Woodwork Ireland

Cordless and Corded Drills

Aside from hand tools, I’m looking into getting a good drill. I’m torn between the reliability of a plug-in drill with a cord, and the portability and convenience of a cordless. The cordless can be used anywhere, but it depends on rechargable batteries, which last about three years at best, and can run out at the most inconvenient times. The corded drill is never going to run out of power, but it can be very awkward.

I’m also wary of the sheer weight of a cordless drill - batteries are heavy. If I’m going to be holding the thing up for half an hour at a time, I really want something I can handle fairly smoothly.

Amazon.co.uk have a variety of drills, and have customer reviews as well, which helps for purposes of comparison. I’ll probably look to buy locally when I make up my mind, but window-shopping on the web is a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

First up is the Draper 71385 14.4V Cordless Drill. It’s got a 3.5 star rating, dragged down by one guy who says it’s not good on metal. I'’m pretty unlikely to be drilling metal, so that doesn’t worry me. The other reviewer gives it five stars. It will, of course, work as a screwdriver as well, and comes with screwdriver bits. It’s fairly inexpensive as well, so I’ll put it on the list to consider.

The Black & Decker KR500 Hammer Drill 500W has no reviews by customers. It looks like a pretty standard hammer drill. The price is nice, but I’m wary of the lack of reviews, and Black & Decker tools haven’t the best of reputations for durability. However, I wouldn’t be subjecting it to extra-heavy use, so I’ll consider it as well.

The next one up is the Jcb 18V Cordless Hammer Drill Jcbd-Chd18Vc . It looks very impressive - long list of features, satisfied customer review, and hammer action in a cordless drill. Spare batteries, drivers and drill bits, case. Nice. That’s on the list, then, although it might come off again when I come to consider the price - it’s four times the price of the Draper cordless above.

The search brought up the Bosch IXO Cordless Screwdriver 3.6V as well - and while it looks like a neat little toy, it’s only a screwdriver, and I need a drill.

They’re also got a single hand drill, in case you’re feeling old-fashioned: the Draper 13838 8mm Double Pinion Hand Drill - but I honestly can’t see much reason to use a hand drill these days.

And, incidentally, Tools Ireland carry the rather useful looking Plano Drill Holster. I’m not convinced it’d be of a huge amount of use to me personally, but for someone who’s moving around a lot, I can see it being very useful.

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Tool List for a Basic Workshop

I’ve been working on getting together a wishlist of hand tools, so that I can assemble a decent workshop for myself, rather than the piecemeal acquisition I’ve been going about so far. I posted on a few different forums and discussion boards, and at this stage, I’ve a fair idea of what tools I want. What brands, sizes, and so on remains to be seen, but at least I won’t be stunned by the range every time I walk into McQuillans on Capel Street so much if I have a list in hand.

Here are the recommendations for a basic workshop - hand tools with an emphasis on small work; box making, and the like. Some of these I have already, more of them I’m going to have to get. And some I have aren’t the best quality.

• Steel rule
• Setsquare
• Marking knife
• Handsaw
• Dozuki Saw (will work for fine cuts, until I get a dovetail saw)
• Low angle block plane
• Jack plane
• Cabinet scraper
• Chisels 6,12,18 & 25mm
• Carving chisels
• Paring chisel
• Hammer
• Mallet
• Sharpening equipment
• Screwdrivers
• Various clamps
• Sandpapers and abrasives
• Glues (small bottles, for freshness)
• Finishes

And in small power tools:

• Cordless drill
• Small router

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Drying Timber

I was brought up in a woodwork shop, so there’s a lot of stuff that I know without thinking of it as knowledge. One of these seems to be how wood dries over time - I’ve seen a number of poeple asking about it on message boards and in magazines.

This isn’t really relevant for people working at the manufacturing level, who buy in all their timber in ready planks, nor for the DIY folks, who won’t have time or space to dry wood. However, for the amateur or small professional wood turner or wood carver, being able to go from fresh-cut logs to finished product is great. For those folks, here’s some information on what happens to wood as it dries.

A fair amount of the weight of fresh-cut timber is water. If you leave this in the log, or in planks, under cover and up off the ground, it will eventually dry, leaving you with harder, more brittle material. This is called air-drying (as opposed to kiln-drying).Air drying takes a long time - the usual recommendation is 1 year for every inch of diameter, with an extra year for anything over four inches. However, in the process, it tends to warp and split. In logs, the usual occurance is a split along the long axis as the wood contracts. Often, this is just at the end, but depending on the shape and internal structure of the timber, it may split at points along, or indeed all along the length.

Do excuse my hand-drawn diagrams here; they illustrate my points fairly well, I think:

Planks will usually warp rather than splitting, developing curves - usually in the short axis, or twists along the length.

To understand the way the wood warps, it’s best to use another diagram:

In this, you can see how a given plank will warp, depending on what part of the log it is from. You can see that the centre plank will warp least - although that’s not to say it won’t warp at all; it may well buckle in interesting ways - and the planks taken from between the top and middle will warp most. However, in the same diagram, you can see that a log cut in the middle will warp only a little, and in a fairly predictable manner. This is probably the best way for an amatuer to cut wood for drying, as it avoids splits and still leaves you with a decent chunk of timber - particularly important for carving and turning.

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Woodcarving Tools

My wife, Nina (who has her own food and culture site, Rocking Grass), is thinking of taking up woodcarving. I showed her the most recent Rutlands catalogue, in which there are sets of carving tools ranging in price from about £15 (€22) to £200 (€290) - most of them being boxes of eight to twelve chisels in the £40 (€58) range. Rather than buy straight from Rutlands by mail, I figured I’d have a go at supporting local businesses, and went to a hardware shop near where I work. There, I was shown the one “carving” chisel they had in the place, an oversized gouge with an ugly plastic handle, and told it would set me back €37.

I’ll give the specialist tool shops in Capel Street a try, and if they don’t have something a touch more reasonable in price, size and utility, I’m definitely going to be ordering from Rutlands.

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Good Woodworking, Issue 177, August 2006

I’m still confused when I see “August” as the publication date of a magazine I bought in early July, but never mind that.

This month’s Good Woodworking contains project plans for a leaded light cabinet, a waste paper bin, jigs for large tenons, a barley twist candlestick, a router table, and sheet cutting devices. The techniques articles include batching tenons by hand, assembling lapped tails, repairing a broken chair leg (with particular reference to Victorian and Edwardian chairs, and the annoying narrow parts), planing across an edge, and quick and easy carcases (wardrobes in this case, but the principles carry).

There’s also an extensive comparison of scraping tools - scrapers and scraping planes, for the most part, with commentary on their use. Based on the advice in the article, I’m likely to be picking up some new kit for myself.

There’s a feature article as well on the construction of a small, purpose-built workshop, which contains a few useful ideas, and a sidebar that advises against vinyl flooring in a workspace - it becomes dangerously slippy under sawdust.

As ever, the magazine is worth buying, and if any of the items above are on your list of projects or problems, it could save you a lot of headaches.

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Woodwork on the Internet in Ireland

There’s one thing that’s becoming very clear as I’m developing this site, and gathering material for it - the woodwork industry in Ireland is badly behind with regard to the internet. I was brought up in a workshop, and most of my family work with wood in one form or another, so I know the businesses are out there. Searching, though, reveals nothing. For example, having spent twenty minutes looking for any timber retailer at all that I could place a link to, I’ve found none. Either the timber sellers in Ireland don’t have websites, or they’re so badly designed that the search engines can’t find them. In an age where more and more buyers are seeking information online, that seems insane.

I’ll follow up with other sources, and see if I can provide some links for timber sellers that aren’t your local hardware shop. They’re not making it easy, though, and that has to be costing them sales.

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