thegreenlever

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Home-made Pallet Wood Puppet Theatre Competition with Prizes! Thank-you all for reading, watching and commenting and Happy Repurposing for 2013!

We wanted to design and make a pallet wood puppet theatre in such a way that the wooden structure has a practical daily use. So in the comment section below put down your guess as to what our theatre becomes after the curtain goes down on the seasonal festivities. There are two prizes of hand-crafted, papier-mâché glove puppets complete with hand-sewn organic fabric costumes. One prize for the correct answer, which in case of several correct answers, will be drawn from the hat by the said puppet and one for the most amusing answer. Thank you all for watching, subscribing and commenting and here's wishing you all Good Luck and Happy Repurposing!

Nous avons voulu concevoir et fabriquer un théâtre de marionnettes à partir de bois de palette, de sorte que la structure en bois a une utilisation pratique au quotidien. Ainsi, dans la section commentaires ci-dessous laisser votre conjecture sur ce que devient notre théâtre après la tombée du rideau.

Un prix pour la bonne réponse

Un prix pour la réponse la plus drôle

Le prix est - une marionnette

Merci. Bon Courage et Bonne Récup pour 2013!

Queríamos diseñar y hacer un teatro de marionetas de madera de paleta, de modo que la estructura de madera tiene un uso práctico cotidiano. Así, en la sección de comentarios a continuación dejar su conjetura en cuanto a lo que se convierte en nuestro teatro después cae el telón.

Un premio a la respuesta correcta

Un premio a la más graciosa respuesta

El premio es - un títere.

Gracias. ¡Buena suerte y buenas reutilización por 2013!

The first stages of the puppets - papier-mâché made from strips of organic paper bags from our local grocery store and a home-made organic flour glue.

Home-made Greetings Cards, Gift Tags & Decorations from repurposed wood.

Easy to source and make cards, gift tags and decorations using repurposed fruit crate wood and scraps of tissue paper, serviettes, tapes, ribbons, string, stickers and all those old flavourless spices at the back of the cupboard!

Make and give something original and individual. I'm taking this opportunity to say thank-you for reading my blog and hope you'll enjoy this festive project.

Cartes de Noël et cartes de vœux pour le Nouvel An : faites-les vous-même! Des matériaux de récup faciles à trouver pour faire des cartes, étiquettes à cadeaux et décorations en utilisant le bois de cagettes et des morceaux de papier de soie, serviettes, bandes, rubans, cordes, stickers et d'épices. Faire et donner quelque chose d'original et d'individuel.

Je saisis cette occasion pour dire merci de visiter mon blog et j'espère que vous apprécierez ce projet festif.

Crear sus propias tarjetas de felicitación. Tarjetas y decoraciones para Navidad y Año Nuevo hechas de madera reutilizados y pedazos de papel, servilletas, cintas, cintas, cuerdas, pegatinas y especias. Marca y dar algo original y personalizado. Estoy tomando esta oportunidad para decir gracias por visitar mi blog y espero que disfruten de este proyecto festivo.

Basic Materials, Tools and Cutting the Profiles

Fruit crates come in various sizes and qualities, some are made of thin pine and some of plywood. Both these can be used in this project but the technique of laying your pattern onto the wood and the tools you use to cut it are different for each sort. You may also come across some made from poplar, I never find these easy to cut but using my home-made guillotine, they make great fire lighters!

When using the thin pine lay your pattern in the sense of the grain. This way you will not risk splitting the wood.

Unless you are lucky enough to be ambidextrous, you may find some of the cuts are difficult to do, so it's a good idea to mark out the profile on both sides of the wood. This way you will be able to cut from both sides.

Use a tenon or back saw to cut the pine, this is fine toothed and will give a cleaner cut.

With the ply I usually square up the ends of the wood first to see how large a piece I have to work with.

Because of the nature of ply, there is no danger of splitting the wood so the pattern can be placed so as to optimise the piece of wood and to save cutting time.

The more interesting pieces with grain or knots I leave to use with the natural decorations such as spices and just cover the tree with a single layer of acrylic varnish.

The ply can be cut easily with a modeling or craft knife and a steel rule as a straight edge to guide the cutting.

The tree can be lightly sanded around the edges with a fine sand paper and then decorated. We started with painting ours with a layer of organic, white, water-based paint.

Materials for decoration and glues

There are all kinds of things to use for decoration. From dried and pressed flowers, herbs and spices to stickers, serviettes, ribbons and tissue papers. For the heavier items and to attach a string to the back of your tree, you will need something like a hot melt glue and glue gun. Something like a PVA glue can be used for lighter items.

For the tissue paper and lighter materials we used a home made glue, which we also use for papier mâché. This is made from flour and water. The recipe and the method for making it is set out below.

How to make the flour paste:

4 fluid oz/125ml white flour

18 fluid oz/500 ml water

Mix ingredients together in pan until smooth. Place the pan on a medium heat and cook the mixture, stirring continuously until it boils. The mix should be thick and creamy. Boil for 10 seconds, keep stirring, then empty into a glass or plastic container. Leave to cool and lift off skin which forms on top and compost. Cover with a lid and keep in a cool place. If you are keeping the flour paste for any length of time you can add a couple of drops of Essential oil of Tea Tree or Clove to the mix once it is cool.

Some examples of what we made:

and now, if you would like to, sit back and watch the film:

Thanks for dropping by and please feel free to share this article, comment, ask questions and if you'd like to be assured of getting the next post, then sign up to follow this blog.

All the best, Andy

© Andy Colley 2014

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A Simple Home-made Honing Guide for Plane Irons and Chisels. Part 1 Back to School - Painless Geometry.

All cutting tools should be kept sharp, not only to produce clean cuts in the material but to do so safely and with the minimum effort.

The manufacturers of planes and chisels supply them with the 'business' edge ground to an angle of 25°. It is recommended for optimum cutting of wood that this angle is increased at the tip to 30° and you have to do this yourself using a flat abrasive surface. There are countless sites on the internet that describe this process and offer really sound advice and tips on how to achieve the desired sharpness. Unless you are really experienced with the process it is very hard to attain the desired angle of the blade against the whetstone surface and to this end a honing guide is used. These guides vary in price but all require the blade to be clamped to it.

Very early on on Friday morning I had the idea of making a guide using a flashlight and this is how I made it.

Back to the Geometry Class

Maybe a shudder runs down your spine at the thought of school geometry but there is an elegance in being able to reproduce angles very accurately and with ease.

I wanted to produce a line that was 30° from the horizontal. To do this I first drew two sides of an equilateral triangle, which as you may remember has internal angles of 60° and then bisected this to produce my 30° angle.

I selected a piece of MDF recuperated from a pallet top. Along what was to become the lower straight edge I drew a straight line about 1cm from the edge and parallel to it.

Now, using a pair of compasses, the point of the compasses firmly on the baseline (the origin), I marked two arcs, one on the base line...

....and one in the approximate position for the second line, it doesn't matter if you draw a quarter circle through the baseline and up instead of the two arcs.

I moved the point of the compasses to the point where the arc crossed the base line and drew another arc. The two arcs drawn above the baseline (or the new arc and the quarter circle) intersect.

I drew a line from the origin to this intersection. This established the two sides of the triangle and the 60° angle.

To produce the 30° angle I needed to bisect this. So, placing the point of the compasses where the arc intersected the base line I drew another arc above the base line.

Moving the point of the compasses to where the first construction arc now intersected the newly-drawn 60° line I drew the final arc.

A line was now drawn from the origin to the intersection of these last two arcs.

And that's it! A line inclined at 30° to the base line.

Part 2 follows shortly., after I've had a cup of tea. I will also include a film I made of the process, which takes you though the steps visually. The link for part two is here.

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A Simple Home-made Honing Guide for Plane Irons and Chisels. Part 2 - To the Workshop!

This method is to enable the beginner at sharpening to get a feel for the correct sharpening angle by using a home-made low-cost guide.

Me and my shadow - sharpening chisels and planes

How to make the guide

I screwed the MDF board to a piece of timber so that it could stand vertically on its flat edge on my workbench.

I supported the flashlight horizontally between the laths of a fruit crate at the same level as the top face of the sharpening stone. The 30° line on the board was coincident with the light path from the flashlight. To get a sharp shadow you will need to position the stone about 100mm (4") from the board.

How to use the guide to sharpen tools

When I turned on the flashlight the shadow cast by the stone was clearly visible on the board and the 30° line could be easily seen.

As I placed the chisel tip onto the stone surface, the shadow cast by it could be seen on the board. I then aligned the shadow with the 30° line.

I could now start honing. By keeping on checking the line of the shadow with the 30° line on the board I ensured that the angle was maintained at each pass of the chisel.

As the honing progressed, it was very simple to change to the finer grit of the diamond-faced sharpening stone. Even changing to an oilstone would not alter the relationship of the chisel angle to the stone face.

Obviously, you need to ensure that during the honing process the long axis of the tool is square to the face of the stone so as not to produce a sharp edge that slopes across the tool's width.

Here's the film:

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Home-made Indoor Pallet Wood Trellis Planter - Part 1 the Base

Many people complain that pallet wood isn't a suitable material for use in anything but rough and ready carpentry or cutting edge rustic design. I hope this shows that with a little effort, a free and valuable resource can be used to elegant effect.

Introduction

We have three greenhouses in the garden for growing vegetables, none of which are heated. To overwinter our chilli plants, peppers, aubergines, sweet potatoes, ginger and turmeric we decided to bring them into the kitchen and keep them going and growing in this planter made entirely from pallet wood. In addition we also sowed some nasturtiums and lettuce, this to provide some early fresh leaves for salads. The trellis at the rear of the planter gives us an added dimension in which to grow sweet potato vines and nasturtiums .

Preparation

Because the planter was to be in the house all Winter I decided to plane all the wood so it looked more like an item of furniture. Furthermore, I chamfered each plank's edges to make the walls less monotonous. This being so, all the pallet wood was selected and checked for nails. I planed the surfaces with an electric planer. The chamfering was undertaken with a router with a 45° conical bit.

The wall planks, nailed to top and bottom rails were also planed and chamfered. The planter dimensions were 1.07m x 0.41m x 0.39m this latter dimension was chosen so that three wall planks could be cut from one standard pallet plank of 1.20m.

I selected a a long pallet wood plank, to make the top and bottom rails and cut it in half lengthwise. I then planed and chamfered the two rails.

I did the same with the planks selected to make the walls.

Notice that the planks are not the same width.

To ensure the opposing walls were of the same length, I laid the planks out prior to assembly. A little 'shuffling' was needed until this was achieved. Hey, it is free after all!!

The wall planks were nailed to the upper and lower rails and for aesthetic reasons I decided to mitre the ends of these rails.

To this end, I laid the rail against the edge of the wall and marked the cutting line at each end which was set by the wall length plus twice the rail thickness (one additional thickness at each end).

Once cut (I used a mitre block to guide the saw) the wall planks were laid on the top and bottom rails and were checked for squareness prior to nailing. To prevent splitting at the end of the planks, I pre-drilled the nail holes with a slightly under-sized drill.

When both front and rear walls were made the operation was repeated for the side walls, once again ensuring the planks were shuffled to give the same wall width.

One important point is that the end sidewall planks were offset from the top and bottom rail ends by the thickness of a wall plank so the mitred ends of the walls would meet.

The four walls were screwed together whilst resting on a smooth flat surface.

Four base-support rails were cut and screwed to the bottom of the planter and planks were cut to the narrower dimension of the inside of the planter.

The two base planks which were butted against the end walls were screwed to the bottom rails as illustrated. This was an essential stage in the assembly as this stiffened the whole planter. So as to have the maximum effect, I selected as wide a plank available for this (105mm/4").

The remaining planks were just laid in position without securing.

As usual, there was someone on hand to check the progress of the build.

And that's it! In the next post I'll describe how I made and fitted the trellis. You can find it here

If you have enjoyed this post and found it useful, feel free to share it, comment and ask questions.

Thanks for dropping by and please feel free to share this article, comment, ask questions and if you'd like to be assured of getting the next post, then sign up to follow this blog.

All the best, Andy

© Andy Colley 2014

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Home-made Indoor Pallet Wood Trellis Planter Part 2 - The Trellis

Trellis is something that we always seem to need a lot of in our garden and it is often expensive and sometimes not very well made.

When our first lot fell apart we found quite a handy alternative in the faux astragals in the double-glazed units we salvaged from a joiners. This however, has now finally rotted and I thought it would be a good idea to make our own from our plentiful supply of pallet wood. Having made this for the planter, I will now go on to make some more for the garden including an arbour in which we can eat, without the risk of marauding chicks.

The trellis back to the planter was so as to provide a structure up which climbing plants could grow and provide us with more space for growing food indoors. Furthermore, it gave the planter a more 'furniture'-like appearance. We were just in time in getting the plants in from the greenhouse, the aubergines were already touched by the first frosts.

Once again, I used pallet wood planks, Unlike with the planter I did not plane the faces of the wood. Instead I used a circular saw to cut the wood into 21mm-22mm wide strips. I selected the width so as to obtain the maximum number of strips with little or no waste. I usually obtained four strips per plank.

These strips were secured to an outside frame which provided stiffness to the trellis and provided a means of attaching the trellis to the rear face of the planter. The frame uprights and bottom were cut to about 36mm-37mm (1.5") width and the top portion was cut to 50mm (2").

I decided the bottom of the trellis (the 36mm piece) would rest on the top edge of the planter so that this piece would support the weight of it and any vegetation. The screws used to attach the trellis would not, therefore have any excessive shearing stress placed upon them.

Constructing the trellis.

The uprights of the trellis were to extend to the floor. The uprights were placed onto the workbench, the overall width was the planter rear wall width. The lower trellis edge was laid onto the uprights at a distance of the planter height from the bottom end of the uprights. The wider top trellis strip was laid at the top end of the uprights and the whole arrangement was checked for squareness. These frame pieces were then joined together with two staples at each corner. I found that the staples were not sufficient to hold the structure rigidly enough, but were adequate for a temporary 'tacking'. The corners were then also nailed, the staples prevented the frame pieces from jumping around during nailing. Once these four framing pieces were joined together, the intermediate trellis laths were laid onto the uprights, I used a short piece of wood to set the distance between each lath. The trellis was assembled using an electric stapler (two staples per joint).

The laths were then trimmed flush with the uprights.

Without turning the trellis over, the vertical laths were laid into position and stapled to the laths below (two staples per joint). The surplus was then trimmed off.

The lower edge of the trellis was placed onto the top edge of the planter and clearance holes for the screws were drilled through the uprights where they touched the upper and lower outside rails of the base.

I attached the trellis once the planter was in the house.

Now if you'd like to, sit back and watch the film:

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