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FNG With Grand Fantasies of Crafting Gorgeous Tooling
Shop Greetings, and Holiday Greetings!
I spend more time surfing the net looking at cool tools and projects than I spend in the shop. I'm sure I'm the only retired guy who does that, right?
My interests have evolved over the years from many aspects of woodworking to machining metal. My biggest, and significant early project back in the '80's, was a 18' cedar woodstrip canoe. I've also built a number of Ashiko drums, a West African style of hand-drum made with tapered staves - one of which can be heard on several Ken Burns documentaries and some commercial recordings. These drums were made with walnut that I harvested, milled by a buddy with a Wood Mizer, and dried in my shed over years. I roll and weld my own metal hoops for the drum heads, I milled the wood from log to finished product, and mounted the goatskin heads and laced the drums.
Current projects percolating in my brain include a drum/thickness sander with power feed for which many of the parts have been on-hand for about 7 years. I'm also a devotee of the late Rudy Kouhoupt and his tooling projects. I want to build an adjustable angle plate, boring head, indexing head, and radius/ball turning tool for my lathe. And Rudy's little screwless vise, and a pillar tool/tapping machine, and a sophisticated grinding rest, and...and.....and. I have a few kits from Metal Lathe Accessories Metal Lathe that need to be completed - a t-slot cross slide, toolpost, work post, and milling base.
What do I make? Projects have included cabinetry, built-ins, many shop built stands, jigs &tc, stepstools, dovetail boxes, wall-hanging country-style shelves, rustic benches, lamps, and all kinds of projects that appeared in various woodworking magazines. I'm planning on a couple more woodstrip canoes in different sizes with paddles for family, getting into building fretted, stringed musical instruments - specifically Irish bouzoukis - aka octave mandolins, and maybe take a stab at making a set of Scottish smallpipes - a form of bagpipe that I play. I also play the great highland bagpipes, guitar, mandolin, Irish bouzouki, bodhran, and hand drums. I play Celtic music sessions about once a month, and play 50-60 bagpiping jobs a year, both with band and solo.
I've also built a few....um.....well - let's just call them glider stools with something extra.
I have all of the late Rudy K's Shop Wisdom books. I'm attracted to his methods, and that he used a Benchmaster mill, South Bend 9" lathe, and shaper. I have a few of his DVD's as well. I enjoy the Workshop Practice Series books by Harold Hall and "Tubal Cain". I also like watching "Tubal Cain" on YouTube, but that's a different guy. Heck, I like to watch anyone who can show me how to do something interesting in the shop. SV Seeker, Turn-Wright Machine Works, etc etc.
My shop equipment includes, on the wood side: table saw with shop-made crosscut sled, bandsaw, a nifty little stationary Sakura scroll/jigsaw, drill press with shop-made table and fence, cheap lathe with a shop-made, sand filled base that improves it quite a bit, dust collector, shop-made router table, stationary belt/disk sander, vertical belt sander, oscillating drum sander, portable 12" thickness planer on a shop-made stand, 6" jointer, cheap mortising machine that I've never used and for which I have Shop Notes plans for a positioning jig, portable miter saw on a shop-made cabinet, and the usual suspects in power tools and hand tools.
In my metal shop corner there's a 1934 model 9" South Bend early workshop model lathe, a Benchmaster milling machine, two Atlas 7B metal shapers (one running, one in pieces for restoration); a small, cheap drill press; and a couple bench grinders. A small gas-fed MIG welding machine is also present. I had an ancient and heavy Keller power hacksaw, but sold that because its utility to me was not worth the space it consumed - but I need another machine to cut metal bars.
If you read all that, you have too much time on your hands and you're persistent. I hope you were entertained.
Cheers!
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