Cold Bluing a Rifle Barrel
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Cold Bluing a rifle barrel is not strictly a woodworking project, but since it relates to the whole aspect of gun restoration, and because we actually did cold blue the barrel, we are covering it here. Bluing is a process to help prevent rusting of exposed steel and is sometimes used on some woodworking tools as well.
We are of the belief that hot bluing is the best, at least in my experience, but it is also somewhat complicated and needs special equipment to do, OR you need to find someone who does this and again in my experience, it is not cheap.
The other thing that needs to be noted up front, is that I have seen some pretty crappy hot blued barrels and receiver plates, not because the bluing was all that bad, but because the preparation of the metal was poor. If the metal is not polished and cleaned properly it doesn't matter what kind of bluing you put on, the finished product will not look good.
To that end, we made sure that the barrel was extremely well sanded and prepared before we ever started the bluing process. In our case we were using Outers Gun Blue Kit, a product we had never used before, so were quite interested to see how it performed, and we were ....
Re-Finishing a Gun Stock
- Read Time: 6 mins
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Owners of rifles know that taking firearms back and forth to the target range and just general handling can be hard on guns, particularly wooden stocks. If the gun is old, it could have been finished with varnish, which over years can crackle and chip depending on conditions. In this article we will discuss the different aspects of refinishing a wooden rifle stock to restore the firearm to something close to it's original beauty.
Before you refinish or even handle any firearm, it is up to you to ensure you are working safely for yourself and for those around you.
The first thing to consider when refinishing a rifle stock is - should this rifle even be refinished? Some rifles can dramatically lose their value when the original finish is removed and replaced. If you are planning to go ahead with the refinishing, you will need to remove all the hardware from the rifle.
Once the hardware is removed, the first step is to remove the existing finish. This can be done with sandpaper, but is best started off with some sort of a remover if possible. A good paint and varnish remover should get the stock down to either the natural wood, or at least to a stained wood. At this point you will likely have removed most of the nasty marks on the stock with exception of those that are deep into the wood. The next step is ....
Easiest Way to Break Down Pallets
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Who wants free wood? Pretty much anyone who does woodworking right! Well, there is a catch, like anything else that is free. What I am talking about using Pallet Lumber. All over the world there are free pallets, and some of them have some great wood. I was so intrigued with collecting and re-cycling pallet wood at one time in my life, I wrote a business plan for starting up a Pallet Furniture Manufacturing business. What I discovered was, there is often a lot of waste in trying to salvage pallet wood, there is a big cost in acquisition (finding the pallets), the wood is extremely hard on all woodworking tools, particularly jointers and planers because of all the ground in dirt and small rocks. But for individual woodworkers who are aware of the problems of working with pallet woods, there can still be many rewards.
During the process of writing the business plan, I had the opportunity to collect and break down pallets into useable wood, and I tried many different methods of breaking down or disassebling the pallets. This video represents what I found was the easiest and most effective way of breaking pallets down ....
All About Wobble Wheel Dado Blades
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Many years back, some number of companies produced a special blade that could cut dados with just a single blade. The invention was really pretty cool, but simple. The single blade would have to rotate a bit on it's axis which would mean that it could plough out a trough of wood, depending on how far the blade was turned. When it was not turned I would carve out a slot approximately 1/8 inch wide, but when it was turned fully it could make a dado cut that was well in excess of 3/4 inch. These blades were called wobble wheels and were quite common at one time. I am not sure if they are still made and I have not been able to find a source for them in recent years.
Like all things that change, the wobble wheel has all but gone away, replace instead by the stack dado set which consists of a couple of outer cutting blades and sandwiched between them are something called chippers, and together they are used to dado cuts of varying widths, depending on how many chippers are installed.
I used a wobble wheel for many years and always found to make decent cuts, my only real complaint was it often took a lot of time getting the width the perfect size. Over the years I have heard (but never actually tested) from many people, that wobble wheels, because of their design create somewhat coved bottoms on the dado cuts. Based on how the blade works, it's pretty easy to assume this would of course be the case, but how much of a cove does it make and does it really make any difference? That's what I set out to see ...
Beginner # 9 Using the Sliding Mitre
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The first real dedicated workshop machinery was called a Radial Arm Saw, and many are still around today and I believe you can even by the larger industrial ones to this day. The radial arm saws worked fairly well, their only real problem was the number of digits they claimed ... that's digits as is fingers. Yes they were pretty unsafe despite efforts to make them safer, but their real safety issue was "walking" that's when the blade catches the wood and "walks" toward the operator, which of course happens in a millisecond and if you happen to be holding the board in the path of the blade, you will get hurt. There is no way you can hold back that mechanism. I owned and operated one of these saw for many year and treated it like it was out to get me, which it never did. Then one day it died and it gave me an excuse to finally go out a purchase a nice sliding mitre saw.
In truth I had been looking at them for a whiles, so when the time came to get one, I only had to select a current model and the dealer I was going to purchase it from.
I had agonized for months about whether or not to get a 12" or a 10" sliding mitre. And then along came the reticulated models and it was an even harder choice to make because they took up less space in my rather small workshop ...
Make a Natural Edge Lazy Susan
- Read Time: 3 mins
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Wooden kitchen and cooking accessories continue to be highly popular, maybe even more in the past because people more and more are appreciating the values and beauty of natural woods. In this article and associated video we make a natural edge Lazy Susan from a slice from a Black Locust tree that was being taken down because the tree had died. This gave us a perfect opportunity to secure pieces of wood that were already fairly dry, certainly dry enough to use for out purposes here. We also like the fact that the bark was still very well secured. It appeared that the tree had possibly been winter killed which would account for the fact that the bark would not peel off readily.
Our first challenge was to find a short log among all the logs that had been cut that would be suitable. We chose one that looked to have little cracking but that still had a slight angle cut because we wanted the finished piece to be somewhat oval rather than a perfect circle, just to add a bit of character to our build.
On getting 16 inch log into out workshop, the next thing to do was to cut of a slice with our a chainsaw. Working with short pieces of wood is always dangerous, not matter what tool you are using so we needed to make sure the log was fully secured before we sliced off the piece we needed ...
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