Practice is perfect

Man oh man...

Friday was a bit of a trying day. I spent most of my hand tool time grinding down the rest of my chisels. I thought it was going to be quick and relatively simple, but since these are the smallest chisels in my set, they don't have as much surface area to dissipate heat, and they have a tendency to scorch really easily. I scorched 2 out of four chisels. Major Bummer. My instructor gave me a bit of a break though, and partially ground my chisel bevel closer to the final angle, instead of just knocking the burnt part off and making me start basically from scratch. Anyway, I now have my chisels all ground and honed (thanks to a bit of home-honing...transporting the whetstone container home was a bit tricky, but I did it).

Speaking of the home set-up,

I basically took over the kitchen table for an hour or two.

My goal this weekend was to use my nicely sharpened chisels to carve out a small ledge in my block of mahogany so that it will later be used as a rest to sand down bridge saddle blanks. 

 It was an incredibly trying procedure, as I found that with my kind of poor chisel technique, I have a tendency to create chips and tear out the wood grain (neither of which are good). I should have been making nice, clean shavings, but the first cuts are always the deepest (and the worst). I tore out the grain next to my designated "stop line" and in trying to correct my ragged chisel line, I cut about 1/32 too deep in some areas. Clearly angry with myself, I decided I needed to walk away from this project for a bit (thoughts of what my instructor would say about how I would need to fix it, losing much needed points to advance on to the rest of the class, etc.). I found myself at the Red Wing Boots store.

Yep, its official. I now am a citizen of Red Wing. I have Red Wing Boots. While still wearing my work gloves. I also now own a pair of argyle socks specifically made to wear under my Red Wing Boots. It helped me get over my chiseling errors. Especially after I also got these in the mail: 

That's Finn and Jake from Adventure Time hanging out with Gobo Fraggle and my new Doctor Who metal lunch box (to go along with my now super-awesome sticker of a lumberjack-punching-a-bear that I put on my water bottle). I needed a little retail-therapy.

Going back to my power tools class, I have made my second vaguely guitar-shaped thing in class: a scarf joint. It is the type of gluing joint that allows you to make a guitar neck and headstock out of one flat piece of wood stock.

  Here it is all clamped up. Essentially, all that I did was cut a 15 degree angle into the piece of flat stock, plane both sides smooth, flip the smaller piece around and glue it onto the underside of the longer piece. I'll take a better picture once I get back to school and remove it from my work bench. For whatever reason, this came super easy to me. I needed it after that doozy of a morning.

The Council of Beards has also now taken shape. Only trims and neck shaves are allowed. What did I get myself into? I really hope I can pull off "the Lemmy".

Honestly, I just wanted another excuse to post pictures of Lemmy.