Wednesday 10 December 2014

Cold weather, creating videos and building from pallet wood!


For each day that passes and as Christmas comes ever more into focus, my productivity worsens!

Is it the cold?

Is it the Christmas excitement?

Is it the stress of how busy every road and shop is, that makes me just want to sit in the lounge in front of the fire when I finally get in, and curl up into a ball?

I’m going to go with all of the above!

I love Christmas, but I like to take life at my own pace, not something you can do at this time of year!

Never the less, I have been out in the shed, with some freezing cold steel chisels in hand, making a video!

I know!

It’s been a while since I've made a proper woodworking/carving video, but Sterling Davis of YouTube had put forth a challenge to the woodworking community to create something from old pallet wood.

For those of you that don’t watch my YouTube, I don’t blame you! But I started off making videos on how to whittle. Not so much how to carve cool sculptures with a knife, but more to show how you can take any scrap of wood, for free, and create something beautiful or useful from it! Now I’ve progressed more to carving with chisels, I thought it would be a nice way of revisiting that old idea and show how you can create something beautiful from rotten old green pallet wood that’s been sitting outside for unknown amount of years!

It comes with its problems, I won’t lie, old wood isn't going to be perfect, but it is usable!


First off, it was pine….I hate pine! Although it’s really soft, the grain is thick and you need your chisels so sharp to cut through cleanly. If you get lazy and don’t keep them stropped, like I often do, you will find that, while cutting cross grain, the chisel won’t cut cleanly and the wood will tear easier than hard woods. If you cut against the grain, which is at times unavoidable, it doesn't just split along the grain a little, allowing you to reverse direction, but rather it decides to instantly split right along the piece of wood!
Secondly, while gluing one section on, I found that it later unstuck while I was cutting a hole in it! I was using a jigsaw so yes there were a lot of forces and shaking involved, but the glue had been left clamped to dry for a whole day and a bit. My understanding of wood glue is that it is stronger than the wood itself, is it should have split the wood, not the glued edge? The only conclusion I can come to, is that there must have been moisture in the wood that affected the glue curing? Any theories please leave in the comments below.

Apart from those minor setbacks, that I managed to overcome, the rest of the build went really well and was a lot of fun!


A massive thank you to Sterling Davis for putting on the challenge! To see his YouTube channel, CLICK HERE. While you’re there, look on the playlist tab to see everyone else’s entry into the challenge. Some great videos there!

For now, CLICK HERE, to see my entry. Give it a ‘thumbs up’, comment and share if you like it please!

I won’t say what it is, you’ll have to watch the video through and find out at the end! Post in the comments below at what time into the video you realised what I was building!

             

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