Oct. 12, 2024

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This week I have been making up for my woodworking stall the past few weeks and have gone full steam. It started with dovetail and box joint practice. It was a disheartening experience. At least the dovetails were; I’m just not there yet with technique and it wasn’t computing in my brain, the pieces just wouldn’t fit! I could blame the fact that my wood pieces aren’t perfectly straight and square; they are actually quite off square and rough cut. Maybe that’s it… Or maybe I’m not getting the angles right.

Either way, I drew a line under dovetails and officially switched to boxjoints. It is basically the same joint, just straight cuts up and down instead of a fancy angle. At least I can manage it. I managed to do one successful joint in practice, which I deemed enough to move back onto the toolshed project.

I worked my way through the outer casing of the cupboard, doing box joints in each corner, and a joint for the shelf in the middle of the cupboard. This joint one was slightly disastrous; you have to chisel out the holes in the middle of the board, and something about the plywood means you just blow out the wood on the surface no matter how careful you are. The advisor that is my brother, said it is the plywood’s fault, you don’t get that with solid wood. Unfortunately, we’re in the UK and we have no more trees for solid wood… at a good price. Anyway the cupboard is coming together, despite shoddyness and wonky cuts, but that doesn’t stop me.

Mid-week I went to visit my land, I probably need to be going twice a week right now. I bought a pickaxe (actually mattock) and 10kg of broad beans to plant as a cover crop. I went to try out the process; I had no idea if my mattock planting idea would be feasible. I planted about 4 rows of beans, in 20cm spacing, rows of 15m long, in 1.5 hours. It works, it’s just not particularly fast or light work. I started right at the beginning of the field, right by a popular path for dog walkers. I probably looked quite medieval hammering into the ground with a pickaxe, on my own trying to plant beans. I felt a bit exposed. After 1.5h I got quite tired. I could probably push myself to do 2-2.5h in one session, but then be exhausted. I figured that my ideal goal of planting 80 rows of beans would take me about 30 hours of pickaxing.

So with that in mind… I thought hard about what other tools I could use to make the job easier. I bought two more tools, a twister thing and a rotary thing, and have been awaiting their arrival to try round two next week.  Note - I did consider a wheel plough, there aren’t really any to buy in the UK, mostly just US and China. I didn’t want to spend too much on new tools that might not work. My worry with the wheel plough is that it would not be strong enough to push away the rocks underneath the soil. I’m hoping the new twister tool will be lighter work than the mattock, even if not necessarily faster. I’ll be ordering the trees soon, which will be the most important task to complete before end of November.

I ended up hiding my tools in the bush by the field so I didn’t have to bring it back and forth each time… I hope they’re still there when I go back. I need to build a storage bench for there soon.

Coming back to woodworking, I ordered a jigsaw machine from Dewalt. I succumbed to the fact that I probably needed some machines to help me through this, and a jigsaw seemed a friendlier option than the circular saw. It arrived on Thursday and I was away! Really is a massive step up from sawing the big sheet by hand. It’s a dream. I was quickly able to feel comfortable with it.  I’m getting much straighter cuts. Although… it’s not perfectly straight, jigsaws are supposed to be used for curved cuts and they move around a lot. It’s actually tricky to keep it dead straight. That’s going to be my next goal; making perfect straight cuts. Then I’ll be on my way to make properly decent things. Lots of progress made on the cupboard this week, powering ahead. 

Enough of that. To round up the week… I’ve officially transferred my domain name to my blog - thecraftofoliving.com! Celebrate! It was surprisingly easy, Google Cloud is a dream to work with - sorry AWS.

In the evenings, I’ve been progressing on the jumper, getting there, no rush.

No rest for the crafty.

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