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Here’s a small project to replace a handle on a Chinese-style ladle. The handle I had to replace was a cheap bit of pine pushed in to the metal part of the ladle. Instead of trying to replicate that, I decided to make a handle that would house the ladle. So I grabbed a scrap of walnut, cut it down to size with my rip saw, and then scratched my head for a while figuring out how to secure it.

My solution was to first drill the hole that would house the ladle. I locked it in my vise and used a brace I recently picked up for a few bucks to drill the hole. I also got an auger file recently and had just sharpened up some bits I had also picked up at the local flea market … so I was eager to try it out. It worked surprisingly well.

Then I took a length of 3/4" oak dowel and used a spokeshave to shave it down a bit so I could mount the new handle on the face of my workbench to work on it. I shaped the handle with spokeshave, chisels, and a file.

This is the handle in rough form mounted on a dowel. I used a chisel to slim it down.

Then I worked on it with the spokeshave.

I tapered it with the spokeshave, then smoothed out the rough edges with a file and chamfered the edges with a chisel. I finished it off with some flexible sand paper.

And here it is attached the to ladle.

The little NOAA website I run (my day job) was the source for a final Jeopardy question last night. Nifty!  

I recently completed a new vise Moxon benchtop vise.  The hardware and a good portion of the design inspiration is from Tools for Working Wood. It’s hard maple, 23" between the screws, cork lined, and finished with Danish oil. It was made with hand tools only, as part of my online apprenticeship with the Hand Tool School.

Drilling the Holes

The holes in the front and back jaw were easy to drill, but the right side was just a tad off when I put the screws in and tested the alignment and it was causing it to stick. So the second shot is a dowel with sandpaper I used to open up the rear jaw hole just a bit so there was no rubbing or sticking on the wood.

Hidden Mortises on the bottom

Here are the mortises on the underside of the vise that house the nuts. These were chopped out, of course, with mortise chisels.

Rabbets

Since I didn’t own a rabbet plane when I made this, I used a saw to cut the top and bottom rabbets. This took forever. I had to a lot of clean up work with the router plane to them square.

Angle on front jaw

I made a 45 degree guide for the cut, but it was only really useful to eyeball things to ensure I was at the same angle all the way across. Since I wanted a lip at the top of the front jaw, I couldn’t cut all the way to the angle guide in the back and it was too much of a hassle to get the guide at the right height in back to match up with cut I was making. So I really just relied on cutting down to the top and bottom lines marking the angle on the front jaw. Then I just planed it down. I figured I didn’t really care if it was exactly 45 degrees, anyways…as long as it was uniform and about 45 degrees, I was good. The angle is there so there’s room to angle saw cuts without cutting into the vise wood.

And here's the final product

Front:

Side: (the cork is to keep the vice jaws from damaging wood)

Back: (the top piece is so that there’s a flat surface for dovetail joinery)

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I’ve just started using Fargo, a new browser-based outliner from Small Picture. This little tool is platform-independent and works within any modern browser (i.e. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE10). It’s an HTML5 app written with JavaScript. Files are stored in Dropbox in an open format (OPML).

Why use this instead of one of the myriad of other outliner tools on the market? It's simple to use. You don't need to install proprietary software. It's available anywhere you happen to need it. You don't need to worry about 'lock-in.' There's no need to export your files, ever. It's free. It works well. I like it.

Last December, my wife came across an ad on Craigslist for free fieldstone. On a whim, I decided to haul it home to build a wall. As is so often the case with DIY, it was easier to concieve than to execute. I finished my small wall only a few days ago. It took me nearly four months.

The steps for building a dry wall are fairly straightforward. The essence of it: stake out the wall line; dig a trench about eight inches deep and a bit wider than the planned wall; fill the trench with crushed gravel to form a base that will minimize shifting from frost heaves and settling; then stack rocks. The basic rule of rock stacking is to place one stone over sections where two stones come together, and two stones over sections where there is one stone. Cap the top with heavy, nice-looking stone. The overall pattern should be stable, level, and visually appealing.

That last part is the kicker. In my case, I had to contend with a three foot downhill slope in the front of the house and a one foot incline on the part that curves around the odd looking conifer at the corner, which is called a Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar. A flat wall would have been challenging enough, but the sloping ground added much complexity.

My goal was to place the stones in a cascading fashion so that they conformed to the slope of the land. That entailed placing some rocks, stepping back for a wider view from various angles, deciding it wasn't quite right, tearing down parts that looked unnatural, choosing different rocks, then rebuilding the offending section. Then I'd build another small section and repeat the process. Over and over and over.  

I think the resulting wall looks nice, although I'm sure it would look nicer if a professional installed it. It might also be more structurally sound. Time will tell how well my amateur job holds up. I suspect I'll know in about a year. That length of time will test the wall against the stress of changing temperatures, weather, and frost. The great part about a dry stone wall, though, is that there is no mortar. I can always adjust it. I like to think of it as a rock garden in the shape of a wall.