A Day off and a Spoon Whittle!

Decided today to take a day off all projects and stuff. It's been a busy couple of weeks and I needed a slow day pottering. The trouble is I am easily cajoled into making stuff! My son Harri (10) is currently a bit obsessed with bushcraft and Ray Mears and he was showing me in the Ray Mears book the section on whittling. He can baton wood and is practicing and its a nice thing for us to do in the garden together. 

So I ended up making a small spoon! I made it from a batoned in half piece of ash from the garden pile and I used the Mora Heavy Duty carbon knife to rough it all out. I don't own a spoon/bowl gouge knife so I used an approach thats in Rays book amongst others, that of placing a small ember from the fire on the spoon to burn out the bowl shape into the blank. I then made one concession to modernity in that I used a stamps worth of sandpaper to clean it up and finish it. It's certainly not great, but is a nice object for a first go and it's nice to sit doing things like this with my kids. 

 

10 Minute Make, a crappy ts100 case!

The fabulous TS100 soldering iron (I posted a review of it here) comes well packed in a cardboard box which would be fine as a case apart from the foam inside is cut to hold the body and the tip/element separately. I've been meaning to make or print or CNC a slick case for it that would hold the iron as a complete unit, but it's one of those jobs I never seem to get around to. 

Randomly this week my father in law gave me an old tool (a small spirit level) that was in this sort of glasses case with a nice rusty patina! I also today had to take the ts100 out with me to a space I am borrowing for the boat building project (more on that soon!) and so I quickly mashed up the old foam shapes from the original packaging into the metal case! I'm filing this in the "I'll replace this with something better made at some point" pile... I bet its still in this case in 5 years :)

Swann Morton Retractaway Review

 

I've loved Swann Morton for years ever since using the old school burnt orange model makers blade holders they made for many years as a kid. I recently came across the "retractaway" blade holder in a makerspace toolbox and was immediately impressed with how it felt in hand and secure the retracting mechanism was. So I ordered one and have had it for a couple of weeks. It's a pleasure to use and after years of scalpel holders in toolboxes that may or may not retain their cap/cover its nice to know this is safe when chucked in a box. 

Not much to say technically apart from its only designed to be used with a small range of blades. 10, 10a and as luck would have it 11 and 15, the latter of which is my favourite and is the fitted blade in the image. It has 3 idents on the retracting mechanism, closed, half open (the working position) and fully open (the position for swapping blades). Retention is great albeit with a slight bit of side play in the blade assembly. In usage though this rarely causes any problems and it's capable of very fine work.