Stone Box *PICS*

Re: Stone Box *PICS*

mikew

>Really like the shape on the box sides, William.

Thanks for showing the pics.

Mike

Re: Stone Box *PICS*

Jack Guzman from Maine

>Lots of great ideas there and a good looking box,thanks for sharing it.One question,what is a "London style dovetail"? I couldn't see yours clear enough to tell.---Jack

Thief!!!!!

Steve Kubien

>Well, I'm going to be the thief...eventually.

I really like the system. I acquired some 3/4" thick slabs of glass not too long ago for adhering sandpaper to. The plates are 4-1/2" x 12" and a box like this will keep them nice and safe. Beautiful work and thanks for sharing.

Steve Kubien

Question?

Patrick Gibbons, Houston, TX

>Why didn't you use dividers instead of dowels? It would seem to me that this would be better for containing contamination. Oh, and by the way, WOW! It sure does look nice.

Re: Question?

William Duffield, on the Cohansey

>My thinking for not using dividers was that the working surface would rub against either the divider or the wall, transfering diamonds and swarf to that surface, and then back again to the stone the next time I put it away. If I put a stone into the wrong slot, or got it in backwards, either the working surface or the sponge pad would pick up grit off the walls from whichever stone was there previously. That would surely lead to contamination. This way, I only have to worry about putting the stones away with the non-stick pad sides of two of them against the walls. I was originally thinking about putting really short dividers on the ends, but didn't want to deal with a bunch of stopped dados, and the pegs turned out to be very, very easy to install in comparison.

Re: Stone Box *MORE PICS*

William Duffield, on the Cohansey

>A "London style dovetail" is also called a "single entry dovetail." Both kerfs for the slot between the tails start at the same place. They look neat, but they are not very strong. I definitely would not have used them if the box were intended to hold cast iron instead of acrylic plates, or even real stones.

More photos of the dovetails. Remember, this is a utilitarian shop fixture. The closeup and flash sure show off the putty from filling wayward chops, the pegs stopping the ends of the grooves, and plane marks. Oh, well. It'll be buried under a bunch of dust on my metalworking bench. No half-blind DTs or stopped grooves for this one. Remember, it's just log run walnut with lots of sapwood. The Watco dark walnut Danish Oil helped a bit to even out the color.

Also, a photo showing the utility of the waves to grip the box between thumb and ring finger.

Re: Stone Box *PICS*

Tom in Tipp

>W_OTC,

Nice system you've put together there for your sharpening needs.

I've got a question on the acrylic 'stones' in just how effective are they with the diamond paste? I've thought about using hard maple for this application but I do have some 3/8" plexiglass sitting around from my overhead blade guard project. Is one better than the other for diamond paste?

Thanks for sharing,

Tom

Re: AbsopositivelutelyTheft Proof! *LINK*

William Duffield, on the Cohansey

>Ha! Just go ahead and try to steal it! There ain't no dimensions, and I'm not going to measure it for you! […he said with an evil laugh]

But you don't need any!

There are Arts and Mysteries (™-PW) that you can learn from wizards like Adam Cherubini. Measure zero, Cut once!

I just found the smallest 4/4 board in the stack that would make six pieces of wood that would cover the stones, about a board foot and a half of one by six. You have to start with a board that is about as wide as the width of the stones plus the thickness of the board, and about two and a half times as long as the stones. I resawed it and planed it down until it was smooth on both surfaces and whatever maximum consistent thickness I could get out of it. One end would make the top and bottom, the other end would make the sides and ends. Now that I knew the width the stones and the thickness of the top and bottom, and adding a fudge factor for the width of the cleaned up bandsaw kerf and a loose fit, I knew how wide to rip the sides and ends. I stacked the parts and marked them directly on the other board. Knowing how long the stones were, and the thickness of the ends (same as the sides and top and bottom), I knew how long to cut the sides, using the same trick. Knowing the thickness of stones and pads, the thickness of the sides and the diameter of the pegs (Again, I stacked them all up and marked the stack right on the board), I knew how long to cut the ends. Then, before cutting the sides and ends to length, I matched the grain all the way around (I'll save that small secret for another time), and marked the boards inside and out and marked the matching joints. Then I cut the grooves for the top and bottom, setting the fence directly from the thickness of the top. Turn your plow plane over, cutting edge up. Set the edge of the stock on the cutting edge of the blade, with a finger tip on the side of the blade, and bring the fence up until you can feel that it is flush, and lock the fence. (BTW, the same technique works on a TS.)

I set the marking gauge to the stock thickness to mark the depth of the pins and tails. After chopping and fitting the DTs and dry assembling them, I knew how long and wide to cut the top and bottom, transferring the inside dimensions with a bar gauge made from these Bar Gauge Heads, catalog number 05N31.01 from Lee Valley. That's another advantage of running the grooves out through the ends of the sides. The pins in the bar gauge heads fit right into the holes in the ends, or you could mark the top directly from the holes. I raised the panels on the TS, and planed them with a block plane to fit and to remove the saw kerfs. I drilled the holes for the pegs and glued them in place in the ends before gluing the whole thing together. After the glue set and I trimmed up the exposed surfaces of the joinery, I cut the top off on the bandsaw. A bowsaw would work too. The joint just has to fit itself. If you make it crooked on purpose, then no one can complain that you didn't make it straight enough. Just stay near the middle of a pair of tails, and away from the top and bottom and away from the pegs. You do remember where you located the pegs? You lined them up with the pins, didn't you? If you sawed the tails in both sides at the same time, and then marked pins from tails, the tails will still be lined up when presented to the bandsaw.

I hope I got all this right, and clear enough. I don't have an editor to double check things for me. If you see any errors or obfuscations, I'll have to fix them later.

I would offer some suggestions for your box. That much glass is going to be quite a bit heavier than the acrylic. I wouldn't use London Dovetails. Make the pins more substantial. Also, to try to pick it up full like I showed in my response to Jack would probably snap the wave details right off. The size and weight of the one I built is just about the limit for picking it up like that. You should consider putting handles on yours to allow a secure two handed grip.

Re: Stone Box *PICS*

Dave Anderson Chester, NH

>I'm not Sir William, but I'll answer anyway. I use MDF and have been slowly switching over to solid maple die makers plywood. I had used the MDF for several years with the green chromium wax based honing compound. I was visiting Garrett Hack one day and he showed me the maple ply he used with his diamond paste. He said it embedded better than in MDF and was just as flat. It seems to work well enuf for me with either the chromium oxide or the diamond paste.

Very nice box

BarbS

>and I like the wavy edge cut for clasping the two pieces to pick up together, and make it easy to open the top lid. Thanks for sharing this, William, I've learned a lot from you. -BarbS

Re: Stone Box *PICS*

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>Cool, great idea. I think the only things I'd change would be to do American dovetails and make the top large enough with more slots to hold the diamond paste. Love the curved hand holds, very clever.

Pam

Re: Stone Box *PICS*

William Duffield, on the Cohansey

>Heck if I know! I just use it and it works. I don't think I would call what I do a system. I definitely have not done a lot of comparitive tests, especially not a lot of rigorous ones. (I have done some comparison shopping :^)

Bill Tindall has made some observations of some comparisons he has done between acrylic and cast iron substrates. He reports that coarser grits seem to work better in softer substrates like plastic, but finer grits performed better in cast iron. I guess the theory is that larger particles embed themselves more deeply, and are thus less likely to be knocked out and lost, while smaller particles might be more likely to be embedded completely, with a lot less force in plastic, and therefore become ineffective. One possible minor advantage of acrylic over maple (even plywood) is that it might be more stable in my climate-almost-uncontrolled shop, which is in a temperate, maritime environment. Also, using the water-based paste I get from Joel isn't going to raise the grain. I don't know if there is enough water in it to cause any significant rusting of the iron, but I have bigger problems than that.

Hopefully, someone else can answer your question, but it's not me. I don't have the time nor the inclination to run scientifically controlled comparison tests on different substrates, much less do I have an SEM to take photos of abrasives embedded in different substrates. I don't even have an optical microscope. All I have is a 10x loupe that I manually hold in front of the lens of my digital camera to get pretty good closeup photos.

All these details just don't make a difference in my shop, as long as I can get a decent edge on a few woodworking tools without a lot of hassle and expense. Now if I had hundreds of expensive grinding machines, running three shifts a day, seven days a week, efficiently turning out a stream of high end cutting tools, (like Dave Anderson, Steve Knight or Jim Reed, maybe? :^), then the fastest and cleanest and coolest cutting abrasive, optimum grit sequence, optimum maintenance schedule, minimum down time, cost analysis, etc. would be important.

In my shop, I just design and build or fix one-off kind-of-artistic wooden things. My tool "problem" is just to support the quality of the craftsmanship I demand of myself and my wooden creations. I don't even sell any of the tools I build. So, I'm satisfied if I can reliably keep a few woodworking tools sharp enough to cut wood. Maybe I should say quite a few woodworking tools…

That is soooo nice.

David Barnett - Venice, FL

>Tres sweet. Downright elegant. And the sine is such an artsy touch. You've shamed me into rethinking my own clutter which has grown across two rooms -- three, if you count the lanai. The only thing I've done so far is to mount my bench grinder on a service cart with a torsion box insert in the top tray and plywood reinforced lower tray. At least now I can wheel my Baldor to each work station like some itinerant Yankee cutlery peddler.

Your stones 'n' hones even look great in the box. And that matters. Damn! Now I want all my stuff to be same sized. I'd somewhat attenuated my honing jones to a more casual 'functional' level but you've managed to retrigger my ever-lurking OCD.

Re: Stone Box

William Duffield, on the Cohansey

>I thought about making room for the tubes of paste, but I ran out of board. Then I rationalized my decision to myself:

- I would have had to find a bigger board.

- The box was already big enough. Any bigger, and I might have storage problems. Also, I might have to make a new tool tote to carry it to job sites. As it turns out, it's too bulky for practical hauling out from the shop, so I'll probably just continue to make do with the two smaller stones I've been using, the ones shown on top of the box in the first photo.

- I don't need to recharge the plates most times I sharpen, so I can just keep the syringes of diamond paste in a drawer in the dirty bench, out of the way.

- I might decide to switch to PSA backed abrasive films on Corian™. Extras wouldn't fit in the same space as the tubes. I might even switch to Shapton stones.

- Since I built it partly to serve as a tutorial and example for WC, I figured it would be better to KISS. The basic idea should work for DMT style Diamond plates, water stones, oil stones, SS™, cast iron plates, etc., in whatever size one has hanging around the shop. While I did basic dimensioning with power tools, it would work just as well as a fundamental hand tool skills project.

Next, I have to do something to protect, store, and organize my expanding collection of carving tool slips.