Dallas Makerspace Show & Tell - February 2018

Post a picture and description of anything you are working on this month at the 'Space here!

It can be anything from a small craft project to a large CNC router project to building a table to 3D printing to a science experiment and so much more. There are lots of people doing cool things at DMS all the time, but most of us don’t get to see it. Post it here and share the interesting things you are doing at Dallas Makerspace this month! And we’re all makers at heart, so share with us any tidbits you’ve learned.

Posting here promotes Dallas Makerspace and could inspire others to make something. It will also help PR post a monthly look at what can be done here on a blog post (with attribution to each maker of course).

:bulb: NOTE: Please try to include the following on each post, to help make for richer blog content!

  • a decent quality PHOTO
  • a notation about WHAT you’ve made
  • WHO you are (for attribution on the blog)
  • HOW you’ve made it
  • and WHY
4 Likes

Classical carving bench (AKA Shaving Horse) in 1:12 scale miniature for carving with hammer and chisel.

Made of lemonwood with threaded brass axle and nuts. Everything is made from scratch and is fully functional. It is assembled with dovetails, wedges and friction fit with no glue.

The carver would sit astraddle the bench, with the notched vertical support upright between the legs. The wood to be carved is placed between the support and lever. Pressing the foot plate puts pressure on the wood piece to hold it during the carving. The full-sized one would be adjusted for the size of the carving pieces by pulling and re-inserting the wedges in the vertical pieces. This one works the same way (hence, no glue).

This is the natural finish on the raw wood. The bench needs to be cosmetically aged before going into Gepetto’s workshop. I hate to do that. I love the way the lemonwood looks – lemonwood is probably my favorite wood to work with (although it’s too dense to take stain).

I made this for my miniature Gepetto by adapting a full-sized design found on www.craftsmanspace.com.

Several of the more complex pieces are pin-routed (i.e., tracing along the edge of fixture using an overhead router). I laser cut various pin-routing fixture components plus a couple for sawing the leg tapers. The axle, nuts, and various pins/pegs were turned on my micro-lathe.

The #0-80 wing nut may be my favorite piece; turned on my micro-lathe and then tapped and shaped by hand. Somehow I am always surprised when I manage to persuade a piece of metal to do what I want.

I am thankful to Walter, who pointed out during my initial project research that woodcarvers use different tables and benches than do carpenters.

EDIT: Here’s the aged version.

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…and now, for something completely different…

Messed up etching a tumbler

Then reworked the design and saved the cup :grin:

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I went to the Golden Triangle Woodturners meeting last night in Denton. I was invited to join by @jeffbob and I became a member last year. We had a great crowd and the presenter showed off some of his home-made tools he uses for hollowing his turnings. You can find them here: http://www.goldentrianglewoodturners.org/GTW-New/Plywood%20Steady%20Rest%20-%20Don%20Hawkins.pdf (Think vase or cookie jar) The GTW club has an ongoing program to make bowls for the Denton Empty Bowls project. https://www.ntfb.org/get-involved/events-campaigns/empty-bowls

I was asked to turn a couple so I took a couple of the maple bowl blanks they provide and turned two bowls for the project today. They were pretty small blanks, but they turned out quite nice.
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While I was at it I decided to turn a couple more from my supply of bowl blanks. Both of these blanks I acquired from DMS from the “free tree-wood (an oxymoron I know) shelf” in the wood shop. The spalted maple bowl is from 2016 and the oak is from 2018.

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They are all finished in tung oil. All of the maple bowls I’m going to give to the Empty Bowl project, however, my wife has become fond of the oak one, so I guess I’m keeping it.

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I go to empty bowls every year and get about 5. I give them as gifts.
It is a great cause for Denton and the homeless and poor.

Dan,

Let’s go cut some wood one day 2-18-20. I bought 5 rip chains today to
go along with the 22 normal ones I already have. I will have my Alaskan Saw
Mill and the rails for it by then. Make some slabs and blanks for more bowls.

Keep the faith brother. Keep turning…

Jeff Whitcomb
.
“The only good sense is one of humor, without it all the others are worthless.” JCW
[email protected]

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Floating box. Pear and Wenge.

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Wow! They are very beautiful bowls colonedan!

I am impressed!!!..

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One of these days you’ll need to tell me what you charge for those. I super want one

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Made Soap and Lemon Essential Oil, full attendance in both classes.

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I finished spinning this spindle of fiber I was working on at one of our recent Fiberfrolics in Creative Arts. Finally. It’s many hours of work.

(The gory details…) :slight_smile:

It’s a blend of silk and yak down (the fluffy braid on right) spun on this 10" Tibetan-style support spindle I got for Christmas. Support spindles rest their tips in a dish when spinning, versus being suspended. It’s good for delicate fibers or ones being very finely spun because the spindle is very fast building twist.

It was both reasons in this case. The spinning method this spindle needs lets the fiber spin very fine yet capture the soft fluffy nature versus compressing it like another method/tool would.

Incidentally, the pottery dish is one I made ages ago then did raku with it. It’s been languishing in a shelf and I’m happy to have it in use for this. Most of my other support spindles have metal tips (this one is all wood) and I worried how the raku would wear. Now I can use it. Yay.

This yarn I made is kinda between sewing and quilting thread size. The spindle-full you see represents a good part of a weekend binge-watching a series, quite a few evenings, and some fiberfrolicking at DMS. So, quite a few hours. But it’ll be a goodly amount of yardage once I get the rest of the fiber spun (probably two more spindles). This yarn I made is kinda between sewing and quilting thread size. I’m probably going to weave with it. Not sure what it’s going to grow up to be yet, but likely a scarf since it’s crazy soft. It’ll be a special project.

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I made a couple of drill bit sorting gauges for the makerspace, using some of the acrylic the @Hardsuit donated.

To use, slip a bit into the slot and slide to the left until the bit stops, then read the size off the scale at the bottom.

I made three: one for the wood shop, one for the general workshop area, and one for me to take home. :slight_smile:

20 Likes

really cool, nice work.

Made Orange essential oil, it came out really good and strong. Used about 6 large oranges’ peel to get roughly a tablespoon of oil.

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Just for the record, there is an Empty Bowls project here in Dallas. Most of the contributions for pottery although I donated Glass at one point. When I checked https://www.ntfb.org/get-involved/events-campaigns/empty-bowls it is March 2 and in a new location.

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Made a gas tank skid plate from scrap for our offroad project

Worked great

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That’s absolutely beautiful. Is that its final color? I hope so because I adore it.

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Re final color of yarn

It’ll blend slightly more when I ply it. Then it can blend slightly more depending on next project. Kind of get more heathery. Not planning on dyeing it though.

Knit/crochet would blend more, plus any texture introduced.

Weaving, it depends on what else i pair it with for warp/weft. Close color value and texture of pattern would be more subtle. Or I can go with darker contrasting value to make it pop. I’m thinking if I did that, then probably I would dye some silk a dark dark brown picking up the dark notes of the yak down.

The other option to go with it is I have some raw buffalo fiber (they shed and industrious lady I got it from has a neighbor that let her glean his pasture). I have to separate it (they have five distinctly different types of fibers in their coats) plus get the grass out of it and wash it, then spin the downy undercoat part and see if it’s enough…

Weaving, maybe a nice scarf for my husband. I’ve been thinking about adapting the opening music score of Barber’s Adagio (his fave) into a music draft and using that as a basis for the pattern (doesn’t literally look like music, but rather the music is sorta converted like math into a weaving pattern, but the genesis of the music to textile is there). Gotta play around with that to see if it will do what I want…

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