DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE

As I was carting an abandoned bicycle up the street, I spotted a discarded flatbed scanner. Since Eve was on her way to pick me up, I grabbed it too. The other day I opened it up and poked around. The platen will be kept. What else?

I set the stepper motor and 7 inch circuit board aside as a potentially useful items. But what's that above them?

In my excitement I blurred the photo, but it reads DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE. No wonder it caught my attention. How high voltage?

200 volts AC. Huh, not bad. Should strike an arc, I think. Hmm...

A couple chunks of copper wire and it's a small Jacob's Ladder.

Success with boil-bending at last

On my third and fourth tries bending maple strips by boiling them in coffee, I was able to get it to work reasonably well. None of the bracelets are going to end up as I originally envisioned, but that's usually the way.

Here's the third batch in the pot with the beads.

And bent around the form.

If I do this again, I need to take the time to build up a ramp so that the strip is fully supported at the spot where it first crosses itself as it wraps around. Both of these pieces have damage at those spots that I'll have to cut away.

On my fourth attempt, I used a thin, long strip, and tried to push it into the pot like spaghetti.

I captured a video of the strip coming steaming out of the pot, and of the bending and clamping process.

And here are the future bracelets.

More ways to break a workpiece

After I snapped the batten that I was trying to boil-bend into a bracelet, I had some thoughts about how to avoid that outcome. I tooled up and tried again.

It's a bit hard to see in the photo, but I've taken a red pencil crayon and pointed out weaknesses in the grain of the board. I cut away the split at the left edge and tried to take a few slices of clear grained wood.

 I figure by having a range of batten thicknesses available I can experiment to find out what works. The next thing I wanted was a clamping form. I can make one if I can't find one, but...

A standard 1 1/2 inch ABS pipe coupling has almost the right outside diameter. And room for spring clamps.

Once more into the pot, along with the cleaned-up chisel cut beads from a previous post.

After 15 minutes of boiling, I removed one of the battens, drained it on paper towel for just a moment. and then started gently molding it to the form. It was pliable, and was almost entirely clamped when it snapped along the grain. Ah, I thought to myself, right. The grain has an inside and an outside for this purpose.

So I examined the next batten more carefully, figured out which way kept the grain supported, and carefully bent it around the form. It tore right across the grain.

So, apparently in the absence of more refined technique, I'm going to need to try thinner battens. But it's getting closer...

And sometimes they break

When I cut a 1/2 x 1/2 inch batten for chisel-cut beads, I ended up with a long sliver that was 1/2 x 1/8 inch in section. It was springy and light and seemed to want to be a bracelet. I pictured it bent around a form and bolted closed, with just enough springback to make it easy to get on and off.

I drilled holes for a pair of Chicago bolts, cut and shaped the edges, and sanded the batten to 120 grit, knowing I'd have to finish-sand after the grain was raised by the bending process.

I don't have a steam-bending setup, but this piece is small enough to boil in a largish kitchen pot. I liked how the maple beads looked with a coffee dye, so I figured I'd boil the workpiece in coffee until it was softened.

I had prepared the dye earlier that morning.

Softening up the thin batten only took a few minutes, but I boiled it for almost 15 minutes in the hope of deepening the colour.

When it seemed like time, I removed the wood with soft tongs, drained it quickly on a paper towel, and began carefully bending it around a form. It bent easily, but showed weaknesses at spots where the bend would sharpen. And when I closed the bolts and tried to straighten out the curve on the form...

Notes for next time: cut a choice of battens and flex to test for weakness, inspect for sharp changes in grain direction. Don't drill before bending. Leave long, trim and drill (carefully!) afterwards.

Tumbled beads and hardware: the reveal!

In earlier posts, I wrote about cutting wooden and metal beads, and about making bamboo ring blanks. All of those items went into the rock tumbler along with some water, grit and metal filings, ebony aniline dye, and kosher salt. After three or four days, this is what they look like.

Mmm, beads! Finished and strung on cord, those will be stunning. The abrasives have selectively worn away the early wood from each annual layer, leaving the familiar ridged texture of worn and weathered softwood. And tiny salt crystals have gotten lodged in the wood, which adds just a hint of glitter.

Battered and antiqued barrel clasps and lobster clasps for necklaces and bracelets.

Next time, I'll take more care to grind off the burrs and flashing from the cutting process. I'll have to do it later, and maybe feature the contrast between the freshly-ground and weathered sections. If you can't fix it, feature it...

Much better, don't you agree?

And these old lockset slices are way too cool. I'll have to find a good use for them.

The bamboo rings are also interesting:

I didn't sand the bores out before tumbling, and they didn't get smoothed, so I'll have to do that later, too. The open pores of the end grain probably soaked up dye deeper than the long fibers, so the ring might show a gradient inside. We'll see!

Cutting bamboo ring blanks

I made a bamboo ring from a bamboo plywood sample not long ago, and was pleased enough with the results to want to try a few other approaches to the material. So I cut some blanks to experiment with.

The bamboo is from bamboohardwoods.com, and we have cabinets made of their sheet bamboo plywood. Strong, attractive, sustainable stuff.

Immediately after cutting these blanks I remembered that boring out the central holes is challenging enough without cutting away all of the clamping surface of the workpieces. Oops. I used a large crescent wrench and some battens to hold the blanks during boring, but still had trouble keeping them quite centred.

The 7/8" blanks are bored at 5/8", and the 1" blanks at 3/4". The big ones will be mens' thumb rings, but the smaller ones can be reamed out to typical ring sizes. Wikipedia has a good ring size chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_size.

I happened to have a chunk of 5/8" dowel lying around, so I wrapped it in coarse sandpaper, stuck a blank on it, mounted it between centres, and trying turning the blank.

The cross-laminated bamboo turned poorly, with lots of tearout, so I finished with a scraper to clean it up before lightly sanding. The result is attractive, if a bit muted:

Making wooden beads

When I have time in the shop, I often like to choose a piece of material and then try to find something to do with it. It's an application of the idea that we are more creative when we are forced to find solutions to constraints, problems, or limitations than when we face a blank canvas.

When we bought our house years ago, there was a rotting old cedar trellis nailed to the wall of the garage. It finally fell over, and I threw it on the burn pile. One day, I chose it and made some beads from the weathered battens. Eve will not let me sell the choker that resulted.

So I made some more.

The old trellis batten is laying across the table of the benchtop 8" bandsaw. (I really like this little bandsaw and use it for everything it can handle.) The slotted angle isn't a fence, but a stop and corral of sorts. At the blade, it sets a 1/2" cut, but angles away behind the blade so that the work doesn't bind. It also helps to catch the beads as they are cut free.

I bored out each bead on the drill press, and then threw them all in the rock tumbler along with the cut metal hardware, abrasive grit, kosher salt, and black aniline dye. I'll post photos of the beads when they're ready.

I also got to try an idea that I had been toying with. Years ago, my father and I worked with a portable bandsaw mill operator to saw boards from some diseased maple and cherry trees that he had to fell on his property in Niagara. After years of air-drying, the boards yielded a series of very successful shallow bowls. I grabbed an offcut of maple and cut a 1/2" square batten from it, clamped it to the bench, and used a 1/2" chisel to mark off beads. Then I cut facets with the chisel.

I had tried coffee as a dye before, and thought that the very blonde maple might take the colour well. There's always a little left in the pot.

I tried them as a bracelet. Eve likes them.

But even in this photo you can see how fuzzy they are. The coffee bath raised the grain, and the bandsaw cuts aren't right in the grooves in some cases, which left ridges. Any technique that requires individually hand-sanding beads is not one that I'll be trying again, so I think I'll clean up the ridges, cut a few more, and use the rock tumbler (with coffee and grit, not black dye) to smooth them a bit.