New Wall In An Office

Not a very interesting post this one I'm afraid as I didn't take many photos but it follows on from the last post about the shop counter. When I'd finished building the counter we all decided that the second office was too big and the space would be better used as somewhere to display items for sale.

 So last week I went back and built a new wall out of 3x2 studding and clad it with MDF (so it was easy to fix things to) with insulation between, I then added a 2'9" door with a large glazed panel. 

Taking the old wall out was easy enough, although I was surprised as the metal studding used was welded together, something I'd never seen before, normally it's just held together with the plasterboard.

I gave it all a lick of paint when I finished and other than a last coat on the door the area is ready to be used. 

Shop Counter

This counter is one I built for my fathers firm back in the summer. I managed to get it painted a few weeks ago as they were moving into the office. It's being used now and it seems to work well. 

 The brief was a good solid top, shelves to store leaflets and an area to display them. I made the majority out of 18mm and 12mm ply. The top was doubled up for extra strength, and all edged so it could be painted to a good finish.

Tehmidle section. 3x2 stud sandwiched with 12mm ply. 

Starting to take shape. The Festool came into it's own on the project, allowing me to make straight cuts on the ply

Shelves all fitted in the main unit

A second unit to store manuals and other bits built to the side

Edging the top. I used 2x1 PSE for edging so it's nice and strong.

The unit finished ready for painting

Three coats of paint later it's all finished

A little side bar going off to one side as well.

A great project to build and I'll be interested to see if it works as well as we think it will.

Large Wardrobe With Sliding Doors

The last few weekends I've been finishing some wardrobes with a friend of mine.

 They are rather large, measuring 4.5m long with 4 sliding doors and a wardrobe rail that I can do pull ups on!

The sliding door gear we've been using is the best I've come across. I can smoothly slide a 4ftx8ft door with my little finger and they glide across the room. The doors are made from a sheet of MDF wrapped with aluminium channel, this gives the edge a nice finish and also means that the sliding gear can be fixed securely into the of the MDF.

I'll post some more pictures of these wardrobes when they're finished.

Chair Seat Frame Repair

A local upholster phone me up the other day to see if I was interested in repairing a chair for her. 

 The inside frame had some serious woodworm and had broken through in one place as well as all the joints coming loose or snapping.

 I made a complete new frame using beech and dowelled joints at the corners. I'd forgotten how much I hate dowels, doing them by hand is not as easy as you'd think and the fact that the frame is a trapezium made it awkward to line them up. 

Although only a little job you never know what might come from it in the future and as I was always taught growing up - "You never turn work down". Also it's good to work with (and for) other local tradesmen (and women) as you never know when you might require their skills and expertise.

Wendy House Build

For Christmas this year I built my girls a Wendy house for them to play in. It was a great present as they seem to love it, I built it in the evenings and weekends leading up to Christmas and erected it on Christmas eve. There's a surprising amount of work and wood in it. The cost of the wood alone was over £350 not including some stuff I already had.

Building frames in the workshop - I wanted ti to be modular so I could carry it all down the garden on my own.

Adding ship lap boarding to each side, this is where the main cost is as ship lap is quite expensive.

Side frames built - note how the ship lap boarding runs over the edges so that the joints will be more water proof, there is then a 2x1 trim that runs down the sides for the boards to butt into.

The front frame with a a window and door

Setting up the base. I went a bit over the top with the number of pads but I guess I'm going to have to go in there for tea parties so I want it to be strong and solid.

Painting all the panels, each side had two coats of Cuprinol shades. Although this is water based it does give a good finish.

Starting to assemble the house. Luckily we had good weather on Christmas Eve or this could have been a horrible job!

This si not a small Wendy house!

I sheeted up all the windows that the girls could see out of so as not to wreck the surprise!

Getting there. Ply added to the roof to be felted, handrail on the veranda all finished

Christmas morning, she was so excited to go in!

They both loved it!

Quite a fun project in the end and I'm sure they'll get many hours of happiness out of it (and hopefullly I'll get many hours in the garden because of it! 

I'm planning on adding a few extras for the eldest birthday as that's later this month.

Galvanised Handrail

I fitted some rather modern looking galvanised handrail this week for a customer.

This type of handrail is normally fitted outside or on more industrial buildings but it works well in this customers modern house and what's better is all the parts are off the shelf helping to keep the costs down.

Making A Water Powered Cider Press - A Failed Prototype!

 My friend Brian and I have been on about building a cider press for ages. 

There are many simple designs we could build using screw threads or bottle jacks, but Brian is an engineer - so that would be far too simple for him! 

He talked me into trying to make a press that uses mains water press for the power to press the apples. This idea is nothing new as you can buy them on-line but they are rather expensive, our idea was to make one using cheap materials and then have the plans available for anyone that wants to make them. 

We decided to build press out of 3/4" ply (18mm) and use a wine bladder from a box of wine as the pressing part. We built the ply box to the size of the wine bladder, we knew we were taking a risk with this method as the bladders aren't designed to work under lots of pressure or if they are we have no idea what that number is.

 Brian adapted the screw cap on the front of the bladder to take some 1/2" copper pipe, this would make filling the box easier. Not shown on the pictures is the corner fillets we fitted in all the corners so the bags wouldn't be going into a sharp corner.

 Our mashing of fruit was pretty basic - a mallet and a plastic bag!

 The finished prototype! We added second side pieces so that dowels could be inserted to hold the top on and Brian fitted a pressure gauge so we could see the pressure we were working to.

And now the Science bit, straight from the brain of Brian :-

"So,

When we were pressing on the "traditional press" the "cheese's had an area of about 600 x 600 and the max force we could apply was 20T.  We probably applied less as we bent the frame before maxing the jack out.  Say we applied 10T of force.

So max force was 10,000kg or in engineering speak 100,000 N 

The area was 0.6 x 0.6m so 0.36m2

Therefore the max pressure we could achieve would be Force/Area or 100,000N/0.36m2

which we can round to about 300,000 N/m2 or 300,000 Pascal (a Pascal is 1N per m2, i.e. bugger all)

There are 100,000 Pascal in a bar of pressure.  A bar is also known as 1 atmosphere.  So the max pressure we were applying to press in a traditional way was 3 bar.  THe important thing to take away is the pressure in in the order of a couple of bar and not hundreds of bar which is used for olive oil presses.

Mains water pressure varies between 1 and 5 bar in the UK and I happen to know that we get around 2 bar at our place.

This is because you can also calculate pressure in "head" terms, which is essentially the pressure generated by a vertical pipe of water.  The important thing is that the static pressure (the pressure when there is little or no flow) is only dependent on the height difference between the water supply and the delivery point.  For every 10m of height difference the pressure will be 1 bar.  I happen to know there is at least 20m of height difference between the back shed and the water tanks, so there is at least 2 bar of pressure available to squeeze apples (assuming the bladder doesn't pop)!"

Goggles, we decided, were essential!

We had the science sorted, we had the box built and we had some pears to squeeze.

Juice!

Early signs were good, and juice started to flow. The pressure was making all the ply bend  and there was some serious creaking going on. 

We added straps around the outside as extra support, and then increase the pressure, then there was a small hiss and we decided to stop the experiment.

Unfortunately the bag failed. A small hole formed where the bag creases in the corner.

Unfortunately the bag had failed. It was only the smallest of holes, but we knew we were working with a bag that wasn't designed to be taken to this sort of pressure. 

It was good fun to design and build something like this even though it didn't work properly. 

I'm ever the sceptic and I couldn't quite believe the pressures that I was told we'd get off the tap (Theirs is from spring water with a header tank), but when we were pressing with it and the ply was trying to form the shape of a ball I understood the forces we were working with!

So although it's back to the drawing board I learnt a lot from this project and the next one will be even better! Although I don't think we'll bother until next year now though!

Anyone else spent time designing and building things only for them to fail?

Splicing In The Dark

I know of no carpenter that enjoys spicing. Let alone when it's in the dark. On the top of a ladder.

 A friend had a sash window where the bottom had rotted out of the top frame. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have done the job if he wasn't a friend as it was very awkward without a 100% chance of it working. The timing was down to me, as it was the only time we could both fit it in.

 I machined the piece in advance, ready to fit. I broke the old piece away and cleaned up all the tenons. I then marked the new piece up, halving joints on either ends with mortices to join in the mullions in the middle. I was a fiddly job at the top of a ladder. 

 I then glued and screwed the piece in a place and used linseed putty to seal the glass. My putty skills are far from the best but it's so infrequent that I use it now, it will look fine when painted though. 

The window should last a few more years now, I've told him it's essential that he paints on to the glass when he paints the window as this is the only way you properly seal a window with putty.

Left home at 7 at night and got back in around 12 - not everyones working day!

Can Rotator Prototype

This is a repeat post form my other blog but as it's a wood working project I thought I'd add it on this blog as well.

As any one that reads this blog knows, our house isn't massive. So I'm always looking for new storage solutions and lately I've been looking at making some can rotators for the pantry. This is so we can keep a better stock of cans and always use the oldest first.

My prototype model

 The idea is to make a door for our under stairs cupboard that contains all of our canned goods and rotates the stock for us as well (few things annoy me more than wasting food). The door will be made out of ply and have six rows of cans on the front, and use a castor to help it open smoothly.

Pull the oldest can out first and new ones go in the top

The prototype works well and is ideal for screwing to the wall and keeping a dozen cans in and although it looks basic it would be great for someone to keep tinned dog food in their garage.

I thought I'd post this up here and see if anyone else has any ideas for can rotators or any links I should look at for inspiration? Cheers for your help guys!