Pointy Two-Tone Pendulums

Here are some more turned hardwood pendulums. These ones are two-tone. They were made by first laminating two different colored pieces of wood together with wood glue and clamping firmly until dry. Then the laminated blank was turned round and then into pendulums. I started at the tail stock end, turned a pendulum, parted it off, then turned another, right up the length of the blank until I ran out of wood.

I intentionally made the two colored pieces of wood different thicknesses, so that the parting line did not end up in the center. I did't want the sharp tip to be on the glue line, in case there were any imperfections in the joint. And the asymmetry looks good to me.  These are half walnut, and half ...something else.

A while ago I made my first two tone blank, back when I was making the pendulums large and chunky. I made two of them like the one below. It is a large two tone, but I didn't turn a point on it. Instead, I drilled a 1/4" hole where the point would be. Then I made some small points out of a stick of black ebony, and made sure that the stem (where the eyelet and chain would attach) was turned to a diameter of 1/4" This way, the stem from the ebony point can be friction fit up into the hole in the large two tone pendulum. I also put an eyelet on the ebony point, and used a lobster claw latch instead of a jump ring to attach the chain. This way, you can use the large pendulum with the ebony point in it, or you can pull the ebony point out of it, and re-attach the chain and just use the ebony point by itself. Two pendulums for the price of one!

Most people probably don't want a pendulum this big for their personal use, but I think the large pendulums would work great of you were doing a demonstration, or teaching a class, or if you were doing pendulum divination for a larger group of people, and you wanted everyone to be able to see the pendulum easily.

Bricks are Heavy

From time to time I find myself scouring the workshop looking for something clean, compact and heavy. Even more so, now that I have been doing wood working. With increased frequency, I need to weigh something down, usually while glue is drying. Usually I drag out the old used bolts bin, and the large chisel box, and maybe a few large blocks of wood that we use for cribbing. But I would prefer to have something that is cleaner and more easily stackable.

Coincidentally, I have several bags of old cement products (mortar mix, floor leveler, concrete, etc). I'm sure some of them are no good any more. The only way to be sure is to test them, but then they are almost certain to go bad once opened. Anyway, I really just want rid of them. They take up space, and who knows when I will need them again, or if they will be any good when I go to use them. I would prefer to just buy new when I have a need. But I don't just want to assume they are all bad and dump them, so I am testing them, one bag at a time. if it is bad, I dump it. If it is good, I am turning it into bricks.

I found an old plastic shoe box that is a good size and shape for making cement bricks. It looks like a plastic bread pan. First I mix up a small cup of the material and let it set overnight, just to be sure. If the material sets up OK, then I mix up a batch in the plastic pan.

Solid cement blocks are decently heavy, but to make them even heavier, I am adding pieces of scrap metal. I have a bucket where I throw anything metal that needs disposed of. When the bucket is full, I usually just set it out on the curb with a sign. Within a day, one of the cities scrap collectors will nab it. Well, I decided to make use of some of the smaller bits, like broken bolts and hand tools, to add to the cement mixture to make the blocks heavier.

I leave the blocks to dry overnight, and then I de-mold them. Pretty simple. I might paint the blocks at some point, or even wrap them in some cloth, to protect my work piece. I have some regular clay bricks that I covered in cloth at my store workshop to use similarly. But for right now, they are just plain cement bricks that I can stack on wood pieces while the glue dries.

I'm not sure how I'm going to like storing these, or how often I will use them, but this cement was basically going to be thrown out anyway. And the bricks will probably be easier to store than 60lbs. sacks of cement. If I end up not liking using or storing these bricks, I will just smash them with a sledge hammer, pull out the metal scraps, and throw the crushed cement out into the gravel driveway.

Double Wide Rack

Some years ago, I bought out the remaining stock of a small shop that was going out of business as my local mall was dying. They carried a brand of incense that is traditionally displayed in glass jars on a wooden rack, called Wild Berry. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend it. It is made here in Ohio, and it is very good.

Although the incense is very good, and I still stock it, this post is actually about the wooden display racks that I inherited from that little shop that went out of business.

I don't prefer to display my incense in open jars, because of the overwhelming smell and because of people who don't know how to put incense sticks back in the jar where they found it, and because I'm not interested in selling sticks one at a time. I pre-bag my sticks and hang them on a spinner rack.  So I ended up re-purposing my two wooden racks to display other items. I scraped off the Wild Berry logo decal and stained them a darker color, to better fit with the store's decor. They are very nice little racks, and I like them a lot, but I needed one more. I like using one over by the window sitting on the main counter, but I need two over at my new incense station across the room (as it turns out, they also fit the cartons of HEM brand incense really well too). I could have bought another one from Wild Berry, but they are a little expensive. They seemed to be a fairly simple design, so I decided to see if I could replicate it.

I actually have room for two and a half of them over at the new incense station, so I figured, if I am going to make one, I may as well make an extra long one, then use one of my existing racks at the window, leaving me with a spare!

I don't have a lot of pics from this build, because I didn't really plan on documenting it. I took most of the  pictures after the things was built, and was being stained and finished.

The side walls and rear brace on the originals were made of solid oak. I used 3/4" cabinet grade plywood for my side walls and a piece of 2-by scrap for the rear brace. The vertical faces were made from 1/4" Luan plywood. I don't remember exactly, but I think my shelf bottoms were also made from the 3/4" plywood. I used pocket holes to lock the shelf bottoms and rear brace to the sides, and I used wood glue and pin nails on the rest.

The fabrication of the parts went pretty smoothly, but the assembly and glue-up was a bitch. I probably needed to make some sort of jig to hold the shelves in place as I put it together. I know that doesn't make much sense to any of you, since you can't see the assembly method, but, take my word for it. It needed a jig.

I also had a bit of trouble with the stain. I made the mistake of applying a coat of shellac before the stain, thinking I needed a sanding sealer (which is just dewaxed shellac) to help get even absorption. What I actually needed was pre-stain, not sanding sealer. Oops! Afterwards, the wood didn't want to take the stain at all! I couldn't get even absorption on all the pieces so it looked kind of ridiculous. I ended up basically painting it with stain mixed with shellac to get some color on there. At least no one will really be able to see it when it is in place and loaded up with incense.

Pendulum Board

Here is another one of those items that I thought I had posted about, but that I can't find on the blog. I made this pendulum board a few years ago.

It is made from a piece of 1/4" hardboard, about 12" square. It has several coats of black paint on it, to give it an old lacquered look. Then I used sand paper to weather the corners a bit.

The design was made on my computer, partly from elements lifted from the Rider Wait tarot deck, and arranged in a significant pattern for use in reading the perturbations of a hanging pendulum. It is a form of divination.

The design was printed out and then photocopied onto 11"x17" paper. I hand tore the edges around the design to make it fit onto the board and so it would have a deckle edge that would blend seamlessly with the wood.

I coated the board with gloss polyurethane wood finish, which served as finish for the board and also as an adhesive for the paper. Then more polyurethane on top of the paper. The paper was thoroughly soaked with polyurethane, which is what made it turn an aged yellow color, and also how it is decoupaged to the board.

Once dry, I drilled small holes near the four corners and inserted upholstery tacks into the holes, using CA glue and friction to hold them in place. Lastly, I added some thin cork pads to the back side.

I made about a dozen of these in my initial batch, and I sold about ten of them in my shop. I have a second batch in production.

Turning an Acorn Pendulum (First Project Video)

Well, I said I was thinking about doing it, and now I've gone and done it. I've published my first video to YouTube. I can definitely say that videos are not going to be replacing my regular blog posts any time soon. A blog post takes me anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours to write and publish. Just the editing of this first video took me over 8 hours!


Clearly I need more practice at, well... everything. But especially video making and editing. The original raw footage was a little over fifteen minutes, and the final video was just over five minutes. Of course, I do expect that things will go a little faster when I am more familiar with the editing software, but from everything I've seen and heard, video editing will always be a slow process.

As a bonus, I have also embeded the very first video I shot, which was just an editing test. It's pretty bad.


If I do continue making videos, I will most likely embed them here on this blog, just like this. But you can always subscribe to my YouTube channel, so you won't have to sift through all the blog posts just to watch videos. If you have any comments or feedback on the video, post it here or in the video's comments. Enjoy.

Mother's Little Helper

My mother is getting older, and she has diabetic neuropathy, and very little strength in her hands. I keep telling her to buy 2-liter bottles of soda instead of cans, because they are cheaper. She keeps saying that she has trouble opening them, and when she can get them open, she can't close them tight enough to keep them from going flat.

I've seen bottle grippers (and she has a few) that could help with opening and closing them, but they have their problems too. Depending on the design, they might also require some grip strength, and regardless of design, they would require her to dig out a tool whenever she wanted to open or close the bottle. People are lazy. They would rather just buy cans.

The other day, we were having this discussion for about the umpteen-millionth time, and it dawned on me that what she really needed was a better cap for the bottle. One that would be easy for her to open and close.

I took the cap from an empty 2-liter bottle of soda and embedded it in an "ergonomically" shaped chunk of polyurethane plastic. Now, she can just remove the original cap when she opens a new bottle, and replace it with this "grip cap" and leave it on there until the bottle is empty. Give the cap a rinse when the bottle is empty, and it's ready for use on the next bottle.

The initial prototype took me about 20 minutes to make. I didn't document its creation, because it was just a proof of concept prototype, but you can see it above. It is an organic shape with knobbly edges about three inches in diameter. It was made with a very quickly hand sculpted mold made from sulfur-free modeling clay, into which I poured polyurethane resin.

After the prototype was finished, I decided to refine the shape a bit, and so I made a wooden puck by drilling out six holes in a circle in a piece of 1-by lumber and then cutting out the circle with a jigsaw. I gave the puck a coat of gloss spray paint to help it not stick to the clay when making the mold.

I then flattened out some sulfur-free modeling clay (sulfur can inhibit the curing process of silicone rubber, so I only buy sulfur free plasticine-type modeling clay; hear after referred to as "clay"). Then I mold the clay around the puck, after spraying it with some silicone mold release spray. I put the clay just around the bottom and sides. The top face is left open. Then I pull the puck out the the clay, leaving the shape intact.

 To prevent resin from dripping into the cap, I mask off the underside of a used 2-liter bottle cap from my plastic parts bin. Then I stick it, bottom side up, in the center of the clay mold. Make sure you do NOT spray mold release on the cap. You want the resin to bond with the plastic cap, just not to the clay mold.

I mix up some polyurethane resin. Here, I'm using Smooth-On's Smooth-Cast Onyx, because it's what I had on hand. It's a 1 to 1 by volume mix ration of part A and part B. When it cures, it comes out glossy black. Sometimes I add a little talc powder to the mix as a filler. This resin has about a two minute work time, and can be demolded after about fifteen minutes.

I pour the resin around the cap, up to the rim. I want the finished piece to be big and chunky, and easy to manipulate with fiddly fingers- like a baby toy. 

Once the resin sets, I peel off the clay mold. I do it carefully, so I can just re-use the mold a second time without having to reshape it around the puck. Remove the masking tape, knock down any sharp corners with some rough sand paper, and give it a wash, and it's ready to go!

 I made a total of three of these, the prototype and these two from the wooden puck. That should be plenty for now. I still need to see if the resin will bond well to the plastic cap. Some plastics don't want to stick to anything. But so far they seem fine. Mom seems to like them. She says she doesn't have any problem gripping them or twisting them, and she even thinks they look cool on the soda bottle. :)

Carbide Turning Tools

There is a big schism in the wood turning world over the use of carbide turning tools and traditional High Speed Steel tools. Some people use both, but most seem to lean towards one or the other, and it ends up being one of those 'CD vs. Vinyl' sort of arguments between the 'old school' and the 'new hottness'.  My main turning tools are the mid-level set of HSS from Harbor Freight, which is to say they are about the worst tools that you can actually call 'usable'. That was the set that I started with when I bought my lathe. Since then, I've added a couple of Benjamin's Best brand gouges which are, by most accounts, at the lower end of  'half decent'. Basically, the next step up. These are all High Speed Steel traditional turning tools (gouges, chisels and scrapers). But I kept hearing about these new carbide tipped tools that never need sharpening and by some accounts are suppose to be very easy to use. They are, however, expensive. The carbide tools start at about $65 and easily go over $100, each. The tools I buy now are closer to $20 each.

But the carbide tipped ones are basically a tool handle with a steel shaft and a replaceable carbide cutter that attaches to the tip with a screw. I can make a tool handle. A piece of 1/2" square bar stock will serve as a shaft. All I really need is the replaceable cutter which, as luck would have it, sells for about $20.

I turned the handle out of soft maple. I drilled the end out to accept a piece of square bar stock, which I epoxied into the handle. I used small pieces of copper pipe as ferrules.  Most people who make their own handles for these, cut a recess in the tip of the bar stock, so that the top of the cutter sits flush with the top of the shaft. I don't see the necessity in that. I just set my cutter on top of the bar stock. I drilled and tapped a hole through the top of the shaft near the tip. Then I marked the outline of the cutter, so that I could remove any excess material from around and under the cutter's edge.

I got three different tips; a round one, a square one, and a pointed (diamond) one. There are other shapes, but these are the basic ones. The tip of the shaft has to be rounded on the underside so that the bar stock doesn't get in the way when it is up against the work piece on the lathe. And some of the material at the tip has to be ground down to let the cutter's edge protrude past the edge of the bar stock. Once the cutter was attached to the shaft with the screw, I also put some CA glue around the back edge of the cutter to help hold it to the shaft without twisting or moving at all, and to prevent the screw from working its way lose from vibration. If I ever need to remove the cutter, I'm sure I can break the CA bond without much difficulty.

That's really all there is to it. Turn handle, insert shaft, add ferrule, drill and tap, shape tip, attach cutter. Done.

Having used them a few times, I'm not really all that impressed with them. I won't count them out just yet, but so far I like using traditional gouges better than the carbide tools. I guess I'm just Old School.

Bam-Bam!

I love turning recycled, otherwise junk, wood into nice or useful objects. Plus, I'm cheap, so I don't like paying money for supplies. I have an add up on Craigslist soliciting for scrap wood for turning.

My buddy, Carl, brought me over a few pieces of old barn wood a few weeks back. He lives in a rural area, and like most rural dwelling people, has a bunch of old crap sitting under a rotting car-port that he wants to clear out, including some old wooden beams. All he asked for in return was that I make him a baseball bat on my lathe.

While he was there and we were talking, I chopped a piece off of one of the beams and chucked it up on my ShopSmith. I had recently purchased the pieces I needed to start using it as a lathe. I turned as we talked. He was fascinated watching the shavings come flying off. He was amazed at how fast a chunk of old wood could be turned into something recognizable. He said that if he could afford one, he would get himself a ShopSmith. I think he would enjoy wood turning. I've heard a lot of people describe it as addictive.

I did a bit of a hack job on it, partly because he had somewhere else to be, and my ShopSmith still needed some fine tuning. I was also limited on the length of item I could turn, so it is a little short and a little chubby. I joked that it reminded me of Bam-Bam's club (from the Flintstones cartoon). Also, the wood was kind of shit. It was soft and had cracks in it. Not really suitable for a proper baseball bat. But he loved it anyway. It only took me about a half hour to make, maybe a little more.

Here you can see it next to the rest of the post that it came from.

Carl was in a hurry, so I just gave it a real quick sanding on the lathe and one coat of Shine Juice (boiled linseed oil, denatured alcohol, and shellac), and off he went.

Shortly after this, I made some of the improvments that will help with using the ShopSmith as a lathe. I replaced a few of the set screws on the tool rest with wooden handles.

I turned a scrap piece of Douglas Fur into a handle and found a bolt that would fit in the hole to replace the set screw. Then I embedded the screw into the wooden handle and used a piece of scrap metal tubing as a ferrule. These handles were made very quickly and with no frills, but they make an immense difference when it comes to the ease of using the ShopSmith's tool rest.