New Tool Toys

I love my vintage Davis and Wells horizontal mortiser. I picked it up in eastern Washington state in 2006. I have fond memories of getting a huge hassle from the American customs agents when I crossed the border into the USA on my way to pick it up. It was because I had dreadlocks at the time, not because I was traveling to pick up a Davis and Wells!

 

The D&W has served me well, if somewhat infrequently, but as time goes by I enjoy the freehand aspect of it less. So I decided to upgrade it with an X-Y table. Thanks to some excellent advice from my friend Craig who has the exact same setup, I was able to source and install a very nice Felder table. I felt somewhat bad destroying the originality of the D&W, but it is a much better tool now and the made-in-Austria Felder is a worthy upgrade.

 

On a bit of a whim several (10?) years ago I purchased a vintage metal lathe. A 9" Standard Modern, made in Canada back in the day. However I never really got into it, so it sat in my garage until a I got tired of it taking up space and I sold it on. 

 

Recently the bug bit again, and I bought a Vintage Myford ML7 lathe, made in 1951 in England. It has been fun to learn about this entirely new domain of metalworking along with my son, and to turn a few parts.

 

The other BIG NEWS / disaster was that I damaged a chip breaker on my 8" General jointer early in 2023. The cost of getting a new chipbreaker made at a local machine shop was about comparable to getting a Shelix helical cutterhead. So, six months of dilly dallying and waiting later, I have a Shelix in my jointer. Works very well. Better than the original cutterhead? Probably not.

 

Box Box Box!

OK so maybe I have been watching a bit too much of Drive to Survive on Netflix and that is where the inspiration for this post's title came from!

Picking things up from my hinge saga in the embarrassingly long time ago last post, I did eventually locate my old Bosch router and was able to use it with a couple hinge templates to route out for the hinges.

I am not a fan at all of routers, and my skepticism was amply rewarded in this case as the templates shifted minutely as I clamped them and I wound up with a pretty sh*t job that required a lot of fiddling to make fit. I had a hunch it was going to be a fiasco, so it sat on my workbench for a couple months until I gathered the courage to do it. I should have used chisels.

This is the first project in a very long while that I have done with veneers. I enjoyed it quite a bit and hope to use them more in the future.

The box was completed and in fact I gave it as a Christmas 2022 gift to my daughter.