Those little jobs

You know the ones. The little insignificant tasks that have been on the To Do List since the dawn of time but just never seem to get done, except they'd make life fractionally more pleasant if you actually did them? Yeah, those. Well I've actually got a couple of them off the list.

First, the frightfully exciting replacement of a short (and subsequently broken) post on the base of the adjustable bench light. Okay, so it may possibly have been sold as a desk light and wasn't supposed to suffer quite so many slings and arrows, but that's by-the-by... Had to bore out the remains of the plastic uselessness and replaced it with a length of 10mm steel rod that I happened to have lying around. Also used up an end of JB Weld that's been hanging about, getting in the way, so that was two things dealt with.

A bit of beech was fashioned into a rudimentary bench dog with a hole in the top for the steel rod, and behold. One easily moveable bench light again. At some point I may find another Tuit and make another dog to go in a 3/4" hole too.

While finding the steel rod, I finally stumbled on the old rosewood plane knob I knew I had somewhere (there's an awful lot of that going on in the workshop at the moment). Some time ago I replaced the stained beech rear tote of my oldish UK Stanley #7 with a shapely rosewood version I seemed to have spare, but I was without a front knob to go with it. The stained beech was starting to annoy me, but my available rosewood stock wasn't able to stretch to the required thickness to fashion a replacement, so I was pleased to find the perfect replacement. Well perfect except for the large chip out of the base, anyway. Ah, so that's why I didn't fit it in the first place...

I won't say it's a great match, 'cos it ain't, but as a first attempt at such a repair, I'm pleased it's at least functional.

And the result is a rather nicer-looking Frankenplane than it was before. One of these days I may even treat it to a better iron and cap iron, but to be honest, the existing ones are doing such a decent job there's really not much incentive to do so. Incidentally, quite by coincidence, it's another one of the patternmaker's tools.