I’m into the final furlong with the tool caddy now. The third tier is coming along nicely.
Plugging bottoms (titter!).
I had to cut some holes all the way through the block, for a few of the larger items. That then required that the resulting holes be plugged, to stop things dropping through.
Bottoming out again…
Initially I wasn’t sure exactly what was going in to this section, as almost everything already had a home in the other two tiers. But there’s actually plenty: small files, a small compass, various interchangeable hex shanked drill bits, AA and AAA batteries, a couple of knives, and sundry other oddments.
Cut a groove out the back…
Only just visible in these pics, you might note that I staggered the battery holes; there’s a row of five AA, and a row of four AAA. I tried to space these out so they’d be simple to pull out. And the depths are also set to make that easy as well.
… for a mini spirit-level.
In the image below you can see the drill bits, in their little rubber pluggy things. I drilled a line of holes with, I think(?), a 15mm dia’ bit, taped for depth, and then chiselled out the remaining ‘waste’. Perhaps I should’ve set them a bit further back? Or forward? There’s room for more in that section.
Cut another little groove for these screw-dads.
It was hard to resist the temptation to go out this evening, and take off the clamps. But I was strong in resolve! So… this third and final section is now gluing to the others overnight.
Tomorrow we’re meeting Hannah and co, inc dad and Claire, for a walk along ‘The Backs’, and then lunch at The Copper Kettle. It’s Hannah’s pre-birthday meal.
I’m hoping I’ll find the time either before, or more likely after, to add two handles and a clip for the tape measure.
We didn’t watch Miranda at the time it came out. I did occasionally see bits of it. And I loved it. So, she’s been around ages, and I’ve been ignoring her. Actually, she’s been around as long as I have, more or less, born in ‘72, as she and I are.
Anyway, a few weeks back we started watching from series one, on the BBC iPlayer, and we’re now into the ‘Specials’, with The Final Curtain about to play.
What I love best about Miranda, in addition to her clumsiness and wind, is her disarming candour, around generally not being a typical person, never mind typical woman, or ‘lady’. But then of course, in most important respects she is quite typical. Or rather she both is and isn’t… er…
What a woman!
So, I guess what I mean is that she’s very ordinarily human, at the same time as not conforming to social stereotypes. And she’s brave about showing herself in that light, of imperfection, or rather difference. Something many of us are simply to vain and/or insecure to do.
I’ve had horrible soul-crushing moments of my life that could probably make pretty good comedy. Like when a ‘local hero’ guitarist at a jam session I’d finally worked up the courage to go to knocked my glasses of as I attempted to chat a girl up at the bar.
Rather than kung-fu-kickin’ his ass, Clint Eastwood style, I was down on my knees, like Mr Magoo, scrabbling on the floor amongst the forest of legs to retrieve my specs, before someone stepped on them. Hey ho!
Anyway, Miranda makes such things the meat and potatoes of her comedy. That’s not massively unusual in itself. From Woody Allen to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, klutzy dorks have been standard fare in male comedy forever. But there’s something refreshingly guileless in how Miranda serves up her female version of this timeworn comedy trope.
Anyway, one can pontificate all one likes. At the end of the day pratfalls are extremely funny, as is farting. And Miranda serves up plenty of both, bless ‘er!
Teresa wanted to watch a Hammer horror film. But we could’nae find one we hadn’t seen before. So we went with this Amicus Productions number, as it stars the deadly duo, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
The Skull has a pretty silly plot, concerning the evil possessive influence of the titular skull, formerly the cranial property (accommodation?) of the infamous Marquis de Sade.
But despite the superstitious hokum it’s a rollicking good Hammer style fright-fest, in which Cushing, Lee, and a panoply of great actors – inc Peter ‘Gollum’ Woodthorpe, Nigel ‘Zulu’ Green and others (inc the lovely April Orlich!) – serve up lashings of prime ’60s/’70s style spookiness.
The visual design aspect is great, in ghoulish technicolour, and the music, by Elizabeth Lutyens (daughter of the famed architect), is powerful and effective. By the standards of modern horror this sort of thing is now quaint, or even inadvertently hilarious, occasionally. But if your inner child lives on, as ours most definitely do, it’s vintage horror fun of a very particular kind.
Today I glued tiers one and two together. Took a lot of clamps! I should’ve waited, perhaps, until I’d cleaned up the top faces. But I forgot to do so!
Clamping/gluing tiers one and two.The plywood drill bit support blocks are visible here.Some slot bottoms are ‘capped’.*
I did some work on tier three of my tool caddy today. I drilled and chiselled out holes for two knives, on the right hand end. Down the other end I drilled ten or twelve identical holes for various files.
But the thing that gave me most pleasure and satisfaction was drilling and chiselling out a pretty sizeable hole in the right side of the caddy to take this chunky electric pencil sharpener. I got the latter off Amazon recently. And I love how easily it allows me to get nice sharp pencils.
Drilling and chiselling the hole for this…
I used my largest Forstner bit (35mm), mounted in my corded Hitachi drill; the caddy is too long to drill on end using either of my pillar type drills. I started the holes using the Bosch cordless drill, but it just wasn’t powerful enough. These holes – three, one in each ‘corner’ of the triangular shape – needed to be about two inches deep, or thereabouts.
Once the three holes were drilled, I chiselled out the remainder of the wood that I needed to remove. It took a fair bit of tweaking to get the right shape for the sharpener to fit snugly.
… was hard, but fun. Bingo!
I love how the sharpener sits here, just sufficiently proud of the wood to allow easy removal for emptying as and when required. I also love the various wood grains on view.
I love wood!
*The rather messy holes from my first attempts are visible during clamping. But as these are on the base, they’ll not show when the caddy is in use.
The base of my bench, loaded with toolboxes and timber.
Wasn’t sure if I’d shared a picture of the laden workbench base. Four or five toolboxes (one is out/in use) and a bunch of timber add stabilising weight to the beast!
Also pictured in today’s post… footwear! A pair of Adidas retro-ish ‘80s basketball type sneakers, that I wore whilst working, and some much older shoes I can’t bring myself to throw away.
Picking up where I left off yesterday, I wanted to finish the second tier. This meant adding holes for pens, pencils, screwdrivers, the dovetail square, and various other odds n sods.
The pen and pencil area.
The pens and pencils are the first instance of possible overcrowding, as they get in the way of easy immediate access to some of the drill bits behind them. One solution might be to make the holes deeper. But. Think I’ll leave them for now, as that runs the risk of shorter pencils disappearing into the holes altogether.
Added a hole for an x-acto knife, by the glue.
I’m happy with how three of the machinist’s squares are stored. Only the largest one presents an issue. I made little strips to fill parts of the slots that the smaller ones go in. But the larger one is too tall to sit plumb with the others. What ought I do?
Camera went a bit misty!?
This slightly misty view shows tier two fully loaded. And, in front of the whole shebang, a few of the remaining tools I want to incorporate somewhere, poss’ some in a third tier. Certainly I want to incorporate the pencil sharpener. And the little glue bottle would be handy as well. And some AA and AAA batteries…
I think I’ve mostly avoided overcrowding. But one notable exception is the area in the front middle of tier two, where screwdrivers and pens/pencils block access to the drill bit set immediately behind. Time will tell if this is a problem or not. For now I’m going to leave things as they are.
The squares end includes glue and an exacto knife.
The third and final tier, as yet unbuilt, will house the few remaining tools. Hopefully!? This said. I might leave a third tier/block, as there’s not that many bits and bobs left over. And one or two of those that are still without a place might be best in tiers one or two (the hammer is quite big/tall, and should go at the back).
On the other hand, an argument for going ahead with tier three is that it’ll create space for batteries (AA and AAA), the small glue dispenser, and the electric pencil sharpener (which I adore!). Hmmm? These are tomorrow’s decisions/projects!
* One solution might be to swap out the current screwdrivers for shorter/smaller handled ones.
Today I wanted to continue work on my tool caddy. But I slept in late. This is a bit of a problem at present; often unable to sleep at night, I’m then exhausted and in need of sleep during the day!
This hat arrived today. Was supposed to be blue!
Once I was up and about, I went to Wright’s Tools, for the missing bits for the HSS metal-drilling set I have, with a view to incorporating that into the caddy. Once I’d got those (and a set of tapered countersink bits), I had a long overdue haircut.
On finally getting home and getting started on the caddy, it was time to begin work on tier two. I needed to find a bit of wood that was suitable. Fortunately I have plenty of scavenged timber lying around, and very soon had what I wanted.
The second tier at close of play today.
One other thing I ought to perhaps note, is that the lumber I’m using for the big blocks, or tiers, is very rough. It has required planing flat. For which I have had to set up and sharpen my main plane. That has been going better than in the past.
The primary plan for today was to incorporate the multi-part HSS drill bit set into this part of the caddy. This involved working out how to accommodate the three mini-caddies. Here I diverged from the way Patrick Sullivan did his ‘instant access tool centre’.
I also committed the cardinal sin of not planning so much as busking it! But so far that’s not proved disastrous. Still… time will tell!
Disassembling the drill set.
I finally knocked off working on this at about 9.45 pm. And now I’m typing this. I could easily have carried on all night, or until this phase was complete.
As relayed above, I decided to buy the missing and/or broken drill bits from the HSS set of metal drilling bits I already have, rather than buy an entirely new set. And then disassemble that unit, retaining the individual drill holders.
Some tabs needed removing or bending.All done, ready to go in situ’.
To make the recesses into which these drill bit holders would go I cut a load of passes on the table saw, snapped off any residual ‘fins’, and chiselled, rasped and sanded the resulting recesses relatively flat. This went ok-ish. But I could’ve been a lot neater and more accurate.
Gluing support blocks into the recesses.
I then glued blocks of varied sizes into the bottoms of the recesses, on top of which each of the three drill holders would sit, with enough of each little red caddy showing to allow easy reading of the bit sizes, that are handily printed there.
‘Mock-up view’, testing fit during glue-up.Lots of stuff given a new home; but plenty of space for more.
Here’s another near identical photo to the one up top, showing the stuff I’ve made homes for in tier two: the HSS drill set (1-13 mm, in 0.5 mm increments); five tapered drills with countersink attachments; an allen key for the former; a countersink bit, and drill-chuck key; two awls (round and square); four (new!) engineers squares, two glue-sticks, etc.
I didn’t cut the slot for the dovetail ‘square’, visible in these pics, as Teresa was on the warpath about me stopping for the night! But I did add a rasp/file, to one of the rear ‘tall-boy’ slots. I also added a small round hole to the top tier, at far right, for the scissors I recently got off Amazon Vine.
They’re actually hairdressing scissors, but they’re great for the workshop as well (oh, and as previously mentioned, I had a haircut, at one of our several local Turkish barbers*).
Amy, Misty and Dan, chez Ellis.
Earlier in the day I collected Teresa from town, after she got off work. And we dropped in on Dan and Amy, for a cuppa and a catch up. Dan has his fourth chemo’ session tomorrow. Apparently, at his most recent meeting with his specialist, they reported that treatment so far has been going exceedingly well. With a better than expected response. That’s great news!
* Daniel, my barber, was (and doubtless still is) Bulgarian. The post haircut massage – scalp, neck, shoulders, arms, etc. – was the best I’ve ever had!
It’s interesting, what causes great happiness, and how that might evolve over the years. Today I was overjoyed that the post man delivered a set of four machinist’s squares! I ordered them about a month or so ago, on Amazon UK’s website, but they shipped from the US.
Well packaged for shipping!
I ordered the same brand, Woodstock, as Patrick Sullivan mentions he has, gleaning this info via his excellent ’instant access‘ tool caddy video. They arrived very well/nicely packaged, in a colourful card box, inside of which each square is individually boxed, and, in a third layer, in a sealed plastic bag!
Can you see the oil residue?
In fact there’s actually a fourth protective layer… of oil! I brushed some of the oil off with tissues. Very impressively packaged! And they look and feel beautiful. Can’t wait to get these into my caddy and into use, in the workshop!
Mmm… lovely!
Also arrived in the post today, a book on US WWII tanks and tank destroyers.
Teresa and I went for a walk in a nice old woodland that we discovered locally today. Gault Wood is a little over six hectares of land belonging to the Woodland Trust.
Gently forking paths split around a pond.
Teresa wanted to forage for stuff in the woods. Not edible stuff, mind. But rather materials for her art projects at work, like the annual seasonal murals. So she collected yellowing leaves for the Autumn display.
Teresa collects leaves and takes pics, in the woods.
This rather lovely green space is just a five or ten minute drive from our front door. It was particularly nice today, as the sun was out quite a lot. We had the place mostly to ourselves, save a young family and one or two dog walkers.
Verdant surrounds to a pond.
There are numerous little ponds. And a good number of benches. After our walk we sat on one of the latter, and had a flask of hot tea and some oaty biscuits, listening to the birds singing and the wind rustling the leaves. Tranquil and beautiful!
Semi-wild; signs of humanity, but unkept and lush.
Teresa wanted to watch a vintage movie, so we plumped for this. Starring a youthful James Mason, with some oddly comic support, and a very young Herbert Lom as the villain. Made in ‘44, but set in 38, it’s an oddball thing. It seems to want to be both a thriller and a comedy. And in the end it’s not that great at being either.
A young and handsome James Mason.
Mason is Peter Vadassy, half French and half Austrian, looking to move to France and become a doctor, and escape Hitler’s regime. A mix up of cameras with another guest at the titular Hotel Reserve lands Vadassy in the embrace of the French police, who ask him to do a bit of sleuthing or espionage type work on their behalf.
A young and suave Herbert Lom.
Essentially the movie is about how Mason’s Vadassy character struggles, in a rather paranoid yet also playful environment – folk holidaying in southern France, on the edge of war – teetering between appearing too nefarious himself, whilst trying to smoke out the real villain.
Southern France on a studio lot.
Mostly filmed on a pretty unconvincing set, and with a rather oddball cast, some darkly serious, others bizarrely comical, it’s not a classic. But it is a silly slice of period fun. And by the end it felt kind of lame but enjoyable. Weird!
I followed up phase one of my tool caddy build, with the second step: adding a back panel/spacer strips, for taller and thinner stuff.
Much to my surprise and delight, since my most recent major tidy up and reshuffle, whilst things are far from complete or ideal, I can at least work in the shed workshop space now.
This ‘instant access’ tool caddy should help increase efficiency.
Cutting and gluing spacer strips for the back panel.
I used marine ply for the spacers, busking the dimensions completely. It would later transpire, rather miraculously, that these spacers turned out to be near enough the exact same thickness as a piece of random ply I bought from West End DIY. How unlikely must that be!?
Cutting spacer strips with the super basic sled.
Cutting stuff on the Kity is going well at present. Although I think the blade – the same one that was in the machine when I bought it – needs either sharpening or replacing. And the very basic cross cut sled I made/adapted is doing sterling service.
Gluing the base strip on the rear of the tall segment.
The strip that runs along the bottom at rear is there to stop certain things, such as rulers, dropping straight through. I chiselled a few little bits away here and there; not all the way through. Just sufficiently to add more depth for some of the tallest ‘tall boys’.
The back panel gluing up, clamped and weighted.
After gluing the back panel in place I also screwed it in position. After which I planed some of the faces a little, to smooth and square things up a bit. Like Patrick Sullivan’s version of this idea, which is my inspiration for this project, mine will have two more sections, or tiers.
The single most satisfying part of todays work on this project arose out of a real pain in the ass: when I went to glue my spacer strips to the rear of the tall segment, I discovered there was a hump down the central axis of the chopped/glued board.
I have a planer-thicknesser for exactly this job, but I’ve still not got it hooked up to a motor, and running. I must attend to this ASAP! So I had to go old school, and simply plane the mother flat. That entailed sharpening my smoothing plane.
Time was, not that long ago, when I hated doing this, as I’d spend ages getting nowhere. But I now have the right tools – a plane-iron guide, a whole range of abrasives, etc. – and a few planes in basically good shape, that just need fine-tuning type maintenance. So it was pretty quick and easy restoring a keen edge. And once done, planing the rear face of this block proved easy as pie!
