Yeah, progress! Saturday I tackled the joyous hell that is Me Doing A Glue Up and it all seems to be okay. Then this morning I got up early and planed the bevels on the underside of the tops before breakfast. It can't last, but then it doesn't have to much longer. A few millions coats of shellac to wipe on the tops, the coins to be set in the underside of the top and the buttons screwed on and I'm done. Heck, what can go wrong... (Don't answer that!) I wouldn't usually put the coins in the top, but rather one of the stretchers, but this way when a 2005 coin does eventually cross my path it'll be easier to bore the additional recess. Looking good, although it's ridiculous the amount of time I've taken to make two piddling little tables. Never mind.
Oh, and I'm getting to grips with the diamond paste a little more. Less successfully with the Veritas irons at the moment, but the L-N skew block was hair-poppingly sharp after the 0.25 micron. I thought I was getting things pretty sharp before, but evidentally I was deluded...
Workshop temperature - 112F
Progress - 0
Instead I'm reading "Ice Cold in Alex" as all the talk of heat, flies and thirst fits the current situation perfectly. But it ain't woodworking. :~(
After that small break, here we go again, and a small update to the progress on the tables. At the moment it's just a case of wiping on endless coats of shellac until my eyes boss. Not particularly exciting to do, or take pictures of. I was down in the workshop before breakfast this morning (on a Sunday! Aargh), in order to apply another coat before it got unbearably hot down there. At some point I have to dig out the two 1955 sixpences I bought to put underneath the tables, to mark the fact they're for the Golden Wedding, and polish them up. I'm still on the lookout for a couple of 2005 coins to go with them, coins being my usual method of dating a piece and this year not being 1955, but so far no dice. I have a nasty feeling they do only tend to show up in the latter months of the year, so I could be all out of luck. I also need to check what size recess a sixpence fits into; hope to goodness it happens to coincide with a bit I own or things will get complicated.
Anyway I bunked off the finishing yesterday to go to the Wood Fair (pics here), which was fun. I'm also trying to get round to trying out the diamond paste, but I really need to clear the decks of the side table parts before I do that. Verily, there's no such thing as a workshop that's "big enough"...
Further progress has been made, but no pics until Charley's finished moving my web space to his new server. Worryingly there's still no glaring cock-up to report. Anyone got any ideas as to how wrong chamfering the underside edges of the tops could go? Just so I know what to look out for...
In other news, London won the curse of hosting the Olympics in 2012, and I'm thrilled. Not because I particularly wanted the Olympics to drop us all into terrible debt, but because we Beat The French! Or should that be the Red Team...? That'll teach M.Chirac to be rude about our fine cuisine. Not that I have anything against the French per se, it's just, sometimes, it's rather nice to pull le carpet out from under their feet like that. ;~) Does this make Seb Coe* Lord of the Rings now?
*For 'Murican readers, Sebastian Coe, Olympic winning runner was, er, running the campaign, and he's also a Lord. For everyone else, "Olympic rings", see? Oh never mind...
