u/Senior_Elderberry_37

Type 11. Came to me with some rough jappaning, a cracked beech tote repaired with a copper pipe sleeve by the last person to use it, and a ton of rusty crud inside.

Sandblasted all the paint and rust off, lapped the sole to 180grit and polished with red scotchbrite. At some point, I'll carve a new tote, paint it, and file the mouth open to fit the Hock iron (2-1/4")

Now the question, what colour to paint it? I'm going with engine enamel, but can't decide on a shade. Part of me wants to go super garish with bright red, green, or pink, maybe a metallic blue, but the classic black would always be nice. What about clear, show off the casting? Either way, I'm not worried about resale value.

My take on the Legless Mule from Wood Tamer. I tried clamps, but its just easier to screw it to the workbench for the best rigidity. A chunk of 2x6, a board from a discarded bed frame, a scrap of crubber jaw liner, and a $4.99 1/4" rod. Its been through a few design modifications, the hollow in the back was the original leg section, and I split the front pin holder, so that's been replaced and reinforced with some side panels.

I have 2 pin spacings in the body and 4 height options in the legs, for a total of 12 different configurations. Its a revelation, not as good as a sit-down mule or a serious shavehorse, but having a third hand has made almost every step of spooncarving easier. Future upgrades will be wooden knobs for the pins so I don't need vice grips to shift the legs, a cleanup of the finish on the bedframe parts, and a solid chamfering/roundover of all edges.

You can't white-knuckle a delicate cut. The same as you can't out-muscle a skid with poor bevel contact, the tool has to do the work, your hand can't fix what a bad tool messes up (during the cut). And on a push cut, all of the control is in your right hand, the left hand only stabilizes the tool.

I brace the outside of the bowl with my fingers to prevent it from chattering on the entry, and then just hold the tool down on the rest with one finger. This is a freshly sharpened 1/2" gouge, it's only used for 7 finishing cuts to thin this bowl down from about 1/2" to under 1/8". You can see a little skid at the start when I went in without enough bevel support, my gouge's nose is a little blunt right now, so even if its razor sharp, it doesn't dig in to start a very fine cut as much as a more pointy tool would.

Stanley 51 for scale. Thought I'd have to tune it up, but this baby was making curls right out of "the box". $5 from a vintage dealer.

Recovered from a bed frame at the storage locker "donation" zone. Looks like a softwood, but much denser and harder than I've encountered.

Heavy layer of stain and finish taken off with a card scraper and hand plane, cuts quite cleanly. Not ring porous, the end grain has a bit of tearout from a quick chop on the mitre saw. This board is 106in3 and 1286g which maths out at a very dense 0.73 specific gravity or over 46lbs/ft3, if you assume a few grams for the finish.

Sounds quite hard, and my knuckles tell me its quite hard too. Not sure where it was made, I'd assume either Asia or Eastern Europe, it was a flat pack design with threaded inserts for assembly. The colour and density tell me its a yellow pine, but this would be even harder, denser, and probably from a part of world where yellow pines don't typically grow. Any ideas?

Fresh-cut box elder, roughed out a few blanks and then once-turned a nested set of round bottom, natural edge bowls.

My first foray into utensil hand carving carving, mostly experienced in woodturning so I'm used to working with bigger logs and green wood. I have made spatulas and salad servers on the lathe before. Found someone getting rid of a cherry tree, it had been cut for about a week when I got it.

Split the log by hand, and cleaned up the pieces on the bandsaw.

I don't have the time to carve anything right now, and won't be able to work 20+ pieces at once. All are tightly wrapped in plastic, end grain painted with a bit of glue, and will be stored in my freezer until I can use them. I don't want to keep bins of water around that I can forget about and turn into swamps.

I know how much fruit wood like cherry can warp and crack, an old method of stabilizing roughed out bowls and vessels in woodturning is to boil them for 1hr per inch of wall thickness. This breaks open the wood cells and allows them to release the bound water much faster, while relaxing the lignin and allowing the wood to dry without warping as much. Has anyone ever tried boiling their spoons before?

Picked up a weathered old chunk from a retiring woodworker, he probably bought it in the 1980s. This has been stored indoors and outdoors, and you see what happens to padauk over time (and purpleheart and so many other brightly coloured woods) I took the corner off with a block plane, and the bright red is just beneath the surface. Maybe a cabinet scraper would be enough to revitalize a piece once its faded, but you'd have to totally re-finish it.

This was at least an inch beneath the bark. Credit to Thompson Tools, their 5/8" gouge cut through half the nail before I noticed this ticking sound. This same tree had a railroad spike hidden in a crotch, found it right before going in with the chainsaw.

The body is a single brass casting, 6.5x3x1.5", no markings or logos. The iron is crudely welded from two pieces, and so far out of square that the blade cannot sit flush to the sole. The wedge is oak, with file marks still evident from when it was carved. The blade is about 1/64" wider than the sole, but there is no way to laterally adjust.

Any ideas in what this is? An original plane body with a replacement iron and wedge? The cleat from a ship repurposed into a shoulder plane?

First time using one of these, amazing at how it just swept away the rough grain my hand plane left on this black walnut knot (the chipped edge is unrelated, plz ignore). I think I need a coarser stone to work the edge after filing, there were obviously some lines left on the edge, I only had a 4000 grit stone lying around at the time.

Red oak, 13x6". Got greedy, took one cut too many without checking depth. Funnel club membership renewed for 2026. I think it'll become a lampshade, maybe a canvas for practicing carving details.