Doorgaan naar hoofdcontent

Swingers...

I’ve made a bunch of wooden hair stackers over the years – too many to remember – all on the lathe. They work, but are a pain to get right, especially the bottom of the lower piece, which needs to be smooth. Requires a very special drill. Or the use of epoxy to fill the bottom… And even then, round stackers – not just the ones you make at home, but also commercially produced ones – have a tendency to mess up the stacked hair when removing the bottom end from the top barrel to grab the hairs – for any number of reasons. So when I saw John Nicosia’s ‘Swinger’ stacker, I wanted to try and make one for myself. That was a fair few years back.

About a year ago I finally bit the bullet and actually set about crafting a few, but the finished stackers wouldn’t co-operate, so I ditched the project. But recently I decided to try once more, with better, denser woods, that result in smoother internals after drilling and routing, and wooden hinge pins instead of brass rod (which is always too thin for a hole drilled with a bit of nominally the same size…). So I made 2 stackers out of an unnamed African hardwood (probably a Dalbergia species) with a 10 mm ‘barrel’, and 1 out of Brazilian rosewood with an 8 mm ‘barrel’. All three work admirably, even with funky hair that refuses to play nice with my normal barrel stackers. So I’ll will add these to my small list of available accessories.






Reacties

Een reactie posten

Populaire posts van deze blog

Update hollowing jig

 Some time ago I showed my hollowing jig for (female) bamboo ferrules. That version consisted of a small slab of wood with a groove, the depth of which defines the resultant wall thickness, and a spokeshave to remove material from the inside of a strip, down to the desired wall thickness. While functional, that small jig wasn't completely satisfactory, for a number of reasons. In addition, the (unmodified) spokeshaves were less than totally satisfactory, as they kept digging into the surface of the jig when reaching the final wall thickness. So I updated my hollowing jig, making it from a large, heavy slab of well seasoned European oak (from a 50 year old discarded table, sawn to length and planed to thickness (using a large workshop jointer and a lunchbox thickness planer). I made a number of grooves with a plunge router, of different depth (wall thickness) - on one side for general hollowing (wall thicknesses roughly between 2 and 3 mm), and for female ferrule hollowing on the ot...
Een reactie posten
Meer lezen

Waara V-block

I usually check my strips for dimension (both correspondence to the design thickness from the taper plan and consistency flat to flat) by carefully taking measurements with a digital caliper. I know that this is less than accurate, since the apex, which is always one of the reference ‘sides’, is very easily crushed, resulting in an undersize reading (the actual crushing of the apex itself is not so much a problem). There are better, more accurate ways, to measure dimensions of a (equilateral) triangular strip. The most common approach among bamboo rod makers is to use a so-called Waara v-block, named for the rod maker (and machinist and inventor) who popularised it and manufactured them for sale. The principle behind it is that you put a strip in a 60 degree v-groove in a block that has a cutout for a pair of calipers, supporting the apex side of the strip with the groove, rather than by its apex alone, and measuring the thickness of the strip-plus-block. If you know what the net thick...
Een reactie posten
Meer lezen

Fly threader

At my age, threading a fly onto a tippet in low light conditions, without magnification, is an exercise in frustration. A few high end gadgets are on the market to help with that - magnetic fly threaders - but they are prohibitively expensive, and the concept behind them is simple enough that I reckoned I could make one myself. They are nothing more than a solid base with a groove, a tiny dimple in that groove at one end, to position the eye of the hook, and a small rare earth magnet embedded in the base, just below that dimple, to (sort of) keep the fly attached to the tool, and positioned so that the hole in the eye is aligned with the groove. Once attached, you use the groove to guide the end of your tippet towards, and hopefully right through the eye of the hook - if the eye is free of crowding materials or varnish, this should work relatively painlessly. Most available fly threaders are made either from aluminium or high density resin (some are even 3D-printed) but since I don’t h...
Een reactie posten
Meer lezen