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Luthier cam clamps by Stephen McLean

How to Make a Luthier Clamp

I like how these are made so I thought I'd share it here

It has a link to some plans as well

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107188277705566648406/posts

Cars Engine and a new brad nailer

There hasn't been much happening lately because I managed to blow up my cars engine. It happened on the rainiest day we've had in ages and I had such a great time sitting on the side of the road outside the Japanese Embassy facing Parliament house and diagonally across from the Lodge (The PM's residence) I'm saving up to have it fixed but will take a few months.

Aldi was having a Saturday 18th April sale which included some tools so I learnt how to catch a bus and got myself a brad nailer for about $30.00. With so many things still to build I thought this could help.

15 Foot Radius Dish

My 15' Radius Dish arrived today. I seriously thought making it myself but making the jig and the mess it would have created made me think twice so I decided to buy one locally (Australia)

AU $115.00 including shipping seemed like a good buy at least to me.

The following video I chose at random from a wide selection of videos on the topic to show how they are used for sanding but they also are used for gluing braces on in a go bar deck.

My search on the topic https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Radius+dish

Finding sand paper to fit this size isn't easy so far in Australia but I've found some in the states

http://www.bluescreekguitars.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=201&zenid=t5h7q8yMVVao9WlFch7ic0

I'll wait until the Aussie dollar climbs back up before buying though 0.76 US Dollar atm !!!!!!!!

Aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Plate Jioner

I was working on the plate joiner this morning using 15 mm ply board. At $40.00 a sheet it pushed my finances this week and it seems you get what you pay for.

Not that there are many choices in Aust with both our major food conglomerates Coles and Woolworths buying up all our major hardware stores and running them like a food store.

The bloke cutting the sheet in half for me so I could easily transport it told me they (Woolworths) were going to take their panel saw off them, so they were now forced to charge for cutting. How the fuck do you run a hardware and timber store without a basic cutting service? The current available selection of even basic hardware is is bad enough!

The only other option would have been marine ply, a ply that uses a waterproof glue and costs more than I'm able to afford. Yet still no guarantee that it wouldn't have broken I suspect.

Here I'm cutting the halving joints three at a time so alignment won't be an issue and that the sizes of the cuts will be exactly the same.

This is the piece that broke without a sound. The joints were accurate and firm fitting and in hindsight could have been looser in order to avoid them breaking. Bloody shitty ply board!!!!

So do I just re-cut the broken piece or do I redo all of it in another solid timber? Radiata pine? Tassie Oak or some Aussie hard wood that you need diamond saws to cut through :-)

And this is my dilemma do you go for something that is easy to work with ie cut with the tools you have available or do you go for the even more expensive route and work with materials that require a lot of very hard work to work as it were.

I guess the other option is to not be so rigid in the way you want to work, there are other ways to join two pieces of 2/3mm plate of timber I guess.

Mmmmmmmmmmm

Plate Joiner

I've been cutting the 15 mm ply for this build this afternoon. Originally I had an aesthetic design, as in the picture below, buuuuttttt the reality of my limited tools and work space made me realise I needed to simplify the design by way of simplifying the kinds of cuts I'm going to use. 

I've modified the top left, light blue cross member in this design, so it's just square cuts and I'll do this for all the pieces. What I can do later on is then come back and add in the angles if I want.

This grates on my ocd design sensibility like you wouldn't believe lol

Here's another view

See this page for a youtube video on which the design is based

https://youtu.be/XaUAJNpB0_0

Temperature test 1

Dial on 1/5 mark

After 10 mins it's off the scale. I couldn't wait for the digital thermometer to arrive so I got this $6.00 one at the outlet centre :-P

 You can't see it here, but water sprayed onto the steel boils instantly

I'll do some more research on youtube to see what temps people are using. I seem to remember seeing someone having around 170 Celsius and this passed 200.

Stewmac suggested temperaturesl

Setting the temperature The bender's highest temperature is approximately 500°. A good bending temperature is between 350° (°C 176.66667) and 400° (°C 204.44444). A surface thermometer placed on the aluminum iron is the best way to monitor the temperature. A hotter iron steams the wood faster, but also dries it out faster, so it needs to be wetted again. 

I'd suggest now that 400 watts was overkill and could have easily gotten away with 100w

Mold Heating Element Cartridge Heater 12.6" Wire 220V 400W 12mm x 200mm

I re-checked ebay and could find what I was looking for at a lower wattage so beggars can't be choosers I guess.

On to the next thing on the list now