A Simple Home-made Honing Guide for Plane Irons and Chisels. Part 1 Back to School - Painless Geometry.

All cutting tools should be kept sharp, not only to produce clean cuts in the material but to do so safely and with the minimum effort.

The manufacturers of planes and chisels supply them with the 'business' edge ground to an angle of 25°. It is recommended for optimum cutting of wood that this angle is increased at the tip to 30° and you have to do this yourself using a flat abrasive surface. There are countless sites on the internet that describe this process and offer really sound advice and tips on how to achieve the desired sharpness. Unless you are really experienced with the process it is very hard to attain the desired angle of the blade against the whetstone surface and to this end a honing guide is used. These guides vary in price but all require the blade to be clamped to it.

Very early on on Friday morning I had the idea of making a guide using a flashlight and this is how I made it.

Back to the Geometry Class

Maybe a shudder runs down your spine at the thought of school geometry but there is an elegance in being able to reproduce angles very accurately and with ease. 

I wanted to produce a line that was 30° from the horizontal. To do this I first drew two sides of an equilateral triangle, which as you may remember has internal angles of 60° and then bisected this to produce my 30° angle.

 

I selected a piece of MDF recuperated from a pallet top. Along what was to become the lower straight edge I drew a straight line about 1cm from the edge and parallel to it.

Now, using a pair of compasses, the point of the compasses firmly on the baseline (the origin), I marked two arcs, one on the base line...

....and one in the approximate position for the second line, it doesn't matter if you draw a quarter circle through the baseline and up instead of the two arcs.

I moved the point of the compasses to the point where the arc crossed the base line and drew another arc. The two arcs drawn above the baseline (or the new arc and the quarter circle) intersect.

I drew a line from the origin to this intersection. This established the two sides of the triangle and the 60° angle.

To produce the 30° angle I needed to bisect this. So, placing the point of the compasses where the arc intersected the base line I drew another arc above the base line.

Moving the point of the compasses to where the first construction arc now intersected the newly-drawn 60° line I drew  the final arc.

A line was now drawn from the origin to the intersection of these last two arcs. 

And that's it! A line inclined at 30° to the base line.

Part 2 follows shortly., after I've had a cup of tea. I will also include a film I made of the process, which takes you though the steps visually. The link for part two is here.   

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All the best, Andy

© Andy Colley 2014

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DIY Pallet Wood Hen House Chicken Coop Part 3 - Assembly.

The little touches that count and just give the Hen House a feel of home.

It's day two and the Chicks have still to try out their new home. Now the foundations are down I'm hoping all will go well. The big question you may be asking is how do I know all my workshop fabricated kit will fit together? Quite simply because whilst it was pouring down with rain outside and there was no chance of erecting it, I did this....

Set the whole thing up in the Kitchen! It's something I did before, though not indoors, when I made the roof structure for the Tiny House in the Garden. It's a really good idea if you can just do a trial run fitting a project together somewhere you can easily get all round access  rather than waiting until the project is in situ.

It also means I can check the alignment of bolt holes in the corners and mark them up for ease of assembly. After all, who knows how long the dry spell of weather will last.

The pallets are laid onto the prepared foundation blocks. Providing they are standard pallets, all four should be at the same height.

The rear wall and one section of the side wall are assembled to make a self-supporting structure, to which the other walls may be attached.

Andy's Handy Handling Hint

 

To get the roof panels up through the forest garden without causing damage to trees and bushes and for ease of manoeuvre. I made this simple pallet wood bogey. I used wheels recuperated from an old lawn mower.

It also means that the project can be handled by a person working on their own.

As the night comes down, two roof sections form a temporary cover, secure enough to allow the hens to spend their first night in their new home.






The time was ripe to build this new house because this year Sue has launched us into Cochin Pekins (twelve new babies in all) and seven of them have just been left by their Mother so they are ready to enter a group. As chicks with a mother hen, they have had the right to pass throughout the garden but left alone they need to be attached to a house so as to establish territorial rights. A brand new house, which is new for the whole group makes it much easier for the established flock to accept the chicks because territorial possessions such as the house and perches have changed. If you want to see the new chicks in action:

The next part of the assembly is quite involved so needs a post to itself to complete and it can be found here

Thanks for dropping by and please feel free to share this article, comment, ask questions and if you'd like to be assured of getting the next post, then sign up to follow this blog.

All the best, Andy

© Andy Colley 2014

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