Atelier Lalonde
Paul Lalonde's Weblog

I finally started back in the workshop over the holidays after a long hiatus. I’m still having some eye troubles, but now that all the machines are fitted out with guards and that I’ve adapted some, I’m getting productive. And that means that the disaster area that the space has been turning into over the last year is getting cleaned up.
The first thing was to sort out the dust collection. I had built a cyclone a couple of years ago, but had choked it’s throughput by recycling my bag filters for the last stage of collection. I just replaced it with two cartridge filters as recommended by Bill Pentz in his excellent how-to pages. You can get them (and many other filters) from Wynn Environmental or any decent HVAC supplier. Wow. What a difference - there’s real air flow through all my pipes. The next step is to drop my table-saw run under the floor.

It’s been a long time since my last update. I had about a one year absence from my shop caused by some vision problems in my right eye that have led to the loss of my stero vision. It’s taken this long to adapt and re-learn where things (like spinning blades and chisel tips) are in the world and keep my fingers safe.

So for a warm-up, I thought I’d finish the craftsman bookcase that I had started so very long ago, and that had been sitting languishing in a corner. For finish, I fumed the piece in ammonia, did a few coats of thinned linseed oil, and then several coats of shellac to finish. Next time I’m going to at least pre-finish the shelves - they were a bugger to get the shellac on.

It was a pretty busy weekend in the shop, but with only two small pieces of visual progress on the boat. I build the daggerboard case, knowing that it would be easier to fit it before the planking went on than after, and I cut my transom-to-keel joint. In non-visual progress I finally glued and screwed the apron to the keel - there’s no going back now.

The daggerboard case has been the fussiest bit of joinery to date - I really don’t want a leak there and to hear people talk there is no avoiding a leak there. The sides of the case are of vertical grained fir, with the rails and posts of local Garry oak that I had left over from putting together the apron. The inside of the case, and all the joined surfaces have been painted with red lead - you can see some in the top and again in the mortices that will eventually accept the frames that butt up agains the box. It’s kept watertight (touch wood) by lots of Sikaflex in the joins.

The case has two legs that sit at either end of the daggerboard slot at an angle (the slant of the box isn’t really obvious in the photos, but is about 10 degrees). Then the rails screw down through the apron and into the keel. I’ll be gooping a pile of sikaflex around it when I stand it in place. It’s all pre-drilled and dry-fitted, but I’ll wait until the planking is on before dropping the screws in permanently - I don’t want it getting in the way when clenching nails.

The last job was to get the transom set up on the molds. To do that I had to finish up the transom joinery. I decided to house the end of the apron in the transom - my friend Mark Reuten is just finishing up a similar boat and wan’t happy letting the apron show through at the transom - it’s yet another joint line that can be a little off. Housing it means it won’t be as visible, and I won’t have to re-cut my transom - my pattern had gone all the way to the deadwood instead of the apron.

You’d think I had enough qajaqs… But I just had to build another. It was to travel to the World Traditional Games in Montreal next month, but they have been cancelled due to some funding errors. I don’t know if the Greenlanders will still be coming to visit, so our holiday may turn into a non-paddling vacation.

This qajaq is considerably flatter on the bottom than the previous ones I’ve built - I’m hoping that will help with my forward recovery handrolls, which have been eluding me. I might decide to leave this boat in Vancouver for wednesday night rolling practice.

A few weekends ago I had some fellow re-enactors over to build some bedframes.
We’ve been trying to bring our re-enactment up a notch in the last couple of years, and are hoping to approach the “zero-foot rule” this year. That means that our cots and futons are disappearing, even from our private tents, to be replaced by proper beds.

The difficulty is that there is very little evidence of bed construction circa 1372 in northern europe. Most surviving beds are renaissance affairs and unlikely to have much in common (visually) with those of a hundred years earlier. We can say a couple of things though: pretty much all the beds of the period that we see drawn are completely covered with draperies and bed spreads. We can sometimes see a little leg, or corner posts on canopy beds (which are above our stations…).

We’ve chosen to use a construction method that would not look alien to a carpenter of the era. We’re basically building an over-sized clamped-front chest. It’s a sturdy construction that allows for wood movement and is fairly efficient of materials. Furthermore, the construction is easy to make break-down for transport, a boon to reenactors everywhere.

The biggest departure we’ve made is in material. We’ve chosen to use cedar instead of the ubiquitous oak. Oak would have easily doubled the weight of the finished product, and trippled the construction cost - white and red oak are not native to this part of the world. As is, we were able to get some good quality red cedar from a local sawmill at a good price, and used it. With some stain it won’t be immediately obvious that the wood is off, and with some decent fabrics to drape the beds they should look pretty good.

We were 6 in the shop for a day and a half, working from rough lumber to finished joinery. I was the only experienced woodworker, and we all got to finish our joinery and end the weekend with beds.

Here are some photos of the process.
We processed a lot of lumber - lots of 2x8 and 2x6 for legs and rails, and a pile of 1x4 for slats. Mark is showing great form feeding stock.
The most mind-numbing job was planing all the stock. Here Karen, Barbara and Brenda have taken over the planer.
Karen is squaring up some edges.
Modern technology has a place - routing out the 32 mortices we made that day was a lot quiker than doing it by hand.
There is room for hand work, even in production. Here Barbara is splitting the cheeks off a tenon, then planing the modern tool marks off the surface. Without this critical step all the finishing on earth won’t hide the electric planer’s work.
Mac and Karen have a bedframe! That’s me in front. And I’m not sure if Brenda is faking sleep there - it was a full weekend!

This arts and crafts bookcase is patterned after one of Gustav Stickley’s cases. The joinery is done, and I now need to drop it in my fuming box and finish it, then add the glass and hardware. I hope to do that in the next few weeks. The details on it are to match a little desk I built for my living room that I haven’t written about yet.

A few months ago I came across Bill Pentz’s excellent cyclone construction pages. After reviewing what was out there commercially I decided to build one to Bill’s plans. For a motor and impeller I cannibalized the impeller and 2 horse motor from my bag dust collector. Assembly was a little tricky and annoying, and doing it again I’d buy Clarke Echols’ kit. It wasn’t available when I started mine, but given that I paid $200 canadian to buy metal and have it cut (poorly), the kit makes a lot of sense.

The good news is that the cyclone works. Even without a filter installed it’s catching more of the dust than my bag-collector used to. My only complaint right now is that my trash bucket is too small and fills up too quickly. I’m looking for some nice high-volume fibre barrels to use instead, but refuse to pay $50 in UPS shipping to have to brought in. No luck yet in finding one locally.

By 9:15 this morning the local mover’s heavy crew had finished dropping my new iron in the shop. It’s amazing what these guys can do with a forklift, pallet jack, steel plates, and rollers. It’s interesting that the two older fellows in the crew remember doing a few deliveries and pickups a week from the old machine shop (now a kayak shop) I got the saw from.


The maintenance and thought on this saw continues to amaze me. It was used in a machine shop for about 80 years, and over that time a lot of changes happenned. The babbit has all been replaced with ball bearings, for example. A nice example of machine-shop thinking is the upper blade guide: the many ball bearings that make it up are on eccentric shafts. Loosenning a locknut on each lets you adjust the spacing between the guide bearings really easily. As as with the rest of the saw, not one nut is seized. I feel charmed.


I’m also pretty impressed by the engineering. The blade tension and wheel tilt mechanism is nice. I described the key-way depth adjustment a couple of days ago when I brought that casting home. Today I got it into its slot in the top of the saw, and found the reason for the setup. The whole tension mechanism hangs from a huge pin at the top of the saw. To adjust the tilt of the upper wheel you just have to tighten the screw on the backside and the whole thing pivots around the pin. Slick, and very stable.

I dragged home the loose parts of the bandsaw today, and now get to start the general clean-up. I hesitate to call it a restoration: there’s so little to do. There are minor amounts of surface rust, but most of it just wipes off with an oily rag - nowhere is it even heavy enough to need to scrub. Mostly it has a lot of oily sawdust all over it.

The only chore will be installing new tires on the wheels. I’ve got the top wheel home and the old tire off - the adhesive (if any) was really weak. The old tire was nastily torn into in the center, without enough rubber to re-crown. What will be easy is crowning.

The top axle is mounted on this big block, which sits in a housing in the main casting - you can see the wheel from this picture in the overall photo of the saw - it’s the one in the middle of the throat opening. The whole block is pinned at the top, and holds a dovetailed slide that adjusts the axle up and down. For crowning, I’ll bolt an angle grinder to the “guard” arm and do it right on the axle, before re-installing the whole box.

The most surpising part of the first disassembly is how easy everything is coming apart: this machine has been well cared for. Only one nut has needed any penetrating oil to date, the one holding the shop-made guide block . The guide itself is made of a half dozen sealed ball-bearings bolted and drift-pinned together. I think I’ll have to replace the bearings, and I may want to machine together something that will give me a little finer front/back tracking control. Right now that’s controlled by the number of washers behind the guide block. Breaking News (20Jan2004): There is very good front-to-back adjustment on the guide. The whole assembly sits on a shaft with a flat side, where a set-screw bears down to hold the guide at arbitrary distances. The previous owner was *good* at machine design…

I’ve been using Lee Valley’s router table for a few years now, first with their simple wooden base, and later jerry-rigged between the rails of my table-saw fence. The jig and its accessories are set up so that the fence has to overhang the table - it clamps around the edge. That means that when I built a proper side table on my tablesaw the router table couldn’t stay there.

That’s when I discovered that the twin-screw vice on my bench opens just wide enough to hold the router table:

You want to avoid cranking down on the rubber pads under the router table when you tuck it in - you really don’t need any pressure to hold it. The other nice thing is that my dust collection hose can be held by a simple fixture running through dog-holes in the center of the bench. In this shot the table is set up to do some cutting on the edge of a plank facing the dust hood. You can, of course do your cutting on the other side of the fence, keeping the wooden auxilliary fences apart to direct chips back into the hood as well.

Over Christmas I finally got to move into my new shop.

It’s got 656ft of space arranged in an L-shape, with my old single-car garage forming one leg. I’ve given up on using it as a garage, and will now serve as a building floor for kayaks and small boats, as well as a staging and finishing area when required. The step down is a little inconvenient, but a small price to pay for a 36ft long alley in which to resaw long stock such as kayak gunwales.

A couple of weeks ago Peter at the local kayak shop mentionned something about getting an old bandsaw out of the attic. You see, the shop is located in an old warehouse that used to be a machine and engineering shop. When the shop was shut down some years ago the pattern shop was left behind. It had been built in a closed off section of the light well and the tools were too much of a bear to get out. It took until a few weeks ago for Peter to decide to reclaim the space and move the tools out.

When I saw it the saw was sitting on the main shop floor, minus its upper wheel. It’s a FW Reynolds & Co. (Acorn Works), I’d guess from the turn of the 20th century. It’s belt-driven, massively cast, with 30″ wheels and a table darned near a meter square. The table mechanism is driven by a large handwheel, and is smooth as butter. The babbit bearings had been replaced some years early with ball bearings, which put to rest my biggest worry about the saw. It does need new tires, and I’ll have to find

I contacted the owner, an elderly gentleman who used to run the machine shop, and offered to buy it from him. He got a fair price for it and a lathe that was up there also - I’ll write about the lathe separately once I get it home.

The challenge now it getting it home. A local moving company has a heavy crew who are willing to do it, although it won’t be bottom-feeder cheap. The problem is that my shop door is only 6′8″ high, and the saw, without the top wheel is 6′10″ - it will have to come in on its side and be righted inside. I think I’ll have to rig up some sort of a small crane to do this - I feel an engine lift in my future.

It’s tempting to put it on some seriously heavy-duty castors; or else I’ll never be able to move it. I’m thinking there must be some low-profile heavy weight casters around.