Ay Wood project

My face vise stunk.
I made it out of scrap wood left over from the benchtop. The wood itself is soft, I drilled the holes sloppily, and its a little thin. All of these factors led to a really flexy vise with a lot of slop.

Along with the walnut and maple that I used for the bookcase, I also picked up a grab bag of scrap cutoffs from Peachtree Lumber. One of the real gems in it was this:
Its a 2" thick piece of what Im quite sure is tulip poplar. It was really cupped, but I handplaned it down nice and flat. Poplar is a pretty soft wood which should make it nice for holding smaller, delicate pieces. I ripped it down the middle into two pieces.

The sloppy drilling on the original vise jaw was the result of the vise not coming with a template to help layout exactly where the holes go. I sort of eyeballed it. I thought of a better solution this time:
I took the vise apart and used the jaw itself as the template. The metal piece at the bottom of the picture is where all the rods end, so I just used that to space all my holes perfectly.

Now thats a vise!

Heres a closeup of the beautiful grain of the poplar:
I like it. It works better too.

Im probably going to do a little surgery on the actual bench itself to make it even a little more rigid, but that will be another day.

In the last post I mentioned my affinity for Bosch tools. Well, apparently someone at Bosch is paying attention because immediately a free Bosch plunge-cut blade for my oscillating tool showed up in the mail. Im not kidding.

So it was time to paint the "One Hour Stool". I had already decided to paint it blue, but just to be sure I brought out the milk paint sticks. Yup, it still wanted to be blue.



I broke out the Real Milk Paint and mixed up a batch of sky blue. I wanted the paint to be somewhat transparent, so I adjusted the proportions to make it more of a wash.


After letting it sit for a bit, I painted up some scraps - Hey, those look like busted up legs from a small stool! Huh, wonder how that happened? Anyway, after they dried, I tested some various oil/wax combinations to see how they would change the appearance.



On the left, is my own beeswax/mineral oil mix. In the center, is Tried & True Varnish Oil. On the right, is Dark Tung Oil. I decided on one coat of the T&T Varnish Oil, and one coat of my own mix.

On to the stool.


First the paint.


Then the oil.


And its done! I didnt keep track of time during this stage of the stool build. Id have to estimate that the painting and oiling took about 45 minutes total shop time.

So I guess that would make this one hour stool a two hour stool...