Woodwork Ireland

Woodworking Ireland 2007

Dates and places have been set for the Woodworking Ireland Show, 2007.

That’s 6th - 8th September 2007 in the National Show Centre, Cloghran, Dublin.

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Woodfit

After the amount of giving out I’ve done about the presence of woodworking on the web in Ireland, it’s nice to see a site that’s done well. Woodfit have an excellent site, giving their contact information, some more about what they do, and a list of client references as long as your arm.

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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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Timber Merchants & Discussion Boards

I’m adding a few of my recent discoveries as links on the site. First up, Woodworkers in Terenure have a website. It’s a terrible site, to be honest, but it’s there and it works. They sell timber, doors, decking, flooring, and other goods, and I gather they’ll cut material for you as well. And they deliver, which is a definite bonus for those of us without cars.
In other findings, there’s a Woodcraft forum on boards.ie, which looks useful, and an excellent set of general woodwork forums on UK Workshop, which is close enough to be relevant for the Irish woodworker.

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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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Consumer Pricing

There’s a furniture and fancy housewares shop next door to my place of work. Until recently, they only sold white things - furniture painted white, white throws, white delph, white picture-frames, and so on. They changed hands a few months ago, and a few non-white items have now crept in. However, what caught my eye this morning was an ad for a special offer that said that with every purchase of a desk and chair, you also got a 110cm shelf, free. Normal price €125. I re-read it a few times, and thought it was rather bad phrasing, being as it had to be set of shelves for that price. And then I saw the shelf itself. One horizontal shelf, two end-pieces, rather ineptly painted white - it could really do with another coat. Price, €125. Clearly, web design is the wrong business to be in…

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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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Lisnavagh Timber Project

William Bunbury of the The Lisnavagh Timber Project was kind enough to leave a comment saying that they, as well as Abbey Woods, sell timber in Ireland. Moreover, quoting from the Lisnavagh site:

The Lisnavagh Timber Project grows, sources, conditions and supplies fully traceable home-grown Irish hardwood timber, from sustainable resources, to Ireland’s furniture makers and woodworkers.

So that’s real Irish timber.

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Second-hand Tools

While hunting for tools, I stumbled across an excellent UK site specialising in selling used and antique tools: secondhandtools.co.uk. They deal in woodworking tools, among others, and also carry relevant books. I’ve been looking over their carving chisels and trying to resist - they have some really nice sets, at decent prices.

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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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