Crafts / Craftsmen / craftswomen (craftspeople, I suppose)

If anyone can hit me up with any kiln advice I’d appreciate it. Picked this up this evening. I haven’t read the instructions yet. In truth I haven’t made anything out of clay for a good two years.

First thing I need to do is choose a glaze or couple of glazes and then I’ll probably stick to those colours. I’ve gone for a stoneware clay called at Patrick it’s a kind of creamy colour.

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I can try and answer your questions.

Nice, particularly the crate stool.

I’m sure I will be pestering you with questions.

I’m struggling to chose a glaze

Glazes you need to test. How they come out depends so much on firing cycle, clay used, etc.

I’ve gone for St Patrick’s clay as it was a fairly muted shade. I’m thinking black clay once I’ve gone through this lot. I quite like the idea of a Matt black glaze. Or something mottled and textured.

Vintage woodworkers of LFGSS:

1. Do you exist?
   
2. If answer to 1. is yes, would you be interested in a couple of old woodworking tools?
   
   

I thought the mahogany/brass Atkin & Sons plane was a shoulder plane, but it is in fact an adjustable slot cutting plough. The other is a Record 050 combination plane in its original box with a selection of tools and instructions. Looks unused.

These were my grandfather’s tools. They seem to be listed for money on eBay but if you will put them to use, you can have them for £postage and a forum donation. I otherwise don’t know what to do with them.

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Put them on a shelf and look lovingly at them and remember your grandad.
I use a few of my great grandads tools on a regular basis, just a cabinet screwdriver and a ball peen hammer but feels good. There’s a few others tucked away in my toolbox that I don’t need but feel like that’s where they belong.

Yes, that is how it should be done, I used Dad's hand turned brass plumb bob on Friday and it made me happy.

The combination plane is lovely. Fortunate to have the whole set of blades too. I'm with the other comments, you should keep these.

Can anybody offer advice on this please? I’m doing some repair / restoration work on my Merlin rocket which I have had outside for a criminal length of time - lots needs doing now. I’ve finally been able to make a start on it as I’ve been loaned some garage space. I decided to start at the back and have taken the hardware and varnish off the transom. There is a crack on the right side which appears to have been repaired previously with two screws - you can see where one of them has almost broken through the wood. The crack goes out to the hull and through the thin section of one of the hull planks. There’s also a shorter crack in the transom above that one. I was wondering about a couple of small butterfly joints epoxied in instead of the screws. Is it ok to inject epoxy into these thin cracks or should I be opening them up / replacing sections of wood? I’ve also got some glass fibre tape I could use across the cracks. Any thoughts / advice greatly appreciated, or let me know if there’s a better thread to ask this stuff on (I guess there’s probably a better aligned forum out there somewhere but I thought I’d try here first).

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With the type of epoxy I use for repairing windows you do need to open the crack so that you get a few mm in there. I've added a link to the website for the product I use but I can't say if it's suitable for boats! I guess you want to varnish not paint it so an epoxy repair might not be suitable.

https://www.repair-care.co.uk/

Ok thanks - I’ve got some marine epoxy which I think you can varnish over so will be using that. I will try to open the cracks a bit and maybe use a syringe or something to get the epoxy in as deep as possible!

With the window repair stuff it's recommended to use a die grinder with a 3mm bit to open up joints and fill them. Different applications though so not sure how transferable the methods are!

Hm yes that would be about half the thickness of the hull planking! But makes sense that you need a bit of space to get it the epoxy to flow in properly. Still wondering about butterfly joints to add a bit of strength to that big crack but then that’s rather more significant surgery than just gluing or fibreglass tape.

I think @Sam_Doman knows a thing or two about boats.

From a joinery perspective butterfly joints would seem like a better option. There are plenty of strong waterproof glues you could use then.

I think we have exactly the same little tool chest/set of drawers that is in the top left of your pic here at work!

I have the same!

Haha, not actually mine - I’m borrowing some space in a friend’s garage - but seems like a good tool chest :)

Chair update. Getting paint off is a ball ache.
but looks OK underneath not gonna go much further as I found the chairs and they are quite basic

Try Infra red paint stripping, it's brilliant . The cheaper ceramic units you can get on ebay work, they're just slower than the lamp based ones.

Are these a no-no for use on a door with old paint? Probably likely to have some lead paint in one or more layers.

They're actually better because they don't heat the lead up as much, so won't release nearly as many fumes.
That said, if indoors, make sure you have lots of ventilation and consider a 3M mask.

We removed the paint off our original huge Victorian garage doors a few years ago, which must have contained a lot of coats of lead-based, and we had no problems.

Cool, many thanks BQ!