Made a little progress on all fronts this weekend. Woodworking: Ash + Walnut mallets Firewood: split and stacked my ash up Lumber: Ash 2x
Nice mallets and stacks. Can't decide which is straighter though.....mallets or the stacks! Do you have a specific use/need for the mallets?
Persuasion... Actually when I need to beat 2 pieces of wood together, my rubber mallet can sometimes leaves black streaks on the wood. These won't have that problem and hopefully they won't dent the wood up too bad either. I'm keeping one for myself and giving the other to the restaurant booth customers.
You have been busy , nice work Shawn Did you cut a dado for the handle and laminated the heads or cut a mortise ? My brother made a mallet for the trestle table we built together.
Yeah someday I'll wise up and do the laminated thing... But no, they're each single pieces with a hand chopped tapered mortise.
Glutton for punishment, eh? Takes some patience to do it, and even more to do it that well. Nice job Shawn......again.
Nice work! I like your re-saw set up. Any details on that? I have some nice cedar that I'd like to cut up but I'm at a loss for building a sled/set-up for my bandsaw.
Thanks! I built the resaw setup a few years ago and I use it all the time now. It works great for 'rough' straightening the edges of crooked boards too (saving a lot of time at the jointer). My sled is 8' long, so it needed a pair of support tables. For a shorter sled you might be able to get away with a pair of roller stands or something else. I built infeed and outfeed tables with cheap roller track from a warehouse supply outlet. The sled is attached to a 10' runner, which rides in the miter slot. I've been through several different designs for the actual sled, but my last one here is "the ultimate". You need a way to secure the piece to the sled, and I used to just screw everything down. For this one, I routed some slots into the deck to accept T-flange bolts for mounting the clamping hardware; that way I can adjust their position quickly without messing around with screws. The clamp is a Jorgensen "deep reach" pipe clamp. Here's a couple more important details that may be difficult to see in the pics. When I use the sled, I clamp another piece of plywood to my bandsaw table on the other side of the blade to support the offcut. I also found I needed some more support for the sled while it passes over my narrow bandsaw table, so I use another roller stand there. And finally, I marked out a scale on my deck (measured from the blade), with index marks at every 1/4". That way, once I've squared off one side, I can align the remainder of the cant quickly and accurately to rip the boards. (For shorter pieces, using the bandsaw's fence instead of the sled can be even faster. In these cases, I do still use the infeed and outfeed tables.)
Wow! Those mallets are too nice looking to use. Great job. Did you use a string or laser to line up the stacks? You do pay attention to detail, Shawn. Always enjoy seeing an artist's work.
