing more metal work. So they can just stay in their case for now.

All told, there are nineteen twenty-two hammers and mallets on this rack, and it could be expanded to double that.

 And here it is, right back in the same corner where the car ramps were originally stored. But now it is about eight inches wider and deeper. It can be used in place, or it can be rolled out easily on casters when it needs to move, or to get to the grinder on the back side. Time will tell how the light duty casters will hold up. I may need to upgrade them at some point.

Anyone want to buy a parts washer?

.

Welding Helmet

Back when I worked at the tire recycling plant, I got pulled from general labor quite frequently to do maintenance work. I have posted previously about some of the projects that I worked on while I was there. I did a lot of welding and metal fabrication while I was there, and at some point, the maintenance manager got tired of me using his welding mask and decided to get me my own. He told me to put my name on it...

So put my name on it, I did. The letters and skull applique were things that I bought at the auto parts store. They are self adhesive, chrome covered, plastic, 3D appliques. The row of square studs are metal. They are the kind that you see on leather wrist bands (well, back when you used to see people wearing leather wrist bands with spikes on them- so like, the 80's, I guess). The spikes are hollow underneath, and have two little pointy tabs on the sides for poking through the leather and crimping over on the other side. I cut tiny slits in the plastic of the mask to poke these points through, and then super glued them in place. The points were not long enough to crimp over on the other side of the plastic.

When I left that job, I did not take the mask with me (though I wish that I had) because, although my boss told me it was mine and I should put my name on it, I took that to mean that it was for my use, but I still considered it company property. I wonder if whoever is wearing it now kept it on there?

I did, of course, take a few pictures of it before I left.  Maybe I'll make another one for use in my new workshop.

This was another one of those projects that is old, and I thought that I had posted it, but now I don't see it anywhere on the blog, so better late than never.

_________________________________________

This past several months, I have been trying hard to get this blog back on its feet. I have posted more new content in the past eight months than I did in the past three years combined. Granted, it hasn't been props or book binding, but still. I have maintained a consistent  posting schedule of a new post every 7-10 days, and I have stayed 4 to 5 posts ahead of the publishing schedule for most of that time. But lately I have hit a lull. I have one more post in the queue, and another two that are still unfinished. I have one or two old projects that I had planned on making brief posts about, and then I'm out of material. So, unless something changes in the next few weeks, there is going to be another dry spell, possibly starting as early as ten days from now (when the last finished post publishes). I have no idea how long it will last.