Tag: Wood Turning

Some small projects around the house

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I have been swamped with work and travel for the last couple of months, so my shop time has been very limited. I have mostly been puttering around with my workbench, getting the last bits and bobbles done before calling it done and I have spent the off hour here and there on the lathe and doing stuff around the house:

  1. I had to fix a dishwasher leak and do some painting in the kitchen – still hate plumbing
  2. We did some re-arranging, so I had to fill some nail holes and then make new ones.
  3. Glued a cutting board back together after it split – craptastic glue didn’t hold, so it is back in the to-fix pile and will get some dowels this time
  4. Made a pot lid handle out of some scrap cherry.
  5. Tackled the jungle that was once my yard – twice
  6. Sharpened the lawnmower blade
  7. Turned the compost
  8. I bought a sheet of plywood and built a DVD shelf and a 8′ bookshelf for the lending library we run.
  9. There was been an oak log in my shop for months so I cut it in half and made a couple of stools for my office.
  10. Our puppies play a game called “run away from Mommy” when she takes them out, so I built two small fences to keep them in the back yard and away from the front gate.

I have do a few things in the shop just for organization and am working on a couple of little projects:

  1. We got a huge free wardrobe that I put in the GROP to organize non-tool/shop related items like climbing gear and life jackets
  2. My battery operated tools need a home, so I put together an organization center for them that mounts on the French cleat board
  3. I hung up my 6 heavy panel clamps to get them out of the way
  4. Made a Lathe chuck and tail-stock tool organizer for the French cleat organizer
  5. With a bonus from my J-O-B, I bought a few more molding planes, but they arrived in sad shape. I spent 6+ hours one Saturday cleaning, sharpening and fixing them.
  6. Started work on a blanket chest rebuild: cut here, snip there, new runners and new feet. Will get new milk paint finish when complete.
  7. Working on a copyist lectern rebuild. I made the base, pillar and other bits from some scrap beech left over from the bench build.
  8. Built a wooded top for the puppy Kennel so it blends better with the furniture in the Living Room.
  9. Putting together a 6-board chest for molding plane storage.  Will get re-purposed forged hardware and a Barn Red milk paint finish.

Matt Talley - Projects 2015_06 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_11 IMG_3410 Oak stool 23-2015 (2) Matt Talley - Projects 2015_24 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_22 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_23 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_25 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_17 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_18 Matt Talley _ Drill Organizer _ 2015

Making stuff with My Son

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

It is one of my duties in this life to make sure that my children can do for themselves. Having to call a plumber for a clogged drain or an electrician to replace a switch just is not the Talley way. We are fixers, tinkers, builders, and warranty voiders by practice and nature. I cannot have it on my conscience that such a path would end with me, so part of the summertime ritual is to fix and build stuff.

This year was no different. The Ruminator work on the lathe a bit, helped me build a kitchen island, and helped design and construct a hanging shelf system for my wife’s sewing room. We hung a storage rack in the garage, built a snowboard rack for his room, hung stuff up in the living room, applied a little spray paint and finish, learned about milk paint, refurbished a miter-box saw, cut up some andirons, went over tool identification, sunk a bunch of screws, put some all-thread to use, made sparks with the grinder, and that sort of thing.

Just little bits at a time… Next year we will do a little metal work and wood carving. The year after, we might build a deck and do a little welding. At some point he will learn to sew and mend a little – not to be a seamstress, but enough to make simple stuff and put a button back on a coat. If he wants to be a carpenter or a cobbler or a tailor or a machinist or a welder fine, then I am equipping him with early skills to build from. But if he wants to be an architect, teacher, engineer, lawyer, doctor, or whatever – I still want him to have the knowledge base of how things work, how they are put together, and how they should be fixed.

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UPDATE: Shortly after my son left to go back home, I was cleaning up the GROP and I found this message below written in saw dust. It made me both humble and very proud.

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A Few Turns of the Lathe

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

After our house was packed up and loaded on a container-ship bound for the Panama Canal and on to the Port of Marseilles, the only tool I had were my lathe chisels, so I made use of the time and spun out a few odds and ends: a few cord pull handles for the florescent lights in the basement. two jar lids for Stamps-With -Foot, a wooden pestle (2 actually) for kitchen herb grinding and a short honey dipper for her as well.

From the same section of wood as the pestles, I turned some small bun feet for Brodie’s new  food & water bowl stand.  I re-turned my ash carving mallet to change the handle profile and add some ring details.  As I was in the mallet mood, I made general use wood working mallet for my brother-in-law out of a Baseball Bat and reused the bat’s pommel and turned it into a foot massage nubbin for my wife.  I got points in the ledger for to wife-specific items.  Always a good thing.

Cutting trees down and making stuff

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

Shortly after we moved into La Maison du Talley, we cut 21 trees out of the backyard. There was only one serious tree – a 40′ cedar – and the rest were smaller Bay Laurels and Vine Maples that were blocking any possibility of sunlight reaching the ground. I kept some of the larger, straighter sections of the small trees and put them in the loft of the garage to dry and season, hoping that I would eventually make stuff out of them. That was three and a half years ago and while spring cleaning in the garage/shop this weekend I decided to take a little break and mess stuff up again 🙂 I pulled a couple of sections down and cut them to manageable size with the chop saw. I knew exactly what to do with pieces.

We have a neighbor who is crazy helpful and has a passion for dahlias. He grows and shares them with the whole street and has helped Stamps-With-Foot litter the edges of the yard and flower beds with them. She loaned him the bulb planter early this spring and he loved it. He had somehow gone through life as a gardener and just never tried one. I decided to make him his own with graduated depth gauge marks and a matching mallet to drive it into the odd patch of hard ground. The planter is made from a section of the vine maple and the mallet is turned from a hickory Little League baseball bat that I bought for $2.00 at Goodwill. The maple was super-dense and I counted 21 very tight growth rings on it. It grew in the shade under larger trees for all that time and that made it an especially hard and nice piece of wood to turn with sharp chisels – the wood shavings and tailings came off in long, thin, lace-like strips. An absolute pleasure to work with.

Since I was making sawdust already, I decided to keep going: The wife and I are planning to make some/most of our Christmas gifts this year. I have already started and added a few mallets for the woodworkers in my life (I am not spoiling the surprise – none of them read this blog…). I also turned a garden mallet for Stamp-With-Foot from a section of Laurel tree (her name-sake). I added the burned striped bands at her request after she saw her’s beside the others and got mallet-envy.

Just before my wife stomped out to the shop and MADE me come in for the night, I took a hunk of red oak that I have had for 10+ years and turned a couple of fancy door-stops. Since we live in a house built in 1928, the doors have a mind of their own and a well placed wedge keeps a person from walking into the edge of a door in the middle of the night. I will add some tung oil and a few coats of satin poly this week to finish them up.