Gee up Horsey

Gee up Horsey.

 It's pretty clear to me that I'm going to need a workbench at some point, or just some way to get my workpieces off the floor. The simplest way for me to do this is to go ahead with the construction of some simple sawhorses. As with most projects it all started out with a google and a look through a few YouTube videos on the subject. I subscribe to a few of the known makers and wanted to benefit from their experience, as I'm sure is the purpose of your visit here too.

The first design I want to draw your attention to - and ultimately the design I ended up using is that of Matthias Wandel. A Canadian woodworker whom I admire for his precision and lack thereof. Matthias is incredibly precise when he thinks it important, and very imprecise when it makes no difference. I want you to watch this and see how he cuts the joints for the legs and how brashly the entire construction is thrown together - then see the strength testing.

These sawhorses are incredibly simple and fantastically strong. I haven't even gotten around the actually putting the little flat leg bracing slats on underneath the main top of the horse, and they've still held up literally everything in my entire workshop at once! (I don't have many clamps right now... gluing is mostly done via weights and gravity!)

The next consideration I made was Jimmy Diresta's wooden sawhorses. Jimmy has a lot of very nice tools and makes some wonderfully elegant, simple designs. I believe that simplicity often gives you two core advantages - first of all is that you batch produce things without the need for skill. You can just "set and forget" most of your tools, and just whizz everything through just the same. Secondly is strength. Simple designs mean less parts, less potential for failure, and less accumulative error.
Here's his video of the make process:

Jimmy's sawhorses stack nicely, and would be great in my limited space "workshop", but Matthias's sawhorses are incredibly simple to make with only hand tools and extremely strong. Funnily, it's not the first time these horses have been compared, and if you're considering these two horses, please take a look at this next video; as there is a direct comparison of the build process and how they stack up against each other (hah!)

As you can see, Matthias's design has some significant benefits in both strength and stability.


At this point I want to point out the obvious - there are literally hundreds of designs in different materials. If you're here and just starting out like me, follow the people you like and find designs that speak to you. I went with Matthias's design because I have respect for him and his methodology - he knows when it is worthwhile spending time on a particular aspect and when something would be a complete waste of time, for which you would see little return on the investment; this speaks to me in more areas of my life than just this. Please do look out there for yourself, online or in books - whatever you love.

Without further ado - lets get cracking!

Matthias has kindly provided free plans for this build, so I jotted down the key parts like part dimensions and angles and walked over to my shop to start building. This all happened on a fairly warm day, so I was lucky that I could work outside. It was hard work under the sun! Step one for me was marking out the housing joints for my legs. Four legs on two sawhorses meant I had eight chances to learn here. I started by marking everything out.

Measure once, cut twice... No wait...

In this step, it was key to me that the legs be parallel to the ground. If I start making things crooked here, it'll only accumulate when I get to the end. I made the initial measurements on one corner and using my square marked all the way around the joint, shading my waste. I drew it in with pencil to begin, then I used a knife - this knife line severs the fibers in the wood and reduces the risk of tear-out. I eventually gave us with the pencil though - it took time and I wasn't really gaining anything out of it, though I still shaded the waste. Always shade the waste.

None of your fancy power tools here! ( TT _ TT )

My next step was to very carefully cut along my lines until I had cut two flat walls. The ideal situation here is that these walls a parallel to each other, and the bottom of each cut is parallel to the face of the board - obviously this did not happen!

Hulk smash!

The next step is to remove the waste between your cuts. Now it is absolutely critical that you learn nothing from me here. I have never cut this joint before and this image is the first time I ever used a chisel. The chisel itself is "factory sharp", and has never been sharpened. The mallet is lightweight and ineffective. The first cut, you'll notice, is right along the line I want to finish at. You should always cut above where you want to finish and pare down towards the end - it's easy to remove a little more, but adding material back is very time consuming and will affect the finished piece.

Nearly there...!

So as you can see - none of these cuts are clean or neat - but I don't have a fancy router plane or even a sharp chisel to clean these up. Honestly, at this point I'm not even sure I would know how to use them. For what these are, this is fine. Next up I have to move on to gluing up! Sadly, I don't have any pictures of this to show you - but needless to say, this was very annoying to do. I had to glue up one at a time using my Workmate as a clamp. I did nail these together too - but I wasn't taking any chances. I think it took about a week to juggle gluing, drying time and my life - not hugely fun.

We have the technology!

 As another cost-saving method, I acquire a few of these wooden block-planes at a boot fair. Again - fair from sharp, but this one is in very good condition. I spent an afternoon trying to get used to planing. I even took the time to clamp a little bit of cardboard to the end of my sawhorse to stop the wood getting damaged whilst using my wall as a stop. I only planed here to flatten the tops - not to square anything - just flatten.

Once that was done - the next step is fitting the legs! Now you'll get to see the difference between cutting my first ever housing joint, and my eighth. I did spend some time with each joint testing out my legs (which I totally don't have any pictures of - I just cut across 2 at a time, but hand - it really didn't inspire much picture taking!) against each joint to find the best fits. I also tried to clean out the joints - get them flat too - but I don't think I made much difference.

Ready for my terribly joinery...?



Really?



okay...!

Don't stare too hard...

As you can see, there are gaps everywhere - it doesn't even come close to filling the gap I had cut! This, would you believe it, was the best fit. However saying that, I did try to match up the tightest fits - so there may have been a better leg - but that would have deprived a nicer joint the leg it deserves. So here it is, preserved forever - my first housing.

This, is my eighth joint. Look at that! So much better! It almost fits! the gaps for this one were mostly due to the base of the joint not being flat, or anything even resembling flat. maybe I'll remake these in a few years to gauge how well I'm progressing.
Here it is, as above, my eighth housing. preserved forever.

another little touch I added whilst I was chamfering the legs to prevent damage, I chamfered the ends of the top section to extend the benefit of that protection to this part of the sawhorse. These might be cheap and nasty - but there's no reason I shouldn't want to make them live a long, natural life!

So, here they are, in all their glory. I did finish one with boiled linseed oil, but the wood was so thirsty that I used up half a bottle to get it looking even slightly finished. I might go back and do the other one if I ever build up too much oil - but until I think it needs a finish, I probably won't bother.

So, this is my journey to sawhorse ownership. The story of my trials through making housing and laminating 2x4" boards with no real clamps. If I can make these with a saw, a chisel, a mallet (about £12?) so can you, and you'll be on your way for less than £30 all in!

slap some boards across - and you've got a good excuse to learn ship-lap. place an old door over them and you're good for a bench for a little while! I managed to scavenge an old dining room table-top. so they'll do me for a while!

           -Elabs, James.

Getting a grip.

Getting a Grip.

Well, I've got the space, and I've a got a workmate - that's enough to get my started. I think I actually picked up the workmate at some end-of-line sale for about £15. So really my set up costs have been minimal so far. I am now faced with the question of what to do with my freedom? I can build anything I like - so I scoured the internet for inspiration. It seems like traditionally the first project an apprentice might be asked to build would be a mallet, though being that tools are pretty cheap these days, many modern woodworkers are building small pieces of furniture out of a stable sheet material like plywood.

Ultimately, no matter what I decided I would build first, step one was always:

secure your work piece. 

 Now sure, I have the workmate, which does have a couple of screws running through it - I even have a simple pattern vise. I can hold any work piece that will fit between the jaws or dogs of these, though realistically, the workmate wobbles around too much. The simple solution would be to get a proper workbench. 

Getting a workbench represents a significant problem for me - having a quick scout around, commercial benches seem to fall in one of three categories. I've grabbed a page out of Google shopping search to illustrate my point, other benches are available.

Other workbenches are available.

So in order top to bottom. First, we have a nice bench, looking into it properly it might be a little small for me (as 95% of benches will be, makes no sense commercially to mass produce a bench for 6'5" giants.) but nothing a couple of blocks can't sort. It has a couple of vices, storage - lovely. £350 this will cost, before shipping it out to me.

Second we have this blue aluminium hunk of junk. "low cost solution" it brags! The cheek! £131 for a couple of bits of mdf and some thin steel rods. I've built these for work before, and they suck. "Disposable" is what I would call them. Especially at that price point!

Finally - we have a "real" bench, but I'm balking at the £350 price tag on the first bench, let's not even get me started on a £1400 bench - cripes! Obviously I can't just buy a bench. It's ludicrous money - I mean, the bench would probably cost me more than the rent on the garage in a year! It's clear I'm going to have to build one.

Let's look into that...

Secure your work piece.

 - Elabs, James.

Setting up 'shop!

Setting up 'shop!

Following a long period of inactivity, I'm making a return to the scene! I've relocated and have finally begun getting together a proper workshop! After months of sitting on a waiting list for an ex-council garage, I've managed to secure what we Brits refer to as a "lock-up"! It has no electricity, no water, and no windows save for the tiny bit of algae covered clear roofing in the middle. Its basically four walls and a door - but that hasn't curbed my enthusiasm! I grabbed the keys as soon as it was available and once I figured where it was based on an ancient ordinance survey map threw open the doors of my new maker paradise!

This... this is going to need some work...

As you can imagine - hardly overwhelming! This place is however, a place where I can make sawdust, noise, overspray, GLORIOUS MESS to my heart's content! But first, before chaos there must be order, so to the first order of business! I must locate and purchase a broom!

So, I don't want to write a whole blog post on a broom - but needless to say, I wanted a good broom and I didn't want to pay too much for one. Checked out the usual suspects in the big-box hardware stores, but all the reviews were mediocre and brooms tended to be £10-15. I actually came upon my broom by some sort of divine provenance. The missus dragged me out high-street shopping, so when we inevitably made it to certain "off-price retail store" (the one that is essentially a jumble sale - you know...) where I busied myself in homewares like a real man. On my way I found a big sturdy broom for a fiver. A quick test brush, I thought to myself "well - this feels fine and even if it just gets me going, I don't mind a fiver.".

*Phew!* That'll do! Already I can get my workmate out of the house!

So - cobwebs all swept out, and so far, £0 spent on rent and £5 spent on tools - I'm happy to finally have a space to call my own!

Over the coming few posts, I intend to write build logs to the best details I can of my journey to setting up my (work)shop, building the furniture and anything else I happen to build along the way!
This is the first step of my journey.

Written in retrospect,

                   - Elabs, James.

Gachacraft!

Gatcha-pon, or Gatcha, are little plastic balls you get from vending machines or stores. We have some in England but they seem very popular in Japan, with some really cool sets existing. Over here we're lucky if we see MicroMachines, usually these just contain cheap toys for kids or infants. Sometimes temporary transfer tattoos or bouncy balls.

So after the fairly big staff project (which is still ongoing, it's either too hot or storming! Can't catch a break!) I've taken a little time to dress a little display for this cool little gatcha set I got from Japan this Summer.

It's fairly basic, but I just wanted something to set them out there to that was a little more than just "placed on my shelf". So I got a tatami mat pattern to create a Japanese style traditional living room/lounge. With a papercraft television and stand, and a little cardboard box to store all the leftover peripherals.

I chose the Japanese setting, and intentionally went with the traditional stuff to really emphasise the setting, as all of these consoles are the Japanese versions of the consoles that we know in the west as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES. I'll be you didn't know there was a huge keyboard attachment and magnetic tape drive available for it! In Japan you could even get a cartridge to run a version of BASIC through the console and create your own programs.

Anyway, perhaps I'll try this again when I get my hands on a laser printer and some real cardstock - but for now, it does me nicely.

(3DS and GBC give a good sense of scale I guess! These things are tiny!)

-Elabs, James.

Staffs, staves and sticks to walk softly with.

Here it is! The first make post. I have a couple of projects already completed before ELabs was even a twinkling idea in my head, and whilst I'm scouring the internet for employment I thought I would flesh out this blog with a couple of things I've undertaken and as many (potato quality I'm afraid..!) photos as I've got to hand after my windows phone decided to just flat out die on me.

This build started with my parents, or more specifically my father's enthusiasm for feeding his log-burner and my neighbours desire to be rid of the trees in her front garden. The wood shed was looking a little empty so an agreement was made that resulted in a day of ladders, chainsaws and near-misses! By the end of it we had well over a tonne of wood.

This is kinda focused right? Right?? Well at least I could send texts...

Well this one is better... I guess...

I managed to snag several long and straight(ish) limbs from the trees that I thought would make excellent staffs! How exciting! I've made a staff before, but this is the first one I've had a chance to make since acquiring my "new" draw knife!

Sorry for the mix in quality, I just took this one on my new camera!

 In the past I've sat there by the fire, whittling the bark off with whatever was lying around the camp site - a pocket knife, an axe or rarely a stanley knife. Usually this results in a sore thumb as you use your thumb to lever and apply pressure - but with this! Oh man! The bark just flew off! Before I knew it I had shaved the bark clean off of a couple of the "staffs to be".

2 down, 3 to go!

So for the next 2 hours, give or take, I had clamped the wood in place and merrily shaved the wood to a state where it would begin to take its final shape. The draw knife left the surface very course and pitted - but like anything I suppose, you trade off time for results. In my experience a razor blade - whilst it takes four times as long to do (perhaps one staff in an evening) it gives a better initial finish. Now that these staffs were naked - it was time to get sanding!

Rough! But starting to take shape!

There was still daylight at this point. So I decided that I would take my little Ryobi sander and start to round off some of the raised knots and smooth out the notches and flat spots that the knife had left. This is where it starts to get messy! The payoff is really high though. This step it where I get to really form how the staff is going to look when I'm done. So I start with a really low grit paper to start taking this rough material off. I think in this case I started with some 60 grit, really harsh sandpaper. After some time slowly progressing through the finer and finer grains, I ended up with a staff that looked actually round!

Before and After sanding to 400 grit. Also consistent "artwork"!

This process creates a lot of dust, so if you're doing this you might want to consider what it is you're going to be breathing in for the duration of your work. For me it's usually a bandana or something simple for this kind of work, I only break out the mask if I'm doing spraying.

Dusty jeans and enough wood shavings to displace the pre-existing woodchips!

Now there's a little gap in the pictures here, as I decided that I would be taking one of these staffs and really finishing it as a gift for mothering Sunday (my father already has one I made him! and I know my mother covets it!). So I had to stealthily take one of these away from my parents house and get it back to my flat for further sanding and oiling - I really spend a lot of time hand-sanding it. I eventually worked up to lapidary type paper of 1500 and 2000 grit. I don't know how much good it did, but it's somewhat theraputic to just sit there and buff the hell out of wood. It's weird how shiny it can get without any wet treatment. Unfortunately I didn't snap a picture at that point - but I just immediately coated the staff in linseed oil (I love the smell of this stuff!). This is really my favourite part. When the wood grain emerges from the raw wood that you've spent hours with and you really see what it is going to be spending its life looking like. I always feel happy seeing those lines just pop right out.

Post linseed oiling. 3 coats and a day to rest.

This grain was interesting, patchy and spotty rather than stripy. Not quite what I was hoping for but it really got me wondering what kind of wood it was. I think it turned out to be an ornamental cherry tree, but I'm no dendrologist! The staff was now super shiny and I was really pleased. Time now to dress it up!

Unfortunately owing to a bit of a blunder on my part (basically using Zune was just too much of a pain, so I never backed up...) and a failed phone means that I lost the few pictures I took of this step. This was for my mother on mother's day, so I thought that I would set my siblings and my birthstones in to the grip, as well as give it a textured leather grip with leather oak leaf trim.

Tada!

You can see it all assembled here, but to set the stones I used a mixture of epoxy and sawdust I got from sanding this staff - usually this process gives me a nice blend so the stones just look like they're held on with magic. This one I wasn't so happy with - but we're all our own worst critics I guess! The leaves were individually cut, then I used a skiving type tool to cut "veins" in to them - each had to be punched so I could sew them all to that band with synthetic sinew. I can't count the times I almost gored myself with a bradawl doing that! Eventually I was using a mallet at my workbench for each hole.

The actual grip is attached with nothing more than friction - I wet the leather thoroughly, made a form out of gardening wire which I placed over the leather - wrapped it all tightly in green gardening twine and left it to dry for 24hours - the tension from the twine pressed the curves that you can just about see in to the grip, it also leaves this lovely tooling in the grip by its own virtue. As the leather dries, it contracts, and the fibres kind of lock together - some people use a little PVA to glue the edges - but I'd managed to skive mine down so thinly that it was a barely noticeable overlap that really held together - even today it looks like a continuous strip with barely any seam!

The final piece.

 All in all, it came out well, and my mother was very pleased. Still have a few blanks left that I hope to dig in to real soon!

Thanks for reading the first real post. Future posts will have a lot more pictures now that I've gotten a camera sorted and can reliably get at them! I hope that my artwork improves too!

Feedback is greatly appreciated if you've found this page!

-ELabs, James.

Why "Equivalence Labs"?

Now, this first post is probably more about etymology and how my brain works that it is about making anything, but considering this page is somewhat sparse, I thought it might be good to consider it a piece of modern art - fairly meaningless without the proper context. So if you're here because you wanted builds - check back in a few days. If you're here because I'm famous in the future, well - I don't think I have any way of processing that sort of information, attention or renown. Either way - thanks for reading this far, and I hope that I can quickly tell you before you stop reading: I would really love it if you just went out and made/built/personalised something. That's my goal. I build, you build - we're the same. Equivalents.

Now - back to the etymology!

Without a doubt you'll be familiar with the word "equivalence", assuming of course English is your first language. For those not in the know, "equivalence" describes the state of two objects being the same, the root of this word can be found in the late Latin "aequivalentia" which means "Of equal force or value", a balance between things. When I had to name my efforts in creation (because what's a blog without a name?) I didn't know where to begin - I had no name, but only a concept.

When I initially started making, it was never focused on one particular skill or art. I dabbled in this, that and the other focusing on getting to the end state, and finding solutions to create the desired outcome with limited space, tools and until recently - time. This found me making strange things and no project really carried on to the next one. I've made staffs using nothing but natural "gifted" wood from my local forests, I've revamped kid's foam dart blasters to imitate futuristic space laser guns and I've even dabbled in making swords from popular videogame franchises. (I'm sure I'll get around to posting at least the finished articles - even if I don't have any build pictures any more.) Because of the mixing of my medium, organic and very inorganic, I wanted very much to go along the route of "Harmony", between raw, natural, earthly materials, and the industrial, electronic, man-made side of things. I spent a long time doodling a maker's mark before I came up with this one.

There are elements of the electronic pads you might see on a printed circuit board blended in to an Ouroboros design, with everything tending towards a cyclical design like the yin-yang symbol of Chinese philosophy. Of course there is the large equals symbol in the middle which is probably a little blunt - but aesthetics was important too!

Before really starting this project, I was studying my undergraduate degree in Psychology. One of the final modules I undertook was on emotion, which as it turns out wasn't just critical to my grade - but also in the naming of this blog. There's a term in psychology we use to describe "positivity" and "negativity" in a situation, an object or an event. This term is "Valence" and it can be used to describe "good" emotions such as happiness and "bad" emotions like sorrow, these good and bad emotions would have positive and negative valence, respectively, with good being positive and bad being negative. The lexical interest of valence doesn't just end there!

Valence as a suffix (of course, not a real English word, it just appears within other words!) pops up in other fairly common words such as "ambivalence", which we could interpret to mean "of both valences" and most importantly to me "equivalence" which we could interpret as "of equal valences". In this sense, I really want to get across my true driving concept - to inspire. I love making things, and I know there are many people out there that would also really like to start out making things, or perhaps people that would if they gave it a go! Equivalence to me represents my ambition - my hope that if I give this my all, and make things for you guys to see - perhaps you'll be inclined to give it a go!

Now don't be expecting perfect, gorgeous pieces from me - I'm a novice here and I take my time with pieces. I make mistakes. Hell - I'm sure that I've made typographical errors in this piece (which is now probably the most inaccessible piece of writing I've ever done - way to strike interest with a new audience!)

So there you have it. I've put it out there - all of the nonsense that went through my head coming up with this mark, this name ("Lab" was chosen fairly haphazardly - I'm used to saying lab, as I work in them most of the time, so why not here too :) )

Thanks for reading, and I hope future entries aren't so bland!

-ELabs, James.

Welcome to Equivalence Labs!

This is a new project focused on the artistry involved in the creation of costume and stage props with the aim to inspire more creation and to distribute techniques, tips and how-to guides - especially within the UK where the materials are different or simply unavailable!

Please stay tuned for more information in the coming days!