Instead of doing housework, I rushed into getting my bench out of it’s overnight bondage experience. The bench held together really well and was ready for it’s final finish.

Before applying the final finish, I ran over the piece with 1200 grit paper by hand, then wiped it down with a clean cloth. This just cleans up any raised bits of shellac left over from the previous process. Once the piece was all cleaned up, we were ready for the final touch up.

Continuing on the U-Beat Polishes products, I used their EEE-Ultra Shine to finish up the bench. Using a clean cotton cloth, I placed a few dabs of the polish over the surface. I then used the same cloth to run the wax in making sure I worked along the grain. This wax has an incredibly fine abrassive in it which “scratches out” any remaining sanding marks.

After working the wax into the wood, I used another clean cotton cloth to wipe it away. Turning frequently, this wipes away the abrassive leaving the finish on the wood.

After the previous night’s work with the shellac, I was so impressed with the result that I was tempted to leave it as it was. After working with this EEE wax, I was even more impressed with the result. I’ve included a number of photos below of the finished product as I didn’t take any during the final waxing stages. This should hopefully make a nice Christmas gift for one of my family.

This is the part I both love and hate doing. Finishing. I love it because it’s quite relaxing and you get to see some amazing qualities of the wood come through. I hate it because you have to exercise a lot of patience waiting for things to dry and harden.

For this project I used Dewaxed White Shellac from U-Beat Polishes. I have used their Shellac Flakes and mixed my own, but I wanted something that wouldn’t colour my timber, especially the Huon. Normal Shellac is fantastic stuff but has a tendency to impart a slight orange colour on lighter woods. White Shellac is much better for these lighter woods so I thought I’d give it a try.

I mixed up 4 parts of Dewaxed Shellac with 1 part of Methylated Spirits. The guide said 25% Methylated Spirits but my brain wasn’t doing well at math this day so it was a little stronger than instructed. However, I absolutely loved the result. Here is a shot of all the pieces having been given two coats of this mix. I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Two coats of this stuff and the wood grain just shone quite beautifully.

I was a little nervous about the result I would get from the Red Ironbark. Throughout my preparation it didn’t show up any really nice features and I just wasn’t sure if would work well with the highly featured Huon Pine. I also hadn’t worked with Ironbark before so wasn’t really sure what to expect. After the two coats of shellac however the timber truly came to life. It has a beautiful straight grain a nice range of darker/lighter reds throughout. The simplicity of the grain works well in contrast with the Huon to. There was even a nice reflective quality to the finish – and this was without any wax added at all.

Once all the pieces dried up, a bit of bondage was in order. Working quite quickly I glued up the legs together, then the dovetails. Adding all the clamps took a while as I had to adjust the pressure to ensure the things squared up nicely. Off to bed now to wait for it to all dry up.

A day of sanding was ahead of me. I worked with each piece taking it from rough sawn wood through all the grits from 80 to 800. As always, I loved using my Festool Rotext 150. It made the job quite easy. Below is a shot to show you the difference a bit of sanding work makes. I have also uploaded a before and after shot of the same piece of Huon Pine.

Finally, it was time to see it all put together. This wasn’t the first time I had worked the pieces together, but it was definitely the first time I got to see the potential of this bench. If you look carefully at the image below, you will see that there is an empty diamond shape cut out at the end of the beam. In my haste, I carved out the wrong side of the leg. Unfortunately because the dovetails had already been cut I could just turn the piece around.

Next steps … finishing, gluing and some final touches.

Having finished a few small projects lately, I was ready to try my hand at something a little bigger. A simple sitting bench. I had a few pieces of nice Huon Pine and a piece of Red Iron Bark (which I bought from a chap online). These were to become my sitting bench.

I cut the pieces ready for the Huon Pine to become the legs and the Iron Bark to be the top (that’s the bit you sit on). I had planned to do a nice fine dovetail join between them. I wanted fine slivers of Huon to come up through the darker Iron Bark.

After spending a few hours measuring, cutting and cleaning/chiseling, I got a strange feeling that something wasn’t right. With some help from the wood work forums, I discovered that my dovetails were too small, whilst my pins were too wide. I basically got them the wrong way around!

I then had to spend some time resawing these. Because of my mistake, I lost some Huon Pine (not happy) but managed to turn the oversized pins into tails on the Iron Bark. I corrected my mistake and then moved on.

Next step … I’m going to start sanding the wood ready for a dry fit.

Growing up, I was never terribly good at the sports thing. Thankfully though, my alter ego (also called Carl Joseph) is really quite good at it. He also only has one leg. His feat (pun intended) is quite incredible and if he is in fact real, then I am truly impressed. Competing as a quarterback, basketballer and high jumper, he seems to have achieved some great heights. Ok, so let’s watch the grainy video …

Is this a hoax?

On November 21st 2008, one of my vanity feeds picked up this story about an amazing one legged athlete. Since then, barely a day has gone by when I haven’t seen yet another post about this other Carl Joseph. This sudden influx of interest does not sit comfortably with me.

• The website dedicated to Carl Joseph was first registered with GoDaddy on the 10th Feb 2008. The YouTube video was uploaded on the 13th November 2008, on the same day as the account “Carlsbuddy” was created.

• Blog posts don’t appear to go back before the 20th November. This is the earliest I can find.

• I have emailed the Florida High School Athletic Assn. and asked if they can confirm the nomination for Carl Joseph to appear in their Hall of Fame. I will update this post if/when I hear back.

I am nervous claiming Carl “Sugarfoot” Joseph as a fake but sometimes I’m still not sure. If this is in fact a true story, then I am really quite inspired by his achievements.

Update

The Florida High School Athletic Association returned my email (quite prompty I might add). A one line response: “Yes, he is real and he has been nominated.” So I guess that’s that.

“What’s a trivet?” I hear you ask.

It’s essentially a hotplate used to protect your table from a hot bowl or dish. The one I constructed is made from wood (surprise, surprise!) It’s a simple triangle and caused me to dig up some basic trigonometry from my school days.

I made this as an exercise to practice a number of techniques:

• fine sawing
• half lap joints
• working with angles
• staining

The angles were by far the most difficult. 60 and 30 degree angles are fine in themselves. The trouble came with my lack of accuracy. A degree here and there and a mm off at each length caused the whole thing to not join up nicely. After a bit of fine tuning I got it to work. I’m pretty happy with the final result.