I bought a palette of firewood a few years ago, offcuts of hard tropical wood from furniture making, according to the description it was supposed to be a mix of black locust and jatoba. I was expecting mostly black locust and I hoped there might be a few nice pieces of jatoba fit for making knife handles in there too....
Forced break from working on knives was significantly longer than I wanted it to be but this week I finally could advance a bit with making of the cutting boards. I finally solved the problem of roughly flattening the prefabricates. The solution is not particularly elegant but it works. And it is my second attempt – the first one, using...
Once the drum sander was finished, I gave it a coat of blue paint. Not so much for aesthetics but mainly for visibility and to protect some particle board surfaces against moisture.
When truing the drum cylinder I was collecting the dust simply by means of a handheld vacuum tube. That is not practical, of course, so I have made a simple cover to which I can attach the vacuum.
Last week I did not write an article because I was very busy and it was only late in the evening on Sunday that I realized it is not Saturday anymore. I guess I am getting old.
Since the beginning, I intended to use my current belt sander as a power source for the drum sander. On a picture in one of my previous articles on it can be seen how I used an old abrasive belt for this when I was making the drum cylinder concentric.
To regulate the working height of the drum sander I decided to go for the simplest solution – tilting table.
I won't write too much about the base, I hope most will be clear from the pictures.
I have a lot of tropical hardwood – jataba and garapa – and it is not feasible to turn all that into knife handles and blocks. Thus I decided to make some high-end cutting boards. For that, I need a drum sander to mate glued surfaces precisely. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to buy one and even if I did, it...
I made this part last year but I forgot to write about it at the time. It is the last part on the outside of the forge.
